5 Tips for Living (Not Just Surviving) With Chronic Illness

When illness interrupts your life - chronic, long-term, or lifelong - the hardest part often isn't just the symptoms, it's figuring out how to keep living fully when you can't do it all anymore. In this post, I'm sharing five practical tips for anyone stuck in the suck: why self-care has to come before chores, how to treat your body like it matters, the importance of telling your body it's safe, why you need to stop before you bottom out, and how to show yourself you're worth the effort. These aren't just common sense platitudes - they're strategies built from four decades of navigating chronic illness myself.

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Today's video is for people whose lives have been interrupted by illness, chronic, long-term, or lifelong. I've danced with all three. The specific person this video is for wants to do it all, but can't. Not only are you unhappy about the fact that you can't do it all anymore, but so are others. You're looking for ideas where to begin, how to make it different, and you're ready to think about that for a few minutes. Welcome in to your Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn, videos designed to expand your thinking.

When you're trying to pilot a faulty meat suit and your brain can betray you, it can be extra challenging to think about things that you might not have thought of if you weren't dealing with those things. Seems like common sense, but until you know something, you don't even know you didn't know it. How does that go again? Oh, yeah, "You don't know what you don't know. Until you know, you don't know it." Which sounds like gobbledygook until it happens to you and you're like, "Ah, man. I didn't know that."

Can you live your best life when you're stuck in the suck? When every day is full of hard things? When tears fall easy and you often walk around feeling like a rusty bag of nails. I do. Let's see if you can too.

Okay, so here are my five tips that are going to help you, and you can put them through the You Filter and see how you can apply them in your own life. They may appear as common sense, but if they didn't come into your thinking, you wouldn't be thinking about them. So this is why we like to think about our thinking. They call it metacognition. I call it surviving Tuesday.

Tip number one, put self-care ahead of chores. Am I saying to live in a hovel? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if you brush your teeth and brush your hair and get dressed and feed yourself, you're going to have a little bit more go-juice to actually take on the dishes.

Tip number two, take care of your body like it matters, because it does. Even though your meatsuit may be faulty, it's the only one you get. So you need to treat it like you can't replace it, 'cuz you can't. That means eating nutritious foods that agree with you and making sure to stay hydrated. 2026 is the first year I made sure I was getting eight glasses of water every single day, and my nails are growing like crazy and I just love it. So if you're looking for a motivator for hydration, that's a pretty good one if you're a girl and you like long nails.

Number three, tell your body that you're safe. You might not be feeling very safe if your life has been interrupted by a chronic illness. And as silly as it sounds, you need to reassure yourself that you've got your own back, that no matter what you're facing, you're prepared to face it, and that you matter to you and your existence.

If nothing else, say out loud what it is exactly that you're doing to help yourself through this interruption. Say all of the behavioral things you're doing and the nutrition things you're doing and the doctor things and the prescription things and everything else, and acknowledge all of the efforts that you're making. Whether or not you think they're helping you, acknowledging it tells the body that you matter.

And I always assumed that my body just knew everything that was happening inside of my head. And maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it was just me feeling more confident by asserting what it is that I am doing to make the situation better that helped me feel like I was actively making the situation better.

Number four, stop before you bottom out. This is coming from someone who collapsed from pneumonia on her 21st birthday because she was still working. The problem with living with chronic illness is you don't realize how resilient you are until you drop out.

So if your life's been interrupted by chronic illness, you need to make sure you're doing hourly check-ins with yourself. What can I do to support myself through this? How can I make myself feel better in this moment? How can I comfort my body and make it feel better than it does right now? And bring in every helper, self-soothing, comforting thing that you can find. A lot of times we tend to lean on just a prescription doing it for us, and we need to help ourselves in every single area we can. So before you call in sick, do things to help yourself stay well.

And number five is show you that you're worth it. And you do that by listening to videos like this and keeping yourself on track and educating yourself about what it is that's going on inside your body, and learning how other people are strategizing to manage with what's going on inside your body. And not expecting yourself to be like them. Just using their experience, my experience, every experience that you encounter, as a springboard to ask yourself, is this something I want to try? Is this something I want to learn more about?

You don't want to be chasing your tail over every remedy. You want to really get into your own intuition. And that happens a lot easier when you're super connected to your body. So if you only have half an hour a day to do something to metaphysically help yourself, like to aid the nutrition and the self-care and the other things that you're doing, close your eyes and just really tune into your body. Give yourself a foot rub. Get some compression socks if those are something that will help you. I started wearing them last year after I recovered from sepsis, and I found they help my POTS a lot, and I even got a waist belt that helps me with that as well. So look into the simple, easy-to-try, inexpensive things to support yourself and get on your own side.

I have a five week program coming up that's going to help you learn to let go and then to also build yourself up.

Click the link below to get on the waitlist and receive an early bird discount when registration opens. https://dawnsuper.com/freeyourself

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