By Crystal Lindell

If you’re new to chronic pain, try your best to get some sleep. 

Whether you use a pill, a sick day, a babysitter, or some combination of all three — your first priority is to get a really good, restful night of sleep. 

Nothing can be dealt with before that happens, but everything will feel more manageable when you wake up. 

As someone who writes about chronic illness, people often reach out to me when they or someone they love suddenly finds themselves dealing with a new health issue. And my first piece of advice is always the same: YOU NEED TO SLEEP. 

Chronic illness – especially chronic pain – has a way of eating away at your sleep like a party full of toddlers grabbing chunks of birthday cake. Even if you lay in bed all night long, true sleep can easily evade you. 

Lack of sleep will make you crazy so much faster than you think it will. It will make every problem you face impossible. And it will make every interaction you have with humans or pets infuriating. 

When I first started having chronic pain at age 29, I did not understand any of this. At the time, I was working two jobs, with one requiring a daily hour-long commute each way. I was secretly proud to be living on as little sleep as possible, long before I started having serious health issues.

I thought I was the type of person who could easily live on little-to-no sleep. But there’s a big difference between getting five hours of sleep, going to work, then coming home to crash for 10 hours versus getting less than two hours of sleep a night for multiple nights in a row.

I didn’t realize how much sleep my new pain was stealing from me. And I didn’t realize just how quickly it would start destroying my will to live.

During one early pain flare, before I had any of the tools I have now to manage such things, I was awake for like five days straight. I say “like” because that week is kind of a traumatic blur. It was only a few days, but it felt like a month. 

After one of the first rough nights, I showed up at my primary care doctor’s office before it even opened, begging for help. Another day, I went to an urgent care clinic. By the end of the week, I was laying on my living room floor planning ways to kill myself. 

It doesn’t take long to reach really dark places when you aren’t getting enough sleep. And lack of sleep will make almost any physical pain worse too. Combine those two things, and it’s easy to mistakenly start convincing yourself that being alive is the wrong choice. 

Eventually, a pain doctor gave me a strong antidepressant and sleeping aid called amitriptyline, and I finally got some real rest. Of course, like any strong sleep aid, it came with a lot of side effects. It made me very tired in the morning, sometimes making it impossible to get up for work. It made me gain unwanted weight. And it left me groggy throughout the day. 

But after going days without sleep, those were all side effects I was happy to accept. 

Bodies need the power reset that sleep is supposed to provide, both mentally and physically. When you don’t get that, things get scary glitchy fast.

So if you’re new to chronic pain, do whatever you need to do to get some sleep. And if you aren’t able to get the sleep you need with the tools you have at home, do not hesitate to go to the doctor or even the emergency room. Sleep is that important. 

After a few nights of real rest, then you can start to tackle the rest of the ways your newfound health issues are affecting you. Because trust me, there'll be plenty of time for all that in the morning.