Dealing with fear and stress

Most cancer centres now integrate stress-reduction strategies of different kinds into treatment programmes. Cancer is frightening, and anything that helps you overcome that fear and feel positive even if it’s only in short bursts – is valuable.

While the jury is still out on whether it helps your illness in the longer term, there is good evidence to indicate that reducing anxiety and being positive improves a person’s quality of life. However, as Cancerbackup points out in its booklet Cancer and Complementary Therapies, trying to be positive shouldn’t become a burden. Everyone who has cancer experiences feelings of helplessness at some point and often feels too tired to be positive and show a fighting spirit. It’s important to remember that this doesn’t mean you’re lowering the chances of a good outcome from treatment. If you do feel anxious, depressed or stressed, be sure to talk to your doctor or nurse: there is a range of help available for your emotional needs, including counselling and other ‘talking therapies’, as well as complementary therapies and relaxation techniques.

Simple strategies

• Breathe well

  When we’re anxious, we tend to take shallow breaths without realising it. To counteract this, stand or sit on the floor with feet apart, arms and legs uncrossed and hands loose. Close your eyes, put your tongue lightly behind your top teeth and breathe in slowly through your nose for a count of four, pause for seven, then out through your mouth for eight. Repeat this four to six times at least twice a day. This ‘pranayama’ breathing exercise from the Indian yogic tradition has been proven to have significant health benefits, if it is practised regularly.

• Meditation /visualisation

  Using the same breathing pattern as above, lie or sit comfortably, with your eyes closed, and try to visualise the in-breath as a wave coming up the seashore, hovering at the edge, then slowly ebbing away. You can do this for as long as you wish. Also try visualising a blue sky, or anything else that you find enjoyable and peaceful. Or you can learn one of the many meditation techniques, or practise a form of yoga (for instance, therapeutic iyengar yoga, iyengaryoga.org).

• Give yourself a head and face massage

  a lot of tension is stored in our faces, scalps and necks. Rotate your fingertips gently up your face from your jawline, then back from your hairline – with stronger pressure if you like – until you reach the nape of your neck. Then move down and round your neck, finding any sore or tight places and gently pressing them to release the tension. Exercise This makes your body produce mood-enhancing chemicals – do anything you enjoy, from gardening, walking or dancing, to yoga, riding or swimming.

• Paint

  Sploshing colours on a big piece of paper can help to release emotions. (Or try art therapy classes, tel: 020 7686 4216, baat.org for details.)

• Write it out

  Keep a journal and tell it all the things you can’t say to anyone else.

• Trade talk time with a friend

  The deal is that you get to talk for ten minutes – or longer – without being interrupted. You can ramble, stay silent, be garbled, cry – whatever. Then it’s their turn to talk, while you listen.

• Treat yourself

  – or let others treat you. Just have a nice time.

It’s vital to go to qualified practitioners. The British Complementary Medicine Association (tel: 0845 345 5977, bcma.co.uk), an umbrella organisation, has a national practitioner register which includes the phone numbers of therapists who belong to member organisations of the BCMA . One useful book, written for health professionals and lay readers by a surgeon and doctor with many years’ experience in the field, is Cancer: Herbs in Holistic Health Care by Dr Jo Walker (Amberwood Publishing, available in bookshops and from amazon.co.uk).

It’s vital that, if you do decide to go to complementary practitioners, you keep your medical team fully informed. Everyone who gives you treatment should have the whole picture. At the end of our section called Creating Your Own Resource Book, you will find blueprints for a consent form and integrated healthcare cooperation card (developed for the Poundbury Clinic, Dorchester, by Michael Dooley, FRCO G and Sarah Stacey).

Most doctors now recognise the value of complementary therapies in helping their patients to cope with stress, anxiety and pain. The Royal Marsden NHS Trust offers acupuncture and aromatherapy massage. There are also five NHS homoeopathic hospitals in the UK – in London, Glasgow, Tunbridge Wells, Bristol and Liverpool, some of which run special clinics for people diagnosed with cancer.

• Acupuncture
• Aromatherapy
• Counselling/psychotherapy
• Flower remedies
• Healing
• Homoeopathy
• Herbal medicine
• Hypnotherapy
• Mass age
• Reflexology
• Reiki
• Shiatsu