Can you believe it? The holiday season is coming right up. It’s a fun time of year, but it can also be a tricky one, which is especially true if you have a chronic illness. That’s why I’ve pulled together 10 ideas for self-care that chronic illness patients need this holiday season, as well as a free downloadable holiday self-care plan workbook.

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I am not a medical professional, including a mental health professional. 

Before we talk about these self-care ideas, we need to talk specifically about self-care. I’m sharing what self-care is, why chronic illness patients specifically need self-care, and how to make a self-care plan before the holiday season (aka now). Oh, and I’ve also made you all a free downloadable self-care plan workbook. Let’s get started!

10 Ideas for Self-Care You Need This Holiday Season + A Free Holiday Self-Care Plan

Self-Care Definition

Contrary to popular belief, self-care is NOT a catch-all phrase that means to “treat yourself.” PsychCentral says, “Self-care is any activity that we do deliberately in order to take care of our mental, emotional, and physical health. Although it’s a simple concept in theory, it’s something we very often overlook. Good self-care is key to improved mood and reduced anxiety. It’s also key to a good relationship with oneself and others” (x). 

Self-care is literally taking care of yourself, especially mentally and emotionally.

Self-Care Tips That Chronic Illness Patients Need 

Why Chronic Illness Patients Need Self-Care 

Imagine that you have an illness that will never go away. It costs thousands of dollars a year, and you may or may not have that money to spare. You also have to spend a lot of time at doctor’s offices, which might make your job unhappy with you, and even if you don’t lose your job, you might worry that you will. That is, if you’re healthy enough to work. Your family and friends may or may not stick by you in your illness, and if they do stick by you, they might not be very nice to you about it. You also require more sleep, you have to take medications every day, you have to eat certain foods, you have to try all sorts of random things in the hopes that they help you personally. And then, on top of all of this, literally everything in general is more difficult due to your symptoms and fatigue.

All this doesn’t set you up for very good mental health. Even if you don’t develop a mental illness, you will definitely have times when you’re down in the dumps, sad about your health, frustrated with the world, anxious about your future, and more.

That’s why you should be proactive and take care of yourself via self-care. Forbes has an article that supports this: 

“To keep up with this roadrunner form of living, we don’t think twice before putting self-care on the back burner. More often than not, it takes a wake-up call to notice the toll this kind of lifestyle takes on our lives. No matter how indulgent or fancy the term may sound, self-care is crucial for our physical, emotional and mental well-being. You shouldn’t neglect self-care” (x).

On the other hand, self-care for chronic illness patients will look a little different than it does for physically healthy people, as we have more things that we need to do for our physical and mental health.

And all of this is without taking into consideration the extra stress of the holiday season. The American Psychological Association says that up to 38% of people find the holidays more stressful than the rest of the year, and U.S. News and World report says that 53% of people are financially stressed by the holiday season (x).

Holiday Survival Guide: Living Well with Chronic Disease

How To Make a Self-Care Plan + Free Self-Care Plan Workbook

As we all know, I love a good plan. In general, I like being prepared for whatever can happen, and of course this applies to self-care.

So how do you make your own self-care plan? 

Figure out ahead of time what could be especially difficult and what you can do to make it easier. 

Figure out what you need to do to prevent difficult things from happening in the first place. 

Figure out what you might struggle to do and set up systems to make that easier. 

If that sounds a bit overwhelming, then you’re going to love the new free workbook I made.

This workbook will help you plan ahead so you have a self-care plan before the holiday season starts. 

It helps you identify what’s important to you about the season, potential problems or stumbling blocks you might come across, how you might deal with them, and what your support system will be. 

Get it here! 

And if you want all of the free resources I’ve made, sign up for my newsletter. When you do, you get access to my resource library. This workbook marks the 50th free resource in there! 

My subscribers get all of my new freebies directly in their inboxes, freebies I make just for them that regular readers don’t get, discounts for my store, and so much more. And that’s all just about the products I make! It doesn’t count the information I share in my newsletters, the deals on products for chronic illness patients I find, the behind-the-scenes details I share, and more. 

Mental Health and Chronic Disease Management: What You Should Know 

All of that being said, let’s look at 10 things you can put in your self-care plan.

10 Ideas for Self-Care

Make fewer commitments

The holiday season is often the busiest time of year for people, and personally I think people in general are more likely to over-commit themselves during the holidays. 

Why is this?

For one thing, there’s the expectation that we should do things because it’s the holidays. We should try to see everyone we possibly could.

Another thing is there are so many FUN things happening in the holiday season! We want to do as many as possible. Parties, events, shows, you know. And, for most people, there are more of them than normal during the holidays.

Basically, there are more possible commitments to make, and said possible commitments are more fun than the rest of the year, and we feel like we should make them. 

And if you’re a chronic illness patient, in general it’s too easy for us to overcommit ourselves. Which is why you should make fewer commitments in the first place. 

Think about it: how much does it SUCK to make a commitment that your body later decides you can’t attend? How awful is it to overdo it because you went to one too many events and then you can’t go to an event that you really care about? 

The solution is to make fewer commitments in the first place. Give yourself the gift of proactively not overdoing it and of having fewer possibilities of canceling plans. 

Tips To Make Independently Living with a Chronic Illness Easier

Schedule rest 

Rest is so important for chronic illness patients, but it’s also something that can be hard to get. Especially during the holidays! This is why it’s important to schedule it, or at least factor it into your plans.

If you’re relatively new to chronic illness/having a diagnosis, you might not really get why resting is so much more important now. One way to explain this is through Spoon Theory, which was created by Christine Miserandino.

If you’re having trouble getting actual rest, ask yourself if you’re trying to really rest or to just take a break. Yes, there’s a difference! I take a lot of breaks, but working on this blog (for example) isn’t resting. I love it, but resting is watching TV or reading, not listening to music while writing 1,500-3,500 word blog posts and running 4-6 social media accounts. I’m trying to get better at resting before I need to, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not there yet.

14 Amazing Simple Healthy Recipes for Dinner 

Write down ideas of the gifts you plan to give (and if you’ve bought them yet!) 

Planning planning planning is key to a great holiday season with chronic disease. So start planning and shopping for gifts now! First, let’s talk about planning. 

If you start your planning ASAP – but especially in October – you don’t have to worry about not getting all your gifts in time if your illness flares right before the holiday you’re buying for. Once you’ve lived with chronic disease for a couple of years, you’ve definitely had a holiday season when this happened.

Additionally, if you live with brain fog or memory struggles, you should also make a list to keep track of everything. It doesn’t matter if it’s electronic or paper, just make it somewhere you won’t forget about it.

Make a plan, make a list. Decide what you’re going to get for who, and then keep track of when you’ve bought it. The holiday season is expensive enough without buying the same gift twice because you forgot you already bought it!

Check out all of my gift guides here. 

Start your shopping ASAP 

Part two of the above is, as I said, to start your shopping as soon as possible. 

This is not just to spread out the monetary costs – although it’s a bonus because the chronic illness life is an expensive one – but also to spread out the energy costs. Even if you’re doing your holiday shopping online, there are energy costs, especially if you have brain fog. 

Here’s my advice: start your plan now, and as you come up with gift ideas – especially over the course of the next few weeks and if they’re a reasonable price now – buy them. 

Chronically Ill Tips: What To Do When a Doctor Isn’t Listening to You

However, for big ticket items or things you’re not sure about, wait. There will almost definitely be better prices on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and in December.

Plus, the point is to spread out the costs. If you buy everything in October, you’re not spreading them out.

That being said, if you’re going to start your shopping now, make sure you check out my gift guide archives.

Here are some that might be the most helpful now: 

• Personalized gifts (order anything personalized ASAP because those can take a long time to arrive)
• Gifts for dad
• Most useful gifts

Resources for Chronic Illness: How Organizing Can Make It Easier 

Use the technology you already have to your advantage 

There are so many tools that you already have that you might not know about. Use them to your advantage! 

For example, you should use “do not disturb” or “focus” settings on your phone and/or computer to help you actually rest when you need it. 

Apple’s Do Not Disturb allows notifications from people and apps you choose, so you can take a break without worrying about missing important or emergency things. There are similar settings for Personal Focus time, Sleep, and Work. And you can choose to share your Focus status with others so they know that you have Focus turned on. 

Another technological tool you probably have already is a reminder app and/or alarms. These help you remember all of the things you need to do in general and for the holidays specifically, as well as help you remember to do all of the things you need to do to manage your health. 

As I’ve shared in the past, I have alarms without sound set to go off 4 times across the day to remember to take all of my medications. You never want to miss doses, but that’s especially true in a high-stress time like the holiday season.

I use my reminder app to schedule a reminder in the future. I use a paper planner for keeping track of appointments and regular to-do lists, but there are some things that I want a specific reminder for at a specific time of day in the future. Some items in my reminder app are to post Reels, to schedule Lyft rides, that I have a doctor’s appointment (set for the night before an early morning appointment), and more. 

Another self-care technological idea is to turn off or change your notifications for social media. Years ago I turned off Twitter notifications on my phone because they were overwhelming me. (Not to say that I’m ~ so popular ~ that I was getting too many. I just post more on Twitter than on other platforms, so there are more notifications.) 

Check the apps and sites you have notifications for and decide what is or could cause you overwhelm and change them. Maybe you only get notifications if someone DMs you or follows you. Maybe you turn off push notifications altogether. 

You have to protect your peace. Other people can help, but at the end of the day you know yourself best and you know what will disturb your peace the most. 

Mental Health and Chronic Disease Management: What You Should Know

Hire someone to wrap your gifts for you 

Okay, this might not be feasible for most chronic illness patients as our lives are expensive enough, but it is an option if gift wrapping is important to you but also physically difficult. 

Wrapping gifts can be difficult if you have problems with your hands, chronic pain, tremors, fatigue, and more. Hiring someone to do it for you can reduce worse pain later and take something off your to-do list. 

You can hire someone in the traditional sense – I’m going to talk about TaskRabbit in a second – or in a more bartering sense. Is there a skill or task that you can do with minimal impact on your health that might be difficult for someone in your life? Trade tasks with them! You do that task and they wrap your gifts. 

But you can also hire someone in your life. This is especially helpful if there are tweens or teens in your life. Is there a healthy one in your life who might be looking for a way to make some extra cash? Pay them to do it! Make sure you’re paying them at least minimum wage, but if wrapping takes less than an hour then it’s $15.

Alternatively, go to a company or site like TaskRabbit. (Note: this is NOT a sponsored post.) TaskRabbit’s website says, “Our same-day service platform instantly connects you with skilled Taskers to help with odd-jobs and errands, so you can be more productive, every day” (x). 

You can hire someone to assemble furniture, clean, help moving, organizing, and more. And that “more” includes errands, which can include gift wrapping. 

If gift wrapping is something that can be difficult for you in any way, treat yourself to hiring someone else to do it this holiday. Hiring someone to do a task that you struggle with – especially one that you would feel bad about if you didn’t do – is absolutely self-care.

Alternatively, skip gift wrapping altogether 😉

Living Life with Chronic Illness: Common Problems & Their Solutions

Make a playlist of music that will help you recenter yourself when you’re struggling 

I have this Spotify playlist called Feel Good full of my current favorite songs, and I listen to it when I need to, you know, feel good. These are NOT all feel-good songs. There are some, but there are also sad-ish songs that a) I want to listen to over and over again and/or b) I like to sing. Singing makes me feel good, so onto the playlist they go. 

Making your own Feel Good playlist is a great thing you can do ahead of time to have on deck when you need it. Feel yourself starting to feel down? It’s time for the playlist! This is also the only playlist I have downloaded to my phone. That way, when I don’t have cell service or WiFi I still have the playlist.

6 Tips for How To Accept a Chronic Illness  

Sign up for a class of something you enjoy 

The holidays can be really difficult for everyone for a variety of reasons, chronic illness just being one of them. So one thing you can do to make it a bit easier is to make a plan to do something you enjoy and are able to do. (We’re going to talk about scheduling personal time in the next idea, but I want to talk about this one specifically first.)

The holiday season can be great but also a lot, so it’s important to have a specific thing that isn’t holiday-related to do. Maybe it’s a recurring class, something you do every Monday. Maybe it’s a one-time thing! Maybe it’s something in between. 

The point is to make time for something you like that isn’t related to the holidays.

There are 2 ways to go about this: schedule it for during the holiday season as time that you are spending on yourself in the midst of a hectic season or schedule it for January/after your holiday(s) as something to look forward to. 

Chronic Illness and the Holidays: 10 Rules for a Great Season

Schedule personal time during the holiday season … and stick to it! 

How is this different from scheduling rest? Well, “personal time” means time that you have time to yourself. It might be extra rest time, but it might not. 

Rest means resting. This specific time is about everything else you need for your personal life. 

Grocery shopping, exercising, cleaning, cooking, doing your hobbies, and, yes, self-care are all part of this. 

It can also include time with your partner, your family in general, your friends. 

It’s easy for schedules to fill up and before you know it it feels like you haven’t had space to breathe in days. Prevent that from happening by scheduling your personal time – and keep that appointment with yourself!

Chronic Illness and Mental Health 

Don’t skip therapy!

One thing that makes my life as a chronic illness patient better is all the work I’ve done with my therapist. I’ve been seeing him for years and years, and having a neutral party with whom I can talk through issues, especially around a time of year that can be really difficult, has made my life better. 

That’s why I never skip therapy, especially around times that might be trickier than others. 

Here’s the thing, though: while this is specifically about therapy, which is a great way to practice self-care, the gist of this point is that you shouldn’t skip self-care in general. Skipping things that normally help you live your best life – during one of the most stressful times of year – is a bad idea.  

How Chronic Illness Affects Relationships 

What is your self-care plan for the holiday season? 

Like this post? Share it! Then check out: 

Living with a Suppressed Immune System in a Pandemic, What Is a Chronic Illness? And Other Frequently Asked Questions, What You Need To Know about Living with Chronic Pain in the Winter, Why You Must Track Symptoms of Your Chronic Illness + Freebie To Help, The Impact of Chronic Illness on an Individual