What Is a Chronic Illness?

Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist to help with chronic illness

Chronic illness can cause us to highly value safety.

Safety-seeking behaviors can be both adaptive and limiting.

Expanding life to include exploration as well as safety is a highly individual process.

To live with chronic illness is to have frequent and extended experiences of not feeling safe. Managing this felt lack of safety necessitates the expenditure of a significant amount of psychic energy. We become highly attuned to our bodies, monitoring our health closely. We associate certain activities with symptom improvement (e.g., heating pad, rest) and others with symptom exacerbation (e.g., eating certain foods, disrupted sleep). We learn to “read” our bodies in order to make decisions about what we need to do — and avoid — to stay as healthy as possible.

In the treatment of anxiety disorders, there is a recognition that anxiety causes people to act in ways that manage their distress. For example, someone who is afraid of flying may avoid airline travel. Someone afraid of the dark may sleep with a light on. Clinicians call these behavior modifications “safety-seeking behaviors” (Thwaites & Freeston, 2005). Safety-seeking behaviors are highly adaptive: We identify what we fear, and we change our behavior as a means of keeping anxiety at bay.

This is great, right? We orient our behavior to keep us as close to homeostasis as possible. However, we humans are not just wired to seek safety; we also are........

© Psychology Today