Developing Self Compassion While Living with Chronic Illness

When you live with chronic illness, it can be hard to predict what your body and energy levels will allow you to accomplish on any given day. 

Some days you may wake up feeling wonderful, ready to fill your time with dozens of activities, while other days you make way up in the midst of a big flare up and even getting out of bed feels like a big ask. 

Feeling unsure of how you’ll feel from day to day can be extremely frustrating, especially given that we live in a culture that often conflates productivity with morality and “laziness” with immorality. 

While he was speaking specifically in regards to academic “laziness” Devon Price reveals a larger truth about laziness and lack of productivity:

“If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed.” (Laziness Does Not Exist)

When you live with chronic illness what seems like laziness or lack of productivity is actually both a mentally and physically exhausting process of trying to rest, recover, and tend to your body in the best way you can. 

In order to develop compassion for your limitations, you need to understand what they are. Instead of waking up and trying to get done what you could at an 80% day no matter how you’re feeling, it’s important to learn what different energy/pain level days look for you practically. 

One way you can do this is to keep a simple journal, logging what different days look like to you. 

This doesn’t have to be anything involved–while things like bullet journals and art  journals can be fun and stress relieving, they are also very intricate to keep up with and part of what you’re hoping to accomplish with this journal is just an easy way to build a reference for how to best take care of yourself. If it takes too long to update it or add to it, eventually you’re going to hit a high pain/low energy day where keeping up with it just isn’t possible. And then it won’t be helpful to you! Instead, keep it simple. Note:

• How your pain/energy/symptoms are in the morning when you wake up 

• What you think your energy level is from 0-100%

• What you managed to do during your day without overextending yourself 

• Anything that helped manage symptoms

As you keep track you’ll learn what your 10% days look like, what your 80% days look like, etc. and you can start to have reasonable expectations. 

When you can have reasonable expectations for yourself & your limits, you can start to develop compassion for those limits. 

It can be frustrating to accept a 10% day! If there are things you want to do or activities you want to participate in, waking up on a 10% day can bring a lot of grief. And while those feelings are absolutely legitimate, it can be helpful to make space for a more positive perspective on those days as well. For example, how can respecting your 10% day help you prepare to make the most of a 90% day?

Have a plan for caring for yourself on limited days:

Take a look at your journal, what are the things that have helped on days like this in the past? Can you make a reference for how to best manage these sort of days for yourself? Getting in the habit of providing care to yourself can help shift your mindset from self frustration to compassion as it starts to benefit you long term. 

And remember everyone else has limits too! Chronic illness can feel isolating especially on low energy or high pain days. Having physical restrictions or limitations is difficult in the world we live in but it’s not the only kind of limitation that exists. Everyone has things they need to navigate from day to day. While it might not be as visible, remembering you’re not alone in this can help reduce the shame you may feel.  

Learning that you have a chronic illness diagnosis is often a life-changing experience. Chronic illness tends to impact every aspect of life, from work to leisure time to money to relationships. Remember, chronic illness is not your fault. If you would like more support in coping with chronic illness, our therapists at Hope+Wellness can help.