Some of you may have caught a throwaway line in my last post, Toxic: Redefining Stresslaxing as Toxic Productivity. About halfway through I rather casually mentioned that having a chronic illness just exacerbated my stresslaxing tendencies. It has been my experience that many of my unhealthy tendencies, like toxic productivity, increased the sicker I got. I was stuck on a wheel of insecurity that fed into my fear of being a burden. I then produced more to demonstrate my worth and worsened my health. The cycle repeated and was magnified with each spin of the wheel.

Trust me, my family wasn’t expressing to me that they were feeling any extra burden resulting from my chronic illness. If anything, I was doing more. Yet it didn’t feel like enough and I continued to see myself as a burden.

This fear of being a burden is common among those with chronic illness. A study from 2014 defines this phenomenon as self-perceived burden (SPB):

empathic concern engendered from the impact on others of one’s illness and care needs, resulting in guilt, distress, feelings of responsibility and diminished sense of self

The study also focused on SPB among patients with chronic pain and found it is a common interpersonal experience with 73% reporting elevated SPB.

SPB is a hard one to shake. Even more so when you are in a profession that rewards excessive productivity. If your SPB is exacerbating your toxic productivity, I mentioned good resources in my last post to assist, like the webinar Toxic Productivity in Law and the Psychology Today article The Hidden Cost of Always Being Productive. The article highlights the importance of shifting from a performance-based identity to a values based life. As the article notes:

Values are the deeply held life directions or guiding principles that reflect what truly matters to you and how you want to show up in the world. They are not things you can check off a list and are therefore different from goals. Goals are outcomes, whereas values are directions you want to move toward in life because they represent what’s most important to you. I like to think of values as your personal compass. Every person’s values are different, and even our definitions of each value (like community, spirituality, or adventure, to name a few) are different.

The article provides an exercise to assist you to identify your core values, determine whether your weekly tasks reflect those values, and to switch out some of those tasks that don’t fulfill a top value for ones that help you work toward a core value.

I have used this approach and found good results. As I’m slowly easing myself off that wheel, my health continues to improve.