If breast cancer is making you feel like you’re going crazy, you are not alone. Actually, if you are a breast cancer patient and you aren’t feeling stress, anxiety or depression, you are more likely to be the one who is losing your mind!

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know I write about important issues having to do with problems associated with breast cancer. Since I have never had breast cancer, I am very careful not to describe what it’s like because I have not experienced it myself. What I do know is what it feels like is to be in perfect health one day, and then, find out the next day that I have a serious health problem that may be with me for the rest of my life.

My journey from a healthy person to patient began in late August when I found out I had a large blood clot in my thigh that broke off and went into my lungs. I was in and out of the ICU for three weeks and underwent three emergency surgical procedures. Normally, when I am sick I seek out, and eventually get swallowed up by information on the internet. Some of it I understand but most of which I don’t. This time was different. I think I intuitively knew that reading too much medical information wasn’t going to end well. So, I put my head in the sand and pretended nothing was wrong.

About three weeks later, I tripped over my dog, Oliver. I went flying across the room, landing with all my weight on my knee. My first thought was I was going to get a huge bruise because I was taking blood thinners. To my surprise, the fall was hard enough to break my skin through my pants, but there wasn’t even a hint of a bruise. Panic set in. If the blood thinners were working, shouldn’t I have a gigantic bruise? If I didn’t get a bruise, did it mean the blood thinners weren’t working? If the blood thinners weren’t working, was I at risk for another blood clot? All of a sudden, I realized I had no idea how blood thinners worked much less what might cause me to get another pulmonary embolism.

Awakened from my false sense of security, I reached for my laptop at about 11:00 pm. My obsessive-compulsive internet medical researcher got its mojo. The first thing I learned was that pulmonary emboli kill between 200,000 and 450,000 otherwise healthy people a year in the U.S. The second thing I learned was that I was lucky to be alive. It was now past 3:00 am. I had been on the computer for hours and I was nowhere near ready to fall asleep.

Fortunately for me, and not so fortunate for my doctor, I had an appointment to see him the next day. Armed with a list of a dozen or so questions, I marched into his office and fired away. He answered my questions patiently. The more questions I asked, the more anxious I felt. The reason was obvious. I was trying to pin the doctor down as to exactly how I would feel if another embolism formed in my lung, and how likely it was for it to happen again. My questions were specific. His answers were vague.

Finally, after dancing around some scary stuff, he told me that it was more common than not for patients with pulmonary emboli to need to see a psychotherapist to help them work through their feelings of ongoing stress, anxiety, and depression. He told me it was perfectly normal to freak out when you face a near death experience that has the potential to happen again. It was a lot to absorb, but somehow knowing that my feelings were normal actually made me feel much better. I was no longer alone.

So, I started on a much more productive internet search about some helpful ways to handle the stress, anxiety and depression that accompanies a diagnosis that is not likely to have a predictable beginning, middle, and end. In the process, I found lots of helpful information that I would like to share with you.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do after being diagnosed with breast cancer is to be gentle with yourself. Having breast cancer is stressful and anxiety provoking because it changes every aspect of your life, in many ways, forever. Once you realize your feelings are perfectly normal, it will be much easier to talk about them with family, friends, and even your doctor. Never underestimate how healing it is just to express your fears and insecurities to the important people in your life. They are there to listen and learn. More likely than not, they desperately want to know what to say to you to help be able to support you in ways they would not otherwise understand.

Once you are comfortable talking about having breast cancer with family and friends, the next step might to be to consider joining a support group with a sorority of women in all stages and with all kinds of breast cancer. If you can’t go to meetings in person, check out some of the wonderful online support groups that are available to you almost anytime, day or night.

Sleep

If you haven’t already noticed, stress and anxiety love to visit you just about the time your head hits the pillow. Since a good night’s sleep is an essential part of your recovery, make sure you let your doctors know if you are not getting at least eight hours of sleep at night. For some, all it takes is replacing coffee and alcohol with a glass of warm milk and a predictable bedtime routine. There is a lot of information on the internet with suggestions on how to improve your sleep habits so you can get more high quality shut eye. Chat rooms for recovered insomniacs are another way to learn how to get a good night sleep. Since stress, anxiety, and depression cannot be easily controlled, don’t be afraid to ask your doctor if sleep medication might be appropriate for you. Without enough sleep, you’re more likely to feel stress, anxiety, and depression which, in turn, will slow down your ability to heal.

Meditation

If you haven’t tried it yet, learning to meditate can truly work miracles when it comes to dealing with difficult emotions. If you haven’t tried it before, there is no reason to be intimated. You can meditate anywhere, anytime, and for as long as you like. You don’t have to sit curled up like a pretzel until your bum falls asleep to get its full benefit. I got started by going to youtube.com on my phone and typed in “Guided Meditation.“ There were thousands of choices ranging in time from 10 minutes to several hours. I prefer to lie in bed and meditate for about ten minutes a few times a day. The real beauty of meditation is that once you use deep, rhythmic breathing to learn to relax, you will be able to carry the process with you wherever you go. It becomes a conditioned response for you to use as a resource any time you begin to feel the physical sensation of anxiety circulating throughout your body.

Stay in the present.

After you become adept at meditation, it won’t be long before you will be able to quiet your mind by learning to stay in the present moment. You can’t change the past or predict the future, so why not stay in the present where there are no regrets about what may have happened in the past or fear of what might happen tomorrow, next week or next year. Concentrate on what surrounds you. If you look, beauty is everywhere. While taking a walk, try listening to all the sounds that you normally ignore or block out. Feel the weather on your skin and pay attention to the trees, flowers, and small animals scurrying around. Take a moment to smile at people as they pass by. Watch kids playing with each other or sleeping infants in a stroller. If you stay in the present, I promise much of your stress and anxiety will start to subside.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Finally, if stress and anxiety are impacting the quality of your life, I highly recommend seeing a mental health professional who uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Trying to resolve things that happened in the past in order to figure out what and how you are feeling now is frustrating and generally not productive. CBT focuses on working through real life problems in real time. It can help you change patterns of thinking and behavior that are causing much of your distress.

CBT is a common type of talk therapy to address these issues. Instead of months and months of therapy, CBT often concludes in a matter of weeks. Said simply, CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly, and respond to them in more effective ways.

No therapy will make your breast cancer go away nor will it take away the mental and physical trauma it causes. As I said before, you wouldn’t be human if you were feeling okay after being diagnosed with breast cancer. If you challenge your negative thoughts instead of ignoring them, you can begin to change how you react to them. A simple example might be that every time you think about needing six months of chemotherapy, you have a full blown panic attack. Your heart starts to pound, your palms get sweaty, you feel like your throat is closing up, and you cannot breathe.

For most, there is nothing you can do to make these feelings go away. Using CBT techniques, you will learn how to help yourself refocus your thoughts to only concentrate on one chemo treatment at a time. Broken down into smaller parts, the treatment becomes more psychologically manageable. Your therapist will also help you learn how to distract yourself when similar negative thought patterns continue to arise. She can also teach you relaxation, visualization and meditation techniques to enhance feelings of calm and well being. Usually, you can get a recommendation for a therapist who specializes in treating patients from one of the members of your medical team.

My last suggestion to you is by far the easiest to do. Make sure you give and receive as many hugs and cuddles as you can pack into every day. I don’t know why or how it does it, I just know it works. So take a few deep inhales and exhales. Start learning how to heal yourself by believing, despite everything, we are blessed to live in such a wonderful world.