Eating, sleeping, exercise, grooming, and relaxing are all examples of things you do to look after yourself and your health. Illness can affect the time that you spend looking after yourself.
First, illness may interfere with your best efforts. You many not always sleep as well as previously. You may not feel like eating or exercising regularly as before. Second, illness challenges your ability to look after yourself, at exactly the time when it is most important to do so. The potential benefits of looking after your health and well-being are always great. But the benefits may be the greatest at times when illness impairs your health. Third, you may have to spend time looking after your health in ways other than you might prefer. Attending doctors' appointments, going for tests, and spending time in hospital may be in the best interest of your health and well-being. But this doesn't mean that this is how you would choose to spend your time.
The destructiveness of these three effects can be striking. You may expend more of your time and energy caring for your health. But at the same time, be less able to care for your well-being the way you had before you became ill. With the business and worry that can occur with illness, time previously taken for relaxation and rejuvenation can appear expendable. The simple things that we do to care for our well-being may appear less pressing than the more immediate demands of illness. This is common and understandable. It is likely that most people respond this way when illness first arises. But if illness persists, neglecting yourself can allow the illness to have a much greater negative effect on your well-being than is necessary. Much of what we discuss throughout Surviving Transplantation strives to counteract this natural tendency.