Overcoming the Stress of Blood Cancer

If you are dealing with blood cancer either as a patient or caregiver, there is a good chance you are well acquainted with something called stress. The bad news for all is that sustained stress dumps buckets of potent fight-or-flight chemicals into your body. Over time, this powerful cocktail will do significant damage to things like your heart, brain, lungs, and more.

Reducing stress's long-term harm

Being concerned over the potential harm that my newfound stress might cause, I searched for ways to reduce stress levels dramatically. Candidly, I lost count of the many posts and articles that suggested exercising, listening to music, taking walks in nature, doing stress breathing, and more.

While the advice was well-intentioned, and well-meaning,  I realized that managing my stress over this cancer and its many ensuing treatments was going to take a lot more than a relaxing walk in nature.

Adjusting my attitude

I decided on a total attitude adjustment after realizing my attitudes were not based on what was happening to me. Rather, it was all about how I was dealing with what was happening to me, and that was a significant difference. If you stop and think about it, everything, we do comes back to our attitudes, be it a treatment, a task, an event, or situation.

When I had a positive attitude not only did, I get more done, it also felt easier. On the flip side when my attitude was negative, it took me  a lot longer to finish and required a lot more energy done. All of which created more stress.

The circle of reinforcing emotions

I soon  realized it  was an emotional circle. Attitudes create expectations and experiences. In turn those experiences create reactions and actions which all of which fall back on themselves. It finally dawned on me. Unless I did something to change my down-in-the-dumps attitudes, the same negative pattern would simply repeat  over and over. The more I reinforced my negatives attitudes the more negativity came back at me.

At one point I hit bottom and had to find a way to break the downward cycle. The key it turned out was to write down what I called my “chain breakers.”  I reasoned the mental chains could not be broken just by thinking happy positive thoughts about my attitude. I needed some form of physical action.

Needing more than happy thoughts

Here are some of things that helped me:

• I actively sought out positive people, believing being around positive people would make my life and living easier.·
•  I realized how I saw things also had a lot to do with how other people related to me. So, sending positive vibes from me just might attract positive back, much like a magnet attracting iron and steel.·
• I embraced what is called the “high expectancy theory.”  It says if you expect good things to happen good things often happen. The reverse also happens. I put a damper on the negative  side.
• My crisis cycle was also causing me a lot of stress. The cycle happens whenever I waited until the absolute last minute to  do something. I decided to be proactive when facing tasks and make things happen vs waiting for the stress of putting things off hit me.
•  I  looked for things in life that worked easily for me and spent more time doing them like writing and speaking  As I did those happy things, other things got a lot better.·
•  Whenever I watched the news, or read the paper and more, I would write down the many things I had no control over. I also included reactions to my medical treatments. The next step was to pro-actively isolate myself from the negative things that were not under my control. In short, I did not let uncontrollable things camp out in the back of my head.

I believe we can overcome some of the many stresses cancer and its treatments can bestow but only if we can take a few minutes out of each day to reexamine our attitudes and the critical role they often play in our life journey.