Will HOPE change my life?
I talk about HOPE often throughout my book and posts. I believe it can help enormously in your cancer journey. As I discussed before, it’s essential to include this tool into your cancer tool box to help you fight this disease. It is one of the tools in your arsenal to use when you’re feeling hopeless. When you’re feeling down and in gloom. When you feel that pain has limited your ability go on. Everyone diagnosed with cancer deserve to not live in fear, but to have HOPE!
What is HOPE?
When I speak of HOPE, it is a mindset of possibility. A desire for positive things to happen to remove despair. To allow light in the dark places of your life and improve your mood knowing things will get better.
- Hope: a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain things to happen
- It’s a simple word and that can mean so much to anyone going through a difficult time. It can mean the difference between holding on and giving up.
- It can mean a slight smile in the face of a devastating diagnosis
- Make a Hope Box to keep you hopeful while fighting this disease
- The Hope Box contains items that serve as visual and tactile reminders of reasons for living.
- For example, patients often use shoe boxes to house pictures of loved ones, letters from friends, inspirational music or poems, and/or prayer cards.
There are many studies that explore a hope mind-set as it relates to cancer patients. They all find that a hopeful outlook gives cancer patients a better quality of life. A National Library of Medicine study cites that, “For patients with cancer, hope is regarded as one of the most important and effective coping style in fighting against the cancer during treatment.”
To mentally get to a place of HOPE several tips must be practiced and employed to help with positivity. Thinking with a positive outlook may not change your lifespan. But it will improve your general outlook and well-being. These practices were covered in other blogs, but I’ll be happy to list them again. Exercises and methods that helped me stay hopeful:
- Practice slow, deep breathing exercises
- Perform meditation and relaxation techniques
- Spend time with pets
- Take a nap
- Enjoy your personal hobbies
- Go out and meet your friends
- Have experiences that will make you laugh, cry or yell out
- Avoid artificial and damaging practices such as using drugs or high levels of alcohol, denying or avoiding your problems, or hurting yourself
- Journaling
You are more Resilient than you think!