By Readers of The Sun Magazine — 2003
I live in a culture that’s only too eager to court my vanity.
Read on www.thesunmagazine.org
CLEAR ALL
72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly affected by mental health issues compared to just 48% of non entrepreneurs.
The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.
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Understanding the patterns of reaction to a prolonged illness with perhaps years of remission and a significant chance of being cured will help you put your emotional survival in focus while your doctor concentrates on your physical survival.
After treatment ends, one of the most common concerns survivors have is that the cancer will come back. The fear of recurrence is very real and entirely normal. Although you cannot control whether the cancer returns, you can control how much the fear of recurrence affects your life.
It wasn’t until I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from my urologist who informed me that I had prostate cancer that I started to panic. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying. He then ticked off a list of things I had to do.
Just as cancer affects your physical health, it can bring up a wide range of feelings you’re not used to dealing with. It can also make existing feelings seem more intense. They may change daily, hourly, or even minute to minute.
Many people living with cancer experience anger. Often, the feeling arises when receiving a cancer diagnosis. But it can develop any time throughout treatment and survivorship.
Body acceptance in our culture is a tall order even on the best of days, but it becomes even more complicated when we are in pain, or disabled, or have limitations that are affecting our quality of life.
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Most of us struggle at one time or another with an inability to feel what’s going on inside us at the level of emotion and energy flow. The technical term for this problem is “alexithymia.”
In McLaren’s view, we typically perceive emotions as problems, which we then thoughtlessly express or repress. She advocates a more mindful approach, where we step back and see our emotions as sources of information.