How to Actually Relax on Vacation When You Have a Chronic Illness

How to Actually Relax on Vacation When You Have a Chronic Illness

You finally made it to your destination. You planned the trip, figured out what you could afford, packed your medications, worried about what you might be forgetting, made it through the airport or the long drive, and checked into your hotel. Now you're supposed to do the one thing everyone says vacations are made for: relax. That sounds simple enough until you actually try to do it when you live with a chronic illness.

For many of us, getting to the destination is only the beginning. Your body may already be tired from traveling. Sitting in an airplane seat or car for hours may have increased your pain. Your sleep schedule may be completely off, your medications may need to be adjusted to a different time zone, and you're suddenly sleeping in an unfamiliar bed and eating food you don't normally eat. You're also probably walking more, making more decisions and dealing with more noise, crowds, heat, cold or stimulation than you would during an ordinary day at home. Even when you're having a wonderful time, your body is still processing all of those changes.

Then there is another part of vacation that we don't talk about nearly enough: the pressure to enjoy every minute of it. You spent money to get there, possibly saved for months, used vacation time and put a lot of energy into planning the trip. Maybe this is somewhere you've dreamed of visiting for years. It can be incredibly difficult to sit in a hotel room and rest when your mind is telling you that you're wasting precious vacation time. You start thinking about everything you could be seeing and everything you might miss. Before you know it, your relaxing vacation has turned into another job with an itinerary you feel obligated to complete.

Living with chronic illness has taught many of us how to push through discomfort because sometimes we don't have much of a choice. There are things at home that still need to be done even when we don't feel well. That same habit can follow us on vacation, except now we may be pushing ourselves through museums, walking tours, restaurants and sightseeing instead of laundry and errands. The surroundings have changed, but we're still asking our bodies to keep going long after they're telling us they've had enough.

I don't believe the answer is to stop traveling. I believe the answer is to stop expecting ourselves to travel as though our bodies don't have needs. A vacation that works with your body instead of constantly fighting against it can still be exciting, memorable and full of experiences. In fact, you may find that slowing things down allows you to enjoy the trip much more than you would if you spent the entire time racing from one attraction to another.

Why Can a Vacation Be So Exhausting When You're Supposed to Be Relaxing?

Vacations involve an enormous amount of disruption to your normal routine. You may wake up earlier, eat at different times, sleep in a different bed, cross time zones and spend hours sitting or standing in uncomfortable places. There are airports, security lines, luggage, rental cars, hotel check-ins and unfamiliar surroundings. Once you arrive, there are dozens of little decisions to make throughout the day. Where are we eating? How are we getting there? How far is the walk? Where is the nearest bathroom? Is there somewhere to sit? Do I need to bring medication with me? What time do I need to be back? None of these decisions seems particularly exhausting by itself, but together they can take a surprising amount of energy.

Travel days themselves deserve more respect than we usually give them. We tend to think of a travel day as a day when we didn't really "do anything," but your body may disagree. Getting up early, getting yourself and your luggage to an airport, navigating a terminal, standing in security lines, sitting for hours, collecting your bags, finding transportation and checking into your accommodations is a full day of activity. The fact that you didn't visit a museum or go sightseeing doesn't mean your body wasn't working hard. When you have chronic illness, acknowledging that travel itself requires energy can help you make better decisions about what happens after you arrive.

There can also be a mental exhaustion that comes from constantly evaluating how you feel. People who don't live with chronic illness may decide what they want to do based mostly on whether they have time and whether something sounds fun. We may have another entire conversation happening in our heads. How much energy do I have? How much walking is involved? If I do this now, will I still be able to go to dinner? What if I start feeling worse while I'm there? Can I get back to the hotel easily? That constant calculation is part of traveling with chronic illness, and it can make a vacation feel surprisingly complicated.

Give Yourself Permission to Arrive Before You Start the Vacation

One of the simplest changes you can make is to stop treating your arrival day like a sightseeing day. I understand why that's difficult. If you've paid for five nights somewhere, you naturally want to get as much as possible out of those five days. If your flight lands at noon, it can feel almost irresponsible to spend the rest of the afternoon doing very little. You may start thinking about all the things you could squeeze in before dinner.

Instead, consider making arrival day part of your adjustment period. Check into your room, unpack the things you actually need, put your medications somewhere safe, charge your phone and figure out where you can get something to eat. Take a shower, change into comfortable clothes and give yourself time to settle. If you feel good later, take a short walk around the neighborhood, sit somewhere outside or have dinner nearby. If you don't feel like doing any of those things, you can stay in your room without feeling as though you've failed at vacation.

I did that when I went to Scotland. I flew in a day early so I could get acclimated to my hotel, surroundings and the time zone. I was so glad I did. I took a two-week tour group of Scotland. That extra day gave me the rest I needed to prepare for my tour and not push myself too hard.

Those few quiet hours may protect the rest of your trip. There is a huge difference between waking up the next morning feeling rested and waking up already trying to recover from the day before. When you think about it that way, an easy arrival day isn't wasted vacation time at all. It's an investment in the days that follow.

Stop Trying to Get Your Money's Worth Out of Every Minute

This may be one of the hardest things to do, particularly if you're traveling on a limited budget. When you've worked hard to afford a trip, resting can actually feel expensive. You start calculating what the hotel costs per night, how much you spent on airfare and how few days you have left. If this is a destination you may never visit again, the pressure can become even stronger. Sitting in your hotel room for two hours starts feeling like you're throwing away something you worked hard to pay for.

The problem is that pushing yourself beyond your limits doesn't necessarily give you more vacation. Imagine you have five days somewhere you've always wanted to visit. During the first two days, you walk for hours, get up early for tours, eat dinner late and keep adding activities because you're excited. On the third morning, your body finally says no. Now you may lose the next day or two because you're trying to recover. You technically did more during those first two days, but you didn't necessarily get more enjoyment out of the trip.

Getting your money's worth can mean something different. It can mean being able to enjoy the museum instead of desperately searching for the next bench. It can mean having enough energy left to enjoy dinner. It can mean sitting at a café for an hour and actually noticing the place you've traveled so far to see. There is value in watching a sunset, taking a nap, ordering food to your room or spending an afternoon beside the hotel pool. You paid for the vacation, and you don't have to earn the right to enjoy it by exhausting yourself. Check out my post, Make the trip work for your body, your budget and your life. It will teach you how to plan a vacation that works for your personal needs.

Choose What Really Matters Instead of Trying to See Everything

A packed itinerary can look wonderful when you're planning it from your kitchen table. You start researching your destination and suddenly there are twenty things you want to see. Then you discover another restaurant, another neighborhood, another museum and another day trip. Before long, every day has a morning activity, an afternoon activity and an evening activity, with barely enough time in between to get from one place to another.

A more realistic approach is to decide what actually matters to you. I like the idea of choosing one main thing for each day—the experience you would be genuinely disappointed to miss. Maybe it's a museum you've wanted to visit for years, a scenic drive, a historic site, a boat ride or dinner somewhere special. Once you've done that thing, everything else becomes optional rather than another obligation on the schedule.

This doesn't mean you can only do one thing per day. If you're feeling good, you can absolutely do more. The difference is that you aren't starting the day with six activities that all feel mandatory. Your itinerary can expand or contract depending on how you're feeling. On a good day, maybe you do your main activity, have lunch, explore another area and go out for dinner. On a difficult day, maybe you do the one thing that matters and spend the rest of the afternoon resting. Both days count as vacation.

Learn to Rest Before Your Body Forces You To

Many people with chronic illness become very good at pushing through discomfort. At home, we often have to. The laundry doesn't disappear because we're having a bad day, appointments still happen, pets still need care, groceries are still needed and responsibilities don't magically go away. Over time, it becomes normal to keep going until the body makes continuing impossible. Unfortunately, that habit can follow us on vacation.

There's an important difference between resting because you're starting to get tired and recovering because you've completely depleted yourself. If you wait until your pain has become overwhelming or your energy has completely disappeared, a twenty-minute break may no longer be enough. You may need the rest of the day or even the next day to recover. Stopping earlier can prevent you from reaching that point.

That might mean finding a bench while you're still feeling reasonably good, spending half an hour in an air-conditioned café, sitting by the water or going back to your hotel for an afternoon break. Take your shoes off, change into comfortable clothes, close the curtains and lie down for a while. Then decide later whether you want to go back out. A two-hour break in the afternoon may give you an entire evening you wouldn't have had otherwise. Resting before you've completely emptied your tank isn't giving in to your illness; it's pacing yourself so you can enjoy more of the trip. Read, The spoonie energy budget: Why your energy is more valuable than your money when you travel. It will help you plan your vacation around your spoons (energy).

Watch Out for the Good-Day Trap

Ironically, one of the easiest times to overdo it is when you're feeling good. If good days aren't guaranteed, waking up with energy can feel like winning the lottery. You want to take advantage of it while it's there, so you walk farther, add another attraction, skip the afternoon break and stay out later. You're feeling good, so why not?

The problem is that feeling good at ten in the morning doesn't mean you have unlimited energy. You may simply be starting the day with a fuller tank. If you use all of it by mid-afternoon, you may still pay for it later that night or the following day. That doesn't mean you should spend a good day worrying about what might happen tomorrow. Enjoy your good days. Just remember that you don't have to use every ounce of energy simply because it's available.

Think about what else matters that day and what you have planned for tomorrow. If you've been looking forward to dinner somewhere special, save enough energy to enjoy it. If tomorrow is the excursion you've been waiting for, maybe tonight isn't the night to add another three hours of sightseeing. Sometimes one of the best things you can do for tomorrow's version of yourself is stop while today's version still feels pretty good.

Make Your Hotel Room Part of the Vacation

We often treat hotel rooms as places we're supposed to leave first thing in the morning and return to only when we're ready to sleep. When you have a chronic illness, your accommodations can be much more than that. Your room can be your recovery space, quiet space, meal space and escape from crowds, heat, noise or overstimulation.

That's also why the cheapest hotel isn't always the least expensive option in practical terms. A hotel that costs slightly more but is close to the places you want to visit may allow you to return during the afternoon and rest. A refrigerator can help with medications and simple meals. A microwave may mean you don't have to go back out when you're tired. An elevator, comfortable chair, bathtub or quiet room can make a meaningful difference in how your body handles the trip.

Once you're there, don't feel guilty about using the room. Have coffee in bed, sit on the balcony, order takeout, watch a movie, read, nap or simply enjoy being somewhere different without having to accomplish anything. You paid for the hotel too. Enjoying your room isn't taking time away from your vacation; for some of us, it is part of what makes the vacation possible. I was into my last week of my 29-day trip through Scotland, Ireland, London and Paris when I was exhausted and spent one day in my hotel room watching Game of Thrones reruns and eating room service. Best thing I did for myself on that vacation. I was rested enough to continue. Read, Get there your way: Why there is no right or wrong way to travel. It's your vacation, take it in a way it works for you.

You Don't Have to Figure Everything Out While You're Already Tired

One of the most exhausting parts of traveling with chronic illness is how much thinking can be involved. You may be keeping track of medications, energy, rest breaks, transportation, meals, accessibility, symptoms and backup plans while you're also trying to enjoy yourself. When you're already tired, even small decisions can start to feel much bigger than they normally would.

That's one of the reasons I created my Ultimate Spoonie Travel Planner. It gives you a place before your trip to think through things such as medications, accommodations, energy, rest days, backup plans and the details that are easy to forget when you're already managing a chronic illness. The idea isn't to schedule every minute of your vacation. In fact, it's almost the opposite. By doing more of the thinking before you leave, you can hopefully spend less of your vacation trying to figure everything out.

Sign up with your email address and get The Ultimate Spoonie Travel Planner free! Click here and see all of the free recourses available to you. No spam. Cancel whenever you choose.

Let Convenience Win Sometimes

When you're traveling on a budget, it can feel wrong to pay extra for convenience. Maybe public transportation costs a few dollars while a rideshare costs fifteen. Maybe a hotel farther away is cheaper than one near the attractions. Maybe food costs less several blocks away. On paper, the least expensive choice looks obvious, but the financial cost isn't the only cost worth considering when your energy is limited.

Sometimes the extra money is buying you energy. A rideshare might save enough walking that you can actually enjoy the museum you're going to visit. A hotel in a better location might allow you to return for a two-hour rest in the afternoon. A direct flight may cost more but save you from navigating another airport, another long walk and another boarding process. Food delivery on a difficult evening might allow you to eat properly without forcing yourself to go back out.

This doesn't mean spending money you don't have or paying for convenience every time. It means looking at the whole cost of a decision. Sometimes spending an extra ten or twenty dollars in one area protects the much larger investment you've already made in the trip. Affordable travel should help you travel more, not require you to choose the physically hardest option every single time.

Stop Saving All of Your Rest for the End of the Day

It's easy to tell yourself that you'll rest tonight, but that assumes you'll have enough energy to make it comfortably until tonight. If you use almost everything you have before lunch, you don't magically get a new supply of energy because you have a dinner reservation at seven. This is why spreading activity and rest throughout the day can work much better than having one long stretch of activity followed by complete exhaustion.

Think about alternating what you're asking from your body. Walk for a while, then sit. Visit the attraction, then have a leisurely lunch instead of immediately moving to the next place. Take the tour, then return to the hotel. If you know you want to go out in the evening, deliberately protect some energy for it rather than treating the afternoon as time that needs to be filled.

Rest doesn't have to be something that happens only after the day's fun is over. It can be built into the day itself. Once you start looking at rest as part of the itinerary instead of an interruption to it, it becomes much easier to take a break without feeling as though you're doing something wrong. Check out, Traveling as a spoonie: How to see the world without burning out. It will help you travel as a spoonie and save your precious energy.

You Are Allowed to Change the Plan

The itinerary you created weeks or months before your trip was based on what you hoped you'd be able to do. It couldn't possibly know exactly how you would feel when you woke up on Tuesday morning in a hotel hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Your body gets new information every day, and sometimes your plans need to change because of it.

You can cancel a tour, move a reservation, skip the attraction everyone says you "have to see," sleep later than you planned or decide that yesterday was enough and today needs to be quiet. You can replace a walking tour with a scenic drive. You can spend an afternoon sitting beside the water instead of visiting another museum. You can go back to your hotel before everyone else is ready to stop.

Changing the plan doesn't mean the plan failed. A travel itinerary is supposed to serve you, not control you. If adjusting it allows you to enjoy your vacation instead of simply enduring it, then the adjustment did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Traveling With Someone Else Can Make Rest More Complicated

When you're traveling alone, you can change your schedule without explaining it to anyone. Traveling with another person can be harder because now you may feel responsible for their vacation too. You don't want to slow them down, make them miss something or seem like you're complaining. That pressure can lead you to push yourself much farther than you would if you were alone.

This is why conversations before the trip matter. Let your travel companion know that your energy may change from one day to the next and that you may occasionally need to rest. That doesn't mean they have to sit in the hotel with you. There may be times when they go sightseeing for a few hours while you rest and you meet again for dinner. Separating for part of a day can be much healthier than forcing yourself through an activity you don't have the energy for while quietly becoming more miserable by the hour.

You also shouldn't have to repeatedly apologize for needing something your body genuinely needs. A supportive travel companion doesn't need you to prove that you're sick enough to sit down, take a nap or change the schedule. You're both allowed to have a good trip, even if that occasionally means having different plans for a few hours.

Give Yourself a Day With Almost Nothing Planned

For longer trips, one of the most useful things you can do is leave a day mostly open. Not a day that's technically empty but that you secretly plan to fill once you arrive. A genuinely open day means no prepaid tour, no timed museum ticket, no must-see attraction and no alarm unless you need one for medication or another important reason.

When that day arrives, see how you feel. Maybe you wake up with plenty of energy and decide to visit somewhere you discovered earlier in the trip. Maybe you have breakfast, wander around a neighborhood and spend the afternoon beside the pool. Maybe you sleep late, do laundry, order lunch and read for a few hours. The purpose isn't to force yourself to do nothing. It's to give yourself one day when your body gets more say in what happens.

An open day also gives the rest of the trip breathing room. If weather ruins an activity earlier in the week or you need to move something because you're not feeling well, you have somewhere to put it. Instead of every change creating a domino effect through the itinerary, you have some flexibility built in from the beginning.

Be Careful With the Imaginary Vacation Version of Yourself

Most of us have an imaginary vacation version of ourselves. This person gets up early every morning, walks ten miles without complaining, looks wonderful in every photograph, stays out late and wakes up the next day completely refreshed. This imaginary traveler apparently doesn't need much sleep, never has digestive problems, never gets overheated and always has enough energy for one more activity.

Unfortunately, the person who gets off the airplane is still us. Our normal needs don't disappear because we're somewhere beautiful. If you need eight or nine hours of sleep at home, you'll probably still need sleep on vacation. If skipping meals makes you feel terrible at home, it probably won't work particularly well in Rome either. If heat drains you at home, your body isn't going to ignore ninety-degree weather simply because you're standing somewhere you've always wanted to visit.

There is something freeing about giving up the idea that you have to become a different person on vacation. Build the trip around the person who is actually going. That's the person who deserves the vacation in the first place.

What Happens When Your Illness Takes a Day Anyway?

You can plan carefully, pace yourself, take breaks and do everything "right," and sometimes you're still going to wake up feeling awful. That's one of the realities of chronic illness. It can be especially upsetting on vacation because the day feels more valuable. You may have paid for something you can no longer do or missed an experience you were genuinely excited about.

You're allowed to be disappointed. You don't have to immediately turn it into a positive lesson or tell yourself that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes it simply stinks. You spent money, you made plans and your body didn't cooperate. Being upset about that doesn't mean you're ungrateful for the rest of the trip.

What you don't want to do is turn one difficult day into several by spending the entire day fighting yourself. Take care of what needs to be taken care of. Rest, eat what you can, hydrate, take your medications as prescribed and make your surroundings comfortable. See whether anything can be rescheduled, but don't spend hours desperately rearranging the entire vacation while you're feeling terrible.

A bad health day on vacation doesn't mean you shouldn't have traveled. People without chronic illness lose vacation days too. They get stomach bugs, flights get canceled, storms arrive, attractions close and luggage disappears. Travel has never come with a guarantee that every day will go according to plan. Chronic illness simply adds another unpredictable element to something that was already unpredictable. Traveling with chronic illness during flares--when your body slows down but your soul wants to travel will help you when your body needs a rest day on vacation.

Relaxation Doesn't Have to Mean Doing Nothing

Relaxation looks different for different people. Lying beside a pool for six hours might sound wonderful to one person and incredibly boring to someone else. The point isn't to spend your vacation doing nothing. The point is to reduce the constant feeling that you need to be moving toward the next thing.

A relaxing day could include a scenic train ride where someone else is doing the driving, a leisurely lunch, sitting in a café and people-watching, taking a slow drive along the coast, browsing a bookstore or spending an hour near the water. It might mean taking photographs without worrying about getting anywhere quickly or sitting somewhere beautiful long enough to actually notice where you are.

Some of the best travel memories aren't the things we scheduled months in advance. They're the unexpected conversations, the café we wandered into, the view we sat and watched longer than planned or the evening when we decided we were too tired to go back out and ended up laughing over takeout in the hotel room. Those moments count too.

Don't Forget About the Trip Home

It's easy to use every bit of available energy because the vacation is almost over, but getting home requires energy too. You still have to pack, check out, get to the airport or begin the drive, deal with luggage and eventually unpack when you arrive home. If you've completely depleted yourself during the last two days of the trip, that journey can feel much harder than it needs to.

If possible, avoid making the final day your most physically demanding day. Give yourself enough time to pack without rushing and consider what your schedule looks like after you return home. Arriving home late Sunday night and having a completely packed Monday morning may not give your body much opportunity to recover from travel.

You don't win a prize for coming home completely exhausted. A successful vacation doesn't have to end with you saying, "I need a vacation from my vacation." Coming home with a little energy left doesn't mean you didn't do enough. It may mean you finally learned how to travel in a way that works better for your body.

Your Vacation Is Still Real Even If It Looks Different

There is no rule that says a real vacation requires getting up early, sightseeing all day, eating at the best restaurants every night and collapsing into bed exhausted. Your vacation can include naps, canceled plans, room-service dinners, medication alarms, mobility aids and afternoons when you do almost nothing. You might have a day when your biggest outing is walking down the street for coffee, and that day still belongs in your vacation.

The more important question is whether you enjoyed being there. I would rather see three things and genuinely enjoy them than see ten things while spending the entire time looking for somewhere to sit. I'd rather change the plan than spend the day fighting my body. I'd rather sit somewhere beautiful for an hour than rush past it because I'm trying to get to the next attraction on a list.

For those of us living with chronic illness, travel may always require some negotiation with our bodies. That's okay. The goal isn't to manage your illness well enough to survive the vacation. The goal is to actually have a vacation—to experience somewhere different, enjoy yourself, make memories and come home glad you went.

So take the afternoon break when you need it. Order dinner in sometimes. Skip something that isn't important to you. Change tomorrow's plans if today's activities took more out of you than expected. Sit and watch the sunset without thinking about the attraction you didn't get to see. You worked hard to get there, and you're allowed to enjoy being there in whatever way works for you.

Make Travel Fit Your Life

If you're trying to travel with chronic illness, a limited budget or a body that doesn't always cooperate with the itinerary, you don't have to plan your trips the way everyone else does. Single, Sick & Broke Traveler is about finding ways to make travel work around your actual life rather than waiting for your life to become perfect enough to travel.

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The Single, Sick & Broke Traveler

Travel stories for the brave and budget-conscious.

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