lifeaftercancer

Relationships after a cancer diagnosis

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, once you receive a cancer diagnosis, your life is changed forever. One of the biggest areas that may change is relationships:

Relationships with your partner, with your friends and family, and quite often – the relationship you have with yourself.

Close relationships

So first of all, thinking about your intimate relationship with your partner, whether you're in a marriage, or you've got a close relationsh…

Sleep

Why do we need sleep? Why is it so important for us? Does it really matter if you don't get enough sleep, surely you can just catch up later?

Creating the right environment for your best sleep.

I'm going to suggest to you things have worked for me, but we're all different. So you pick and choose what works for you. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to invite you to think about the things that you're doing and whether they are serving you well. And the last thing is just som…

Is your job making you sick?

Not in a physical sense, unless your job is manual and hurting your body, I'm thinking about our mindset and how we feel about work.

So what can you do if you feel that you're stressed? What can you do if you feel that your job is not helping you, or actually making you sick?

Unfortunately this is all too common in my experience.

My work history, like a lot of people is that I fell into a finance job when I was very young, I found that I was good at it and quite …

3 Key Nutrition Principles

What is a healthy diet? It seems that are a myriad of new theories about what is best.

Keto, vegan, low fat, low calorie, high fibre,  Intermittent Fasting, TRE (Time restricted eating) – I’ve seen online articles about all of these in the last few days alone.

So how do you know which is best?

As always, I'm not going to tell you what you must do and what you mustn't do. I'm going to invite you to think about your nutrition. Is it serving your health goals? And if …

‘Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess’ 

I loved that song as a child, but back then I didn’t appreciate just how elusive happiness could be, both for me as an adult, and for so many people.

Most of us aspire to be happy and I have been thinking about why is it that some people just seem to go through life very happy, and some people don't?

What can we do about happiness? Is this something that we can create? Is it just something it's outside of our control if bad things …

The biggest issue that many cancer survivors face is Fear. And for some people that fear gets worse, and more life limiting after treatment has finished.

What can we do about that ?  Is it just something you have to accept ? That it's just the way life's going to be now after your treatment is finished?

A huge issue for a lot of people is fear of checkups and ‘scanxiety’, the crippling fear of going for scans, waiting for the results and not knowing if you are going to get bad news again.

So …

Self-love. That's a phrase that triggers a lot of people.

What is self-love ? Why is it important that you heal the relationship with yourself? Why is self-love so difficult for all of us?

The concept of self love is something that I've only recently learned, just how important it is to love and accept yourself. And I've come to realize that most people I meet don't even like themselves, never mind love themselves. And before we can talk about healing or changing anything in our life, we nee…

What's for dinner tonight? - That question used to drive me crazy - if my son or husband asked - in all innocence, I could feel my blood pressure and stress levels rising.

One of the most time consuming things can be deciding what to eat, espcially when you are following a healthy eating plan.

Thinking about food, planning meals, grocery shopping, preparing and cooking meals  - it all adds to 'mental overload' in a busy life - it's easy to become overwhelmed if you don't plan ahead.

One thing…

Is positive thinking enough to get you through a cancer diagnosis and through the treatment afterwards?

How is it possible to be positive when you feel bad?

When you've had that diagnosis that tells you that you've had cancer and quite possibly you may be going to die, how can you be really positive about that? I think it's a lot more than positive mental attitude that is going to get you through this.

The sad fact is we're all going to die sooner or later. Something we don’t like to think …

Stress

Why does stress make us ill? Is it true that stress causes cancer?

How can we manage stress?

Is it possible to avoid it altogether or can we make it manageable in our lives rather than letting it take over everything?

It seems to many people that stress is everywhere. It seems for a lot of people that stress is just ‘part of life’. We've almost become to expect that there's nothing that you can do about it. But is that true? I'd like to think about why we get stressed and what that …