Breast cancer is a personal and unique experience, one that is often filled with many emotional and psychological challenges such as doubt, shock, anger, guilt, insecurities and indecisiveness. How best to cope depends a lot on your personality type.

With each decisive step, you will discover who you are and explore who you want to be in relation to the disease process. Empower yourself by asking questions and seeking the support you need. Below are some of the reasons to enlist help:

• Difficulty in overcoming feelings of hopelessness and helplessness
• Finding it difficult to cope with intense emotions and feelings – anxiety, depression or fear
• Coping with the physical and emotional challenges that are negatively impacting on your relationships, social life or career.
• Feeling overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings, unable to focus, remember details or sleep.

Coping with the Stress Response

The diagnosis of cancer can be a crisis. Your responses are caused by the stress of diagnosis and are modulated by many factors including medical, psychological and interpersonal.

Stress can be understood as a result of an interaction between you and your environment. Nothing is stressful unless you interpret it as such. 

A stressor can be any event, situation, a person or object that you perceive stressful and that you have difficulty in coping with. For example, you might complain of anxiety or depression when you perceive a future event to be stressful. 

Usually when you perceive a situation is controllable, it forms an important part of your sense of competence and coping. What is possible is to change your perceptions from negative to positive in order to reduce negative stress so that it does not drag you down and cause unhealthy physical, psychological or behavioural reactions. 

Everything must have a beginning. Take the initial step to turn your negative stress into positive stress. You have remarkable powers of self-healing. Don’t leave them untapped. You have to believe in yourself. A good beginning makes a good ending.


Tips for dealing with emotional upheaval

• Identify your emotional concerns. Be as honest as you can. This can be a difficult process.
• Seek advice and professional assistance
• Try visualisation
• Set goals the SMART way – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and within a Time frame.
• Have a spiritual time daily. Going through inspiring or spiritual reading, praying, listening to music promotes peace and calmness with yourself.
• Indulge in the hobbies that you never had time for previously
• Think of your treatment as Me-time
• Try keeping a journal, recording all those fleeting ideas
• Practise muscle-relaxation techniques
• Get seven to eight hours sleep per night