Episode 79: How Chronic Health Challenges and Your Work Impact Each Other with Sally Riggs

Listen to Episode 79 with Sally Riggs →

When Your Body Limits Your Business

You built a business or career you care about deeply. But chronic health challenges now limit how much you can work and what you can accomplish. Some days your body simply won't cooperate no matter how important your deadlines are. You wonder if you can continue doing work that matters when your health feels so unreliable.

What if your health and work aren't separate domains but constantly influencing each other in ways you haven't fully recognized?

Your health impacts how you show up for work through energy, focus, and capacity. And your work impacts your health through stress, demands, and how you pace yourself. They're not separate issues but interconnected aspects of your life that either support or undermine each other.

Sally Riggs joins me today as an entrepreneur, psychologist, and COVID long-haul coach who understands this intersection personally and professionally. We discuss the interconnectedness of work and health and strategies you can use when your body struggles with long-term health issues while you're trying to maintain your career or business.

Understanding the Bidirectional Relationship

Is your health actually impacting how you show up for work in ways you've been minimizing or denying? Yes, it is. And ignoring this connection makes both your health and your work performance worse over time because you can't optimize one while neglecting the other.

The two-way impact between chronic health challenges and work capacity means that your health issues affect your work output, quality, and sustainability. But your work also affects your health through the stress you take on, the demands you place on your limited capacity, and whether you honor your body's signals or override them. The loop runs both directions creating either positive cycles of improvement or negative spirals of decline.

Using Polyvagal Theory to optimize both work and health provides a framework for understanding how your nervous system state determines what's possible in both domains. When you're in ventral vagal connection and regulation, you can work more effectively and your body can heal better. When you're in sympathetic activation or dorsal shutdown, both your work performance and your health suffer because your biology prioritizes survival over performance or healing.

Understanding the Biology of Trauma® alongside chronic health challenges reveals why work stress can worsen physical symptoms and why physical symptoms increase your vulnerability to work-related stress. Your nervous system connects everything including your immune function, your energy production, your cognitive capacity, and your emotional regulation. When one aspect suffers, all aspects feel the impact.

Common Mistakes and Critical Components

The most common mistake people make when trying to work with their nervous system while managing chronic health involves pushing through regardless of signals. Sally explains that ignoring your body's communication about its limits while trying to regulate your nervous system creates internal conflict. You can't simultaneously override your body's needs and expect it to regulate and heal effectively.

The number one component for business success when you have chronic health challenges isn't working harder or longer but rather managing your capacity strategically. Without this capacity management, everything else struggles because you're constantly exhausting yourself beyond what your body can sustain. Your business needs your sustainable presence more than it needs your temporary heroic efforts that lead to crashes.

What sabotages business impact often traces back to nervous system dysregulation and unaddressed health issues rather than lack of skill or market problems. Specific patterns that undermine your business include overcommitting because you can't sense your limits accurately, working in ways that activate your nervous system chronically, avoiding necessary rest because it feels like failure, and pushing past your body's signals until you crash completely.

Preventing your business from making a bigger impact often involves your own health challenges that you haven't fully addressed or accommodated. Your personal capacity limits your business reach when you haven't found sustainable ways to work within your body's constraints. Growing your business requires first optimizing how you work with the capacity you have rather than constantly trying to force more output than your health allows.

The Role of Emotions and Long COVID

Hidden emotions that you don't acknowledge create negative effects on both work performance and health outcomes. Emotions you suppress or ignore drain your energy reserves without you realizing it. They create physical symptoms through the nervous system pathways connecting emotions and body. They block your performance by consuming cognitive and emotional resources in suppression rather than allowing those resources for work.

Long COVID specifically creates unique challenges for working professionals and entrepreneurs that Sally specializes in addressing. The profound fatigue that limits how many hours you can work. The brain fog that makes cognitive tasks feel impossible. The unpredictability where you don't know from day to day what your body can handle. Strategies exist for managing both your health and your work when long COVID affects your capacity.

Strategies for working with chronic health challenges require different approaches than healthy people use for productivity. You need to pace yourself differently by honoring energy fluctuations rather than forcing consistent output. You must honor your body's signals about when to stop rather than pushing through to meet arbitrary standards. You should structure work around your biology's patterns rather than forcing your biology to conform to traditional work structures.

Sally emphasizes that working with chronic health doesn't mean giving up on meaningful work or impact. It means finding sustainable ways to contribute that work with your body rather than against it. This might involve shorter work periods, more flexible schedules, different types of tasks on different energy days, or building systems that allow you to maintain business momentum even when your health requires rest.

Practical Application and Integration

The integration of health management with business or career development creates better outcomes than treating these as separate concerns. When you acknowledge that your health and work constantly affect each other, you can make strategic decisions that optimize both. This might mean turning down opportunities that would deplete you unsustainably, designing your business model around your capacity constraints, or investing in health improvements that increase your sustainable work capacity.

Understanding how your nervous system state affects both domains helps you recognize when you're operating from dysregulation that's undermining both health and work. When you're in sympathetic activation, you might push yourself beyond sustainable limits at work while also triggering inflammatory responses that worsen symptoms. When you're in dorsal shutdown, you might struggle to work at all while your immune function and healing also suffer.

Sally's work with long-haulers demonstrates that people can maintain meaningful careers and businesses while managing chronic health when they work strategically with their constraints rather than fighting them. This requires accepting your current capacity rather than constantly comparing to your pre-illness abilities, finding work rhythms that match your energy patterns, building in recovery time proactively rather than only resting after crashes, and communicating your needs rather than hiding your health challenges.

The practical wisdom includes recognizing that rest is productive when your health requires it because preventing crashes allows more total work output than pushing through and collapsing. Your business needs your long-term sustainable presence more than short-term heroic efforts. Building systems that can run somewhat independently during your down times protects your business while honoring your health needs.

For people without chronic health issues who work with those who have them, understanding this interconnection helps you support colleagues or employees more effectively. Flexibility and understanding around capacity limitations allows people with chronic health to contribute meaningfully when rigid expectations would force them out of work entirely.

This Episode Is For:

✓ Entrepreneurs and professionals with chronic health challenges 

✓ Anyone with long COVID trying to maintain their career 

✓ People whose health limits their business impact 

✓ Those struggling to balance work demands with health needs 

✓ Managers or colleagues who want to better support people with chronic health 

✓ Anyone wondering if meaningful work is possible with unreliable health

What You'll Learn

Listen to understand how chronic health and work impact each other bidirectionally and what strategies help you keep going when your body is struggling. Discover the most common mistake people make working with their nervous system while managing health. Learn specific approaches for working with long COVID or other chronic conditions that affect your capacity.

Your health and your work constantly influence each other rather than existing as separate domains.

Listen to Episode 79 with Sally Riggs →

Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.

Join the Conversation

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. What resonated with you? What questions came up?

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