For women who have experienced breast cancer, the anxiety and fear that follow treatment about their cancer coming back (known as fear of recurrence) is very real. Fear of recurrence affects between 40% and 70% of people who have had cancer to the point where it causes them significant challenges in their day-to-day life.
For many women, this fear may be triggered by upcoming routine scans and check ups, or the onset of new physical symptoms such as a lump or pain somewhere in the body. This neural pathway may be so ingrained that the smallest change in your body may cause your mind to leap to the worst case scenario in a heartbeat because the emotional distress you suffered through your cancer experience was so awful that your mind is permanently on high alert to raise the alarm.
For some women the fear about cancer returning is more than being hypervigilant about their physical health and can affect their emotional health even years after diagnosis. I describe it as a sort of white noise that’s always there in the background and the degree to which it impacts my life depends on how much I tune into it. Most days I’m busy with work and family responsibilities and I don’t have time to pay my fear much attention so it doesn’t get the fuel it needs to thrive and overpower me. But on days that I am tired or feeling flat, the white noise creeps to the fore and my fear can turn into something visceral and linger for days. When I’m in one of these cycles I feel the fear from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall sleep. Simple things like tucking my children into bed at night spark flashes of them growing up without me as the narrative in my mind continues to reinforce my fear of cancer coming back.
The experience of breast cancer brings you face to face with your own mortality. It causes you to attach so tightly to your life, to the people you love, to your dreams and plans you’ve yet to realise. You may become afraid of leaving loved ones behind and not experiencing all that you thought you would in life and paradoxically, you are unable feel joy and fullness of life because you’re living in a constant state of fear.
How yoga can help you to manage fear of recurrence
It’s important to recognise that it may not be possible to overcome fear of cancer returning completely, but that you can explore it and learn to manage it so that you can live your best life. The first step is to become consciously aware that you’re anxious about cancer returning. At some point it becomes impossible to ignore the ferocity of your emotions and it is crucial that you allow yourself the space to sit with them.
I initially started yoga to assist my physical recovery following mastectomy and reconstruction surgery. However it wasn’t long before I was practicing regularly because I felt better emotionally, yoga instilled a sense of calm and optimism. So how does yoga do this?
Physical poses (asana)
You may wonder how the physical practice of yoga can help reduce the fear of recurrence. Physical poses force you to focus the mind and become present. When you’re trying to balance in Tree pose or Warrior 3 for example, the mind must become still to concentrate on a single point to maintain balance, and whilst it’s doing this it can’t simultaneously worry about cancer coming back. A physical yoga practice is mindfulness in motion, helping to cultivate present moment awareness, instead of living in the future, anxious and fearful of what it might bring. As Eckhart Tolle teaches we must realise deeply that the present moment is all we every really have.
Meditation
In a study of 247 women diagnosed at 50 or younger with early-stage breast cancer mindfulness meditation was shown to significantly reduce depressive symptoms as well as decrease fatigue severity, sleep disturbance, and hot flashes that persisted over the 6-month follow-up, compared to women who received survivorship education and control groups. Meditation is a portal to the present moment, where fear about the future, and worries about the past cease to plague the mind, allowing a sense of calm and peace to prevail. It is not difficult to practice, yet the rewards are far reaching and potentially life-changing.
Breathing Techniques
An important part of yoga is pranayama, or breathing techniques. Prana means life force and Ayama translates as “to extend or draw out.” Together, the two mean breath extension or control. Pranayama uses techniques to control of the breath to expand vital life force energy. Pranayama helps to steady the mind and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, helping to reduce physiological symptoms of anxiety. In breast cancer patients, practising pranayama twice a day, for 6 weeks during radiotherapy treatment experienced a significant decrease in cancer-related fatigue scores compared to the control group. Further, for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, pranayama practice has been shown to improve chemotherapy-associated symptoms and quality of life.
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