Yesterday morning I woke up feeling groggy with a cough/cold coming on and when I tried to get up I felt worse. (And was also the icing on the cake after a horrendous week of a&e and hospitals but that’s another story)! I came to the conclusion it was going to be one of those ‘sick days’.Ideally where you stay indoors, hidden under a duvet drinking lemsip and resting!
I use to love poorly days when I was younger. A day off school (best part!) and permission to bring your duvet down into the front room to watch trashy kids tv. My mum used to bring me lucozade and a ‘girl talk’ magazine (who remembers these 🙃🙌🏻)
As much as I would have loved a sofa day, nowadays it’s like I’m battling with 2 sides in my head if I’m ever Ill. My body tells me to rest whilst other thoughts tell me this isn’t allowed. This is because of OCD rules and niggling eating disorder thoughts that are present in my mind.
I struggle with having to clean my flat top to bottom every day which I’m not ashamed of admitting. So when a ‘poorly day’ ‘inconveniantly’ comes along it’s mental torture because the OCD part is telling you to get up and start the cleaning routine regardless ; poorly or not it’s no excuse. But this task becomes that much harder because your body physically isn’t allowing it.
Then I’m greeted with thoughts surrounding food. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in the best place I’ve ever have been with anorexia, but some days thoughts just creep up on you, even when you don’t expect it. I don’t really have an issue with exercise anymore but knowing if I stayed in bed all day was translated in my mind to ‘you’ll be lazy, you don’t deserve to eat because you wont need it’.
Needless to say, I spend the first couple of hours of the morning debating how to spend the day. Trying to argue both irrational/rational thoughts in order to come to a conclusion as to what I would do.
Rational points:
- listen to your body, it’s telling you to rest so honour that
- If you don’t clean today the world won’t and it doesn’t bloody need cleaning anyway
- You’re more likely to recover quickly if you take it easy and rest
- You still need to eat. It’s not a reward and doesn’t need to be ‘earnt’. You’re not going to balloon overnight. Your body’s not going to be thinking ‘Ey up, she’s not out and about , lazy cow. She’s in bed let’s add a few more pounds on her body to counteract this’ - although bodies are clever, they’re not clever enough to know if you are in bed or not 😅 bloody hell!
- Not eating isn’t going to help, it’ll probably make you feel worse not better
- Food is a necessity not something you have to complete tasks for
Irrational thoughts:
- you are an absolute failure at life if you don’t do your normal cleaning routine
- You’re head will feel messy
- You haven’t done anything to deserve a ‘duvet day’
- You’ll wake up tomorrow and would have doubled in size. Why eat when you haven’t done anything to earn it?
- You’re lazy
- You will waste the day
I even sound crazy even writing some of these thoughts out but I was honestly so conflicted with all of this thoughts spinning around in my head. But that’s the thing..THOUGHTS are just THOUGHTS. It’s how you act on these thoughts with your behaviour that matters the most.
The easy option would have been to run with the irrational thoughts in order to get a peace of mind. The harder option was to go by the rational thoughts and have a ‘duvet day’. And that’s what I did. I accepted the situation, knew I’d recover better if I rested and did just that. I also ate regardless of staying in bed all day....(shock horror, call the negative thoughts police and have me arrested 👩🏻✈️✋🏻😅).
It was the hardest option because it wasn’t easy and the consequence was that I felt guilty on and off throughout the day. But I know I’ve helped myself make decisions like this in the future easier, and overtime the guilt will lessen.
I wanted to write about this because I can’t be the only one that struggles with sick days if they have mental health issues that get in the way?
It’s weird because something so simple like being physically unwell can trigger so many irrational thoughts 🤷🏻♀️?
And I’ll end this right here by reporting
A) I’m still alive
B) I’m not a failure (or at least I hope not😅)
C) I haven’t ballooned overnight
D) My house is still standing after not cleaning
E) I feel a lot better !
...just goes to show that not acting on irrational thoughts is the best thing you can ever do X
