5 Tips for Taming Your Fear of Cancer Recurrence

Here are five tips to help you get back in charge when you experience fear of recurrence:

1. Pause and Take a Few Slow, Intentional Breaths

Intentional, slow breathing calms your nervous system and reverses the cell-damaging release of stress hormones that accompanies fearful thoughts. In the pause created by a few breaths, you gain the opportunity to choose where to focus your thoughts, rather than letting them be sucked into the vortex of fear.

2. Come Back to the Present Moment

Practice bringing your full attention to the present moment. A simple way to do this is to become acutely aware of the input of your senses: What can you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste in this moment?

This works because you can’t focus on both the future and the present at the same time. When you’re fearful, your thoughts are preoccupied with possible, future events. Your senses, on the other hand, are completely occupied with the details of the present moment. As you deliberately focus on the present, where everyday life is happening, fear will slip out of the frame of your attention.

3. Create a Regular Gratitude Practice

Notice all the things that are going well today, even in this moment, and feel gratitude for them.Gratitude has the power to displace your fear, because you can’t feel both fear and gratitude in the same moment — it’s one or the other. Gratitude and fear create opposite physiological states: Fear produces stress hormones, while gratitude dials back production of stress hormones and is associated with production of “feel-good” hormones like oxytocin. If you master the ability to generate gratitude at a moment’s notice, you have a powerful tool at your disposal to calm yourself (and your body) should fear arise.

While most of us can readily generate gratitude when things are calm, it can be harder to do once fear has set in. Adopting a short daily gratitude practice — say, writing down five things you’re grateful for before bed each night — makes it far easier to summon gratitude when you need it under a cloud of cancer-related fear.

4. Embrace Preventive Health Practices

You’re not helpless to prevent cancer recurrence. There are many things you can do to create a cancer-resistant body: drink enough pure water, choose nutrient-rich food, engage in regular physical activity, and so many more. Each act of self-care empowers you, improves your physical well-being, and declares, “I love my life and am doing whatever I can to live in high wellness.” When you live by that credo, fear wilts away for lack of attention.

5. Remember That Today Is the Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday…

…and it’s not so scary, is it? Most of what we worry about never happens. Why not spend your energy dreaming about what will go well tomorrow?!

Shani Fox, ND, is an naturopathic physician in Portland, Oregon, who helps cancer survivors reclaim physical and emotional well-being and take steps to prevent cancer recurrence. She is the author of The Cancer Survivor’s Fear First Aid Kit: 5 Simple Steps to Release Your Fear of Cancer Recurrence and has been published in the peer-reviewed Natural Medicine Journal.

Source 5 Tips for Taming Your Fear of Cancer Recurrence