How Chronic Illness Impacts My Fatigue, Productivity, and Purpose (Plus 3 Tips to Help You Cope)

The Comical Colon

3 years ago

Woman hunched over desk scribbling in a notebook beside a laptop

If you live with a chronic illness, I’m willing to bet you’ve struggled with fatigue and productivity. You may have even wondered or feared that your illness impacts your purpose.

In this blog post, I tackle these big questions and share how these aspects of my life have been affected by my invisible illnesses.

Living with Chronic Fatigue

One thing I absolutely cannot stand is feeling tired—I’d rank it right up there with being cold, bored, and hangry.

But living with inflammatory bowel disease, feeling fatigued is something I experience most of my waking hours. It’s like walking around with ankle weights and eyelids 10x too heavy.

But more than that, for me, the fatigue is mental. Despite a 10-hour night’s sleep, I (sometimes, but not always) feel unfocused and unmotivated.

And I hate feeling unmotivated. My mind is always racing with new ideas, new projects, new goals, but I can’t always sit down and crank them out as I used to before my diagnosis. (In fact, I’m really struggling writing this right now).

Irons in the Fire

Most of what I do involves writing and marketing, which are tasks that eat a lot of brain juice.

For example, some of the projects I’ve been working on recently include,

Blogging,
Writing email newsletters,
Crafting book reviews,
Writing and editing my book manuscript,
Running a Facebook group,
Managing social media for myself and my employer, and
Working with advocacy groups for the rare liver disease primary sclerosing cholangitis

I have a lot of irons in the fire. But some days, there is no fire. I wake up with a 50% mental battery and need to nap rather than write. Words cannot describe how much that upsets me. I believe I was created to write and manage multiple projects, but some days, it just isn’t in the cards.

I’m learning to not beat myself up over it. I read this fantastic quote by @chronicloveclub that reads the following:

I LOVE this quote. It reminds me that even something as life-altering as chronic illness cannot take away my desires or my dreams. It may only change the timeline a little. Day by day, I’m learning to accept that.

3 Tips to Help You Emotionally Cope with Chronic Fatigue

Over the years, I’ve been accumulating tips to help me cope with the delayed nature of my dreams. If you’re struggling with this fatigue vs productivity complex, I hope these tips can help:

1. Schedule breaks

If I don’t see a break in my calendar, I won’t take one. I truly believe in the statement that people make time for what they value, so the first step might be learning or re-learning how to value breaks. Try your best to do at least one small act of self-care every single day.

2. Reframe your mindset

If you end up snoozing your alarm and sleeping for an extra two hours (oops, guilty, I’ve been doing these the past two weeks), challenge yourself to believe, “This is what my body needs,” instead of “I’m so lazy, I just wasted a good chunk of my morning.”

Or, instead of thinking, “This break from work means I’m being unproductive,” try instead, “This 10-minute break is a small percentage of my day, and I deserve to use it to bring myself joy.”

These small mental shifts can make a big difference.

3. Write about it

Seriously, pick up a pencil and write about how your fatigue makes you feel. Maybe I’m biased because I’m a writer, but I believe the physical act of writing things down is so powerful.

Get emotional. Cry onto the page. Get pissed. Feel, feel, feel. Bottling things up does no good, and writing how you feel is incredibly cathartic.

Of course, writing won’t make the fatigue go away, but it can help you come to terms with things. Acceptance makes room for you to grow.

Chronic Fatigue and Chronic Illness Cannot Take Away Your Purpose

If you feel like your invisible illness and the debilitating fatigue has taken away your purpose, let me stop you right there. Nothing, nothing can take away your purpose and what you were made to do on this earth.

Your chronic fatigue and invisible illness may make you realize your purpose is something different than you originally thought. They may alter deadlines or your working style or your hours of production, but they cannot take away your purpose.

And if you’re like me, with lots of irons in the fire, my hope is that when we wake up to only 50% battery and a fire gone cold, we can learn to find purpose in the embers.