What Does it Mean to Engage in Self Care When You’re Chronically Ill?

What does it mean to engage in self care when you’re chronically ill?

In general, self-care is the habits or practices you engage in in order to meet your emotional, physical and social needs. Unlike self soothing, which is concerned with providing comfort in the moment, self care is typically some sort of proactive care that has a noticeable effect on your life. It’s basically making sure you meet what you’ve determined to be the essentials for living a fulfilling, happy and healthy life. Some simple examples of self care are: 

• Establishing healthy sleeping habits

• Finding meals that are both enjoyable to eat and provide you with nutrients you need

• Carrying a water bottle around to make sure you stay hydrated

• Putting your prescriptions on auto-refill, or having them delivered to your house if that’s an option

• Taking a walk around your neighborhood

While self soothing often focuses on things that make you feel good in the moment–taking a long shower, a mindfulness exercise, watching a favorite movie, etc–self care is more about the long term maintenance of your wellbeing. Which means it's not always (or ever) a breezy, effortless thing. It can mean using up a lot of energy, both physical and mental, which is something chronically ill people don’t usually have in excess. 

So how can you realistically engage in self care when you’re also managing a chronic illness?

First, as we’ve said before, stop all or nothing thinking:

Life is rarely all or nothing. 50% is pretty much always better than 0%.

Getting started is often the hardest part, especially when the task itself is so massive it feels like even if you start you’ll never finish.  When you tell yourself “I don’t have to finish the dishes, I just have to start them” you’re easing that pressure. Chances are? You’ll realize doing the dishes isn’t actually that bad and you’ll just finish them. And if not? Then some of your dishes are clean now when they weren’t before! 

Your practice doesn’t have to be perfect all of the time. No one is keeping score at how well you’re taking care of yourself or what you’re falling behind on. 

Determine for yourself what you can maintain, and try your best to maintain it–and trust yourself to know when you need to just relax. 

Self care practice: keeping yourself nourished.

When you look up self care, so much advice is centered around food. And food is important! It keeps us alive! But the advice you often stumble upon when looking to take better care of yourself is to cook for yourself more. Cooking is a great way to practice taking care of yourself but it’s not always a realistic solution. Maybe you only have the energy to cook once a week. Or your live with too much pain to stand in a kitchen for a long time, so cooking is extremely rare. Maybe you’re so busy with different doctors appointments that you don’t have much time for grocery shopping or meal planning. 

Chronically ill approach: find your cheats. 

What are easy, filling foods you can throw together when you don’t have more than 10 minutes of kitchen energy in you? Make a list of things like this and use the components as the starting point for your regular shopping list. For example: a bag of frozen fruit & veggies, some yogurt, and juice can be quickly thrown together for a protein rich smoothie that takes little time and effort including prep and clean up. Consider your regular schedule and think of when you tend to have the most energy/feel the best. Is there a predictable time in your week where you could make time to cook? When you do, try to cook enough to yield leftovers so you can have another filling, low energy meal later in the week. 

Self care practice: move your body every day.

Physical wellness impacts our mental wellness and our overall holistic health, so it’s good to find ways to tend to it! While exercise is often a primary example of self-care, that can be tricky to navigate for chronically ill people. What if you’re in too much pain? What if your illness inhibits exercise? 

Chronically ill approach: but listen to it first.

At the root of the advice to move your body each day is the idea that your body’s needs deserve to be recognized and prioritized with regularity. This is actually very important for chronically ill people, even if it doesn’t show up in practice as exercise. Instead, it can be waking up and doing a body scan, assessing how you’re feeling, what your symptoms are–if any sort of gentle movement or stretching would be helpful or if other needs (taking medication, getting hydrated and fed, etc.) need to be taken care of first. And if you have the physical wellness to engage in exercise, remember it doesn’t have to be the aggressive, strenuous type of exercise we often associate with gyms and workout culture. It can be taking a long walk around your neighborhood, volunteering at a community garden, tending to your own house or yard, playing with a nibling, playing with a pet, etc.  

Self care practice: develop routines. 

Having dependable routines can be great! You can learn to prioritize your time and make room for everything you need to do and practice regular rest. But routines themselves depend on you having the same energy and interests all of the time–which is not really true for anyone, but fluctuating and unpredictable health or energy is a major obstacle in life with chronic illness. 

Chronically ill approach: but prioritize your needs over your expectations. 

If you have it in your routine to cook over the weekends because you usually have more time and energy to take care of yourself, but you suddenly get a flare up over the weekend, remember it’s more important to take care of yourself and what you need right now than to live up to the routine expectations you’ve set for yourself. If you push yourself to maintain routines through poor health, you only run the risk of feeling worse for longer. Instead, know when you need to show yourself some grace and let go of your to do list in favor of taking care of the needs pressing for your attention. 

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.