Chronic illness sufferers can feel like everything in their life must stop. The pain impedes every dream, goal, and activity. It is easy to want to give up and give in. The resulting downward spiral can leave the chronic illness sufferer feeling depressed, downtrodden, and hopeless.
A Note of Encouragement
Chronic pain sufferers need encouragement to know they don’t have to give in and give up on their goals and life. When I read this following passage from Jane McGonigal’s Superbetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient, I knew I had to share it because it is just too important.
It turns out that a fear of pain, discomfort, or failure can cause people who are ill or injured to enter a downward spiral of withdrawal from ordinary activity. In an effort to avoid triggering pain or experiencing failure, they severely limit the actions they take–avoiding physical activity, travel, or work, for example. This can be a helpful and natural reaction at first. But if these self-imposed limits are not challenged and tested often, they become artificial barriers to full living. Individuals become less likely to challenge themselves and therefore less likely to discover that they have, in fact, gotten stronger or can still do things that are important to them even while in pain.
To compound the potential downward spiral, restricting daily activity gives individuals more time and attention to pay to their physical symptoms. This can lead them, quite understandably, to become even more convinced that their injury or illness is so severe as to require further restricting activity. This has been shown to be true not only for back pain but also for migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic anxiety, and many other potentially debilitating chronic conditions. In all these cases, avoiding pain and failure leads to more suffering and disability, not less.
The only way to avoid this kind of downward spiral, clinical psychologists have shown, is to stay fully engaged with your goals and your life, even when you’re facing extremely negative thoughts, feelings, or experiences.
In other words, you have to acknowledge and battle your bad guys. You can’t ever let them persuade you to give up or to stop looking for ways to lead a good life.
p. 192-193
Jane McGonigal captures this perfectly. Keep living with purpose. Keep being authentic to yourself. Keep fighting. It is not easy by any means, but it is so necessary for chronic illness sufferers.
Are there any goals you have been avoiding? Is chronic pain getting in the way of your life? Keep fighting. Keep pushing yourself. Progress may be slow, but it is there. Take note. You CAN get Superbetter!