Teenagers with Chronic Illness: How to Deal with Depression, FOMO & Loneliness

The teenage years can be a vulnerable period in anyone’s life. After all, dealing with the mix of hormones and a changing body, figuring out who you are and where you fit in, combined with pressure from both your peers and parents is challenging enough as it is – with 1 in 7 adolescents struggling with feelings of depression, anxiety and body image issues.

But what if, on top of the usual teenage troubles, you also have to deal with painful, debilitating symptoms? Symptoms that stop you from going to school every day, being able to play sports or make music, hanging out with your friends and exploring the world?

That would make anyone sad, stressed, worried or angry at life. It’s no wonder that having a chronic illness increases your risk of mental health problems; not just because of the emotional rollercoaster you’re experiencing after being diagnosed, but also as a result of the physiological changes due to your illness, the side effects of medications and illness-induced stress and anxiety.

Obviously, there’s never a good time in your life to become seriously sick. But what makes the teenage years unique is that it’s such a formative period to develop your body and brain, your identity and relationships, your skills and knowledge.

Practically, being chronically ill during adolescence can have a big impact on your future. If you’re too sick to attend school, that could stop your from getting your diploma or moving towards the job of your dreams – sometimes for good. Not being able to play sports doesn’t sound like a big deal, but your teenage years are a sensitive time to support bone density, muscle strength and lung development. It’s also a painful age to be stuck at home sick while you should be making friends, discovering how the world works and learning to manage your emotions and make your own decisions.

And emotionally, it hurts when you have to miss milestones like going to prom, school trips abroad or getting your driver’s license because you’re too ill. As a teenager, you’re often all too aware of all the things you’re missing out on – especially if you see all your friends having a great time on TikTok.

It’s completely normal to feel sad, frustrated, anxious and alone when you’re struggling with these issues. But you want to avoid those feelings, negative thought patterns and unhelpful habits to turn into a full-blown depression or other mental health problems.

When you’re a teenager living with chronic illness, what can you do to deal with feelings of (mild) depression, loneliness and real FOMO?

Disclaimer: The self-help tips below will support your health and happiness, but they can not substitute medical advice personalized to your unique situation. So if you show signs of clinical depression or anxiety disorder, please contact your doctor or psychologist for help.

1. Give yourself some TLC

Isn’t it ironic that the moment you need to take care of yourself the most is when it’s hardest to look after yourself?

We all need restorative sleep, nutritious food and daily movement to function well. But disturbed sleeping patterns and a changed appetite are common symptoms of depression, while having a chronic illness can make it hard to move your body and make healthy meals. So how can you still take good care of your body and mind despite these limitations?

Sleep well 

There’s nothing like chronic pain, feeling empty inside and replaying scenarios in your mind over and over again to keep you up at night. And the next day, you’ll wake up with an even more aching body and depressed mood, making it harder again to fall asleep the following evening. To break this vicious cycle between disordered sleep and depression, it’s wise to ask your doctor or therapist for treatment options.

Make sure you have your bedtime basics covered:

• Keep your bedroom dark and slightly cool, and sleep on a comfortable mattress and pillow if possible.
• Try to wake up and go to bed at roughly the same time every day.
• Get some natural daylight, preferably in the morning, to sync up your bodily clocks and make it easier to fall asleep at night.
• Don’t have caffeinated beverages like (ice) coffee, coke or energy drinks after 5pm.
• As boring as it sounds, stay off your phone and laptop one hour before bedtime, because the blue light coming from screens disturbs the release of the sleep hormone melatonin.
• Leave your devices out of your bedroom when you go to sleep to avoid late-night scrolling and notifications waking you up at night. Instead, build a relaxing bedtime routine that will signal to your body and brain that it’s time to start winding down for sleep.

Finally, if pain stops you from having a good night’s rest, check out these tried-and-tested tips.

Eat healthily

Feel like stuffing your face with chocolate and chips when you’re upset or down? You’re not the only one. But science shows that eating lots of sugar, processed meats and unhealthy fats increases your risk of depression, while a high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and healthy proteins lowers your chances of developing depression.

But a depressed mood doesn’t just cause food cravings in some people, it can also lead to a lack of appetite in others.

In both cases, it helps to aim for three nourishing meals in a day, with 2-3 healthy snacks in between if you want. As a teenager, you probably partially depend on your parents or caretakers for cooking and groceries, so take a look at this article how you can get your family on board with healthy eating.

Now, you don’t have to change your whole diet all at once or cut out an entire food group like carbs, meat or fat to eat healthily. You’re still growing and developing your body, so you need a varied and balanced diet to get all the nutrients you need.

Here are a few healthy habits you can build to implement one by one:

• Swap (most of) your soda drinks for (flavored) water, homemade iced tea or lemonade, veggie juice or unsweetened plant-based milk.
• Satisfy your sweet tooth with healthier snacks, like stove-top popcorn, a warm fruit salad, a small piece of dark chocolate or wholesome muffins. You could also opt for savory bites like a handful of nuts, a boiled egg or savory yogurt.
• Try to get more vegetables in by adding greens to every meal in surprising ways. Not a fan of veggies? Learn to like their taste by jazzing up your standard vegetables, or sneak more greens into your meals with these hidden vegetable recipes.
• Experiment with making healthier versions of your favorite fast foods, whether that’s pizza, taco’s or burgers and fries.

Move your body

Physical activity can protect against developing depression, as well as reduce symptoms when depression does occur. Recent research has found that 20 minutes of moderate activity a day during 5 days a week lowers the risk of depression in people with chronic illness.

But how can you move your body when you’re limited by pain, fatigue and symptoms like dizziness, vomitting or trembling legs?

• Ask your doctor for advice about which kind of physical activity is best for your situation. You could also consider working with a physical therapist specialized in (your) chronic illness to slowly rebuild your overall fitness.
• Start small with doable movement that doesn’t lead to post-exertional malaise. Maybe you could do some gentle stretching in bed every day, do seated chair exercises to increase your mobility or take an online exercise class that’s suitable for chronic illness.
• You don’t have to exercise to boost your health – short bursts of physical activity can be just as effective. So see if you can fit some ‘exercise snacks’ into your days, from balancing on one leg while brushing your teeth to practice active sitting.
• Explore fun ways to gradually getting more steps in, like geocaching, playing Pokemon Go or nature bingo. Who knows, maybe you’ll even work your way up to 10,000 steps a day!

2. Learn how your mind works

For many adults, it’s already complex to understand how the human mind works, let alone when you’re a teenager.

But it can be really helpful to unravel how events trigger certain thoughts and emotions, which in turn affect your behavior. Because over time, it’s easy to fall into automatic negative thought patterns, especially when you’re sick and sad. For example, when you’ve texted your friend and see they’ve read it but haven’t responded, you may instantly think: ‘See, they don’t really care about me – nobody does.’ 

But what you think is not always the truth. Actually, many of us are prone to making so-called cognitive errors, like catastrophizing (immediately assuming the worst case scenario), personalization (taking things too personal) or mental filtering (not noticing the positives, only the negatives). One simple way to spot some cognitive errors is becoming aware of how many times you think in terms of ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘nobody’ and ‘everything’, or how often you ‘should’ do or be a certain way.

A great set of tools to help you untangle these thoughts and emotions, learn how the mind works and what you can do to support yourself are the Depression Worksheets for Teens from Mental Health CenterKids (not sponsored).

In this digital download, you’ll find 20 different worksheets for kids and teens to recognize bodily symptoms of depression, break down unhelpful thought patterns and reframe their self-talk into a healthier version.

Another common characteristic of many mental health problems is rumination. That’s the psychological term for going over and over a negative experience in your mind, bringing up distressing thoughts and emotions again and again, sometimes long after the event has happened. And the worst thing is: because rumination involves mentally repeating something that’s happened in the past, there’s often little you can do about it now.

Worrying, on the other hand, means you’re concerned about what might happen in the future. And although it’s totally normal to be anxious about how your health will develop over time and if you’ll be able to do the things you love, excessive worrying will only lead to anxiety, digestive problems, high blood pressure and a weakened immunity.

Whether you tend to ruminate about the past or worry about the future, in both cases it’s helpful to get out of your head by moving your body or working with your hands. Hands-on activities like baking, building technical LEGO or crafting are known to reduce stress and depressive symptoms. You could also take a look at these 6 short-term strategies to stop overthinking now.

In that spirit…

3. Mind your mental diet

Have you ever noticed how the information you consume all day long influences your thoughts and emotions? Watching funny videos on YouTube may cheer you up, while reading heated discussions in Facebook comments drains your energy.

But when you’re angry, scared or excited, those feelings trigger the release of specific neurotransmitters – chemical messengers that send signals throughout your body to act accordingly with those emotions. Most of the time, your thoughts and feelings only cause temporary changes in your physiology. But when something becomes a mental habit – like negative thought patterns or counting your blessings every day – that nerve activity sculpts your brain in more permanent ways.

That’s how your thought patterns can have a bigger impact on your health and happiness than you might have realized.

Now as you’ve experienced, you can’t escape all the bad things in life, and you shouldn’t push away difficult thoughts or feelings. But it also doesn’t make sense to get upset, worried or frustrated over annoying reels on social media, trashy reality shows or polarizing statements online – especially when you’re already struggling with limited energy and low mood.

One helpful way to support your emotional and physical health is to mind your mental diet. Ask yourself, how do the movies I watch, the music and podcasts I listen to, the social media channels I follow really make me feel? Is that how I want to feel?

Next, which small changes can you make to consume more information that brings you joy, stimulates your mind or nourishes your soul, and less ‘virtual junk food’? You don’t have to give up scrolling social media or watching your guilty pleasure series, but maybe you decide you don’t watch horror movies and read online discussions at night, so you don’t end up lying awake thinking about climate change or the zombie apocalypse.

Also be selective in who you follow on social media and how often you refresh your timelines, because who wouldn’t feel a little envy, FOMO or body awareness when you constantly see the highlight reels of other people’s lives while you’re sick at home? There’s a lot of evidence that the use of your smartphone and social media in particular has a negative effect on mental health in teens, putting you at risk of chronic sleep loss, depression, self-harm and mental distress.

That’s why it helps to balance your online life with real-life interactions and hands-on hobbies.

Speaking of which…

4. Make room for fun

When you have little energy. mobility and mental focus, the useable hours in your day are often spent on useful tasks, like trying to stay on top of school work, doctor’s visits and therapy sessions. That makes total sense, but you also need some fun in your life, something that makes you smile for a moment and motivates you to keep going despite the pain.

Making room for fun is especially important when you know that a clinical depression is characterized by losing interest or pleasure in the activities you used to enjoy. I know that’s easier said than done when you have chronic pain and spend way too much time in hospitals, but here are some ideas you could try:

• Try to bring back a little laughter in life by purposely watching comedy shows, cracking jokes and playing hilarious games.
• Beat the boredom with low-energy fun like easy crafting, jigsaw puzzles, playing one new song on your guitar, collecting baseball cards or building a fantasy football team.
• See if you can still enjoy your old hobbies by adapting them to your needs.
• Save some energy for fun activities, by writing them on on your weekly to-do list. Maybe you’d love to read the latest BookTok hit, or check out older movies starring your favorite actor.
• Explore illness-proof ways you can still do fun things, like going on a day trip with chronic illness, having mini adventures or planning an amazing summer at home.

5. Explore coping strategies for missing out on life

It’s the one of the worst feelings in the world: seeing all your friends and class mates hanging out and reaching important milestones – and you can’t be a part of that because you’re sick.

When FOMO is real, you have every right to be heartbroken and jealous of healthy peers. Depending on your condition, chronic illness FOMO can be so much more than missing ‘the party of the century’ – it’s like watching life pass you by.

So allow yourself to grieve all that you’ve lost. Just sit with your sadness and frustration, without getting stuck in negative thinking patterns or pushing your feelings away with ice cream or obsessive gaming. That’s hard, but often, your emotions will feel less heavy and intense if you just let them be without judgement.

Next, see if there’s anything you can take away from feeling left out. FOMO gives you clues about what you’re missing the most, and it’s not always what you’d think a first glance. That big party you had to skip, maybe you don’t care as much about being at that specific event, but more about having fun with your bestie. Or you love how dancing gives you a sense of freedom you can’t enjoy now.

Understanding which aspects you enjoy the most helps you to set priorities for spending your limited energy. A big gathering with your (former) sports team may not be worth the pain and malaise you feel afterwards, but hanging out for your best friend’s birthday is. What’s more, you can also explore how you can meet your underlying need for adventure/connection/creativity in a way that’s more doable for you.

Finally, no matter how much you’ve had to miss, don’t overlook the things you’ve simultaneously gained from being chronically ill. I know, that’s a stretch, but hear me out. Of course you wish you’d never had gotten sick in the first place, and you’d do anything to have your health back. But aside from all that you’ve lost to your illness, I bet you’ve also build up resilience to overcome challenges and empathy for others who are suffering. You may understand how your body and mind work better than many adults. You’ve learned how to keep hope in your heart and stay determined to go after your dreams, no matter how hard it gets.

Sure, in an ideal world you wouldn’t have had to figure these things out as a teenager with chronic illness. But just because you’re on a different path right now than most of your peers, doesn’t mean that you don’t reach meaningful milestones along the way as well.

6. Overcome loneliness

Globally, 25 percent of teenagers between 15 and 18 years old are feeling fairly to very lonely. And that percentage is even higher amongst young adults.

Being sick at home by yourself can increase that loneliness. Even worse, when you’re frequently absent from school or clubs because of chronic illness, it gets harder to belong to and get accepted by your class mates. And sometimes, it’s not being alone that hurts you the most – it’s being in a room full of people that do not understand what you’re going through.

As a teenager with chronic illness, what can you do to deal with both the social isolation and the emotional loneliness you’r experiencing? There is no easy answer, but here are some things you can do to feel less alone.

• Keep reaching out to family, friends, team mates and other people you like. That can be tough when you feel forgotten and left behind, I know, but shutting down emotionally to prevent yourself from getting hurt will make it even harder to connect with the people around you who do want to be there for you. See how you can still be a good friend to the peers who do stay in touch, even if that’s in a different way than before you got sick.
• Explore ways you can join in on the fun in a modified way, like making day trips accessible, celebrating the holidays or having amazing summer at home despite the limitations of your chronic illness. Come up with creative ways to spend time with your friends – maybe a monthly movie night at your place, playing an online chess or gaming competition or hanging out at the local park on days when you feel good.
• Make the most of technology. You can attend virtual classes, church services and online clubs, play games over FaceTime or host an online crafts party to stay connected with family and friends…
• … but also save energy for real-life interactions. As great as it is to be able to talk with your buddies through text messages and follow their lives on social media, nothing beats hearing your friend’s voice, seeing them face to face or getting a real hug instead of receiving a ‘heart’ on Instagram.
• Find people who do get what you’re going through. See if you can find a patient support groups in your area with other teenagers with similar conditions. You can also (safely and with permission of your parents!) join an online community like The Mighty, Healing Well or for specific conditions. Just make sure talking about your illness makes you feel seen, heard and supported, and not worse by constantly reading negative experiences from other patients.

It doesn’t always feel that way, but remember: you are not alone.

7.  Do not let one label define you

If you’ve been the sporty one, you may feel a little lost when severe asthma, juvenile rheumatism or lupus stops you from making the team this year. Not just because you miss playing sports, but also because you don’t really know who you are now that you can’t do the activities that felt part of your identity.

Your teenage years are a time to discover who you are, what you love to do and where you fit in. Being chronically ill can really mess up that natural process when who you feel like inside and how you can express yourself in the world do not line up.

Let’s say you love musical theatre, but you can’t perform right now. How can you express that side of you in an illness-proof way? Maybe you can stream Hamilton or Les Miserables while resting or practice one new song. Or perhaps you are able to join the film club or create videos at home at your own pace. It’s not the same as performing live on stage, but these small, modified activities can make you feel like yourself again.

Alternatively, you may discover a whole new side of yourself! When forced to pick up a new hobby that’s less taxing for you, you find out you’re pretty good at drawing, playing chess or writing short stories.

There’s no denying that your illness can have a huge impact on every aspect of your life, including how you’re able to express your identity. But still, always remember that you are more than your diagnosis. You’re also a unique person with their own talents, interests and skills, whether you’re the joker that cracks everyone up or the teenager that brightens the world with their artistic eye or beautiful voice.

Don’t let one medical label define who you are and who you will be when you’re all grown up.

8. Most importantly: Seek help when you need it.

You do not have to go through this alone. There are others out there who truly understand what you’re going through, as well as doctors, therapists, counselors and hotlines available to support you.

So please reach out to family and friends, and contact a medical professional for personalized help, especially if you feel depressed most of the day nearly every day and the symptoms impair your daily functioning.

No matter how dark life gets, keep looking for the stars that will light your way.

Conclusion

None of the tips above will fully take your pain away. But hopefully you will have some new tools to better deal with depressive feelings, loneliness and FOMO when you’re a teenager with chronic illness.

For more help on dealing with depressive feelings, check out Mental Health Center Kids (not sponsored), the many links in this article or contact your doctor for personalized advice.