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We get a lot of judgements when we rest — from others and ourselves. But when you live with rheumatoid arthritis, rest is actually a very active state. In my new column for HealthCentral, I look at what people with chronic illness do when they rest:

“EVERY DAY I fight a battle against my body: It needs me to slow down and take care of it, but I need (and want) it to keep going. My body is doing its best, but rheumatoid arthritis (RA) makes most days a struggle. Truth be told, if I listened to everything my body asks, I’d do about half of what I normally do in a day. I’m pushing past that because life is full of errands, appointments, and endless tasks, but also because of the stigma of laziness that so often gets applied to people living with chronic illness. It’s difficult when it comes from other people, but it’s even harder to ignore the voice in my own mind. It echoes those wider social pressures to be busy—to not nap in the middle of the day and then rest again after dinner. It’s the voice that tells me I am lazy when I sit still.

I hear about similar struggles from others in the RA community—people who are judged for taking the elevator rather than the stairs, or for not helping out with a community picnic. Some get down on themselves for, say, ordering take-out for the third time in a week instead of mustering the energy to cook. When you are in the middle of an RA flare or exhausted from having overdone it yet again, how do you fight back against that stigma and judgement, whether from onlookers or your toughest critic: yourself? For me, it helped when I began to understand first, what rest actually is and second, that it is necessary for my physical and mental health. Now I know that rest is not a passive state. It is, in fact, one of the most active things my body does. While I am still, my body is busy with a host of different tasks.

Let’s look at some of the very active things we are doing when we rest.”

Read by column on the four things people with RA do when they rest on HealthCentral.