Your body and your mind are best friends.
Like peanut butter and jelly, spaghetti and meatballs and macaroni and cheese; some things are just better together!
What do I mean when I say your mind and body are best friends?
Look at it this way
Sure, it is easy for your mind to read these letters, words and sentences, but once upon a time, you had to put in a lot of work and training to get your mind to make sense of these letters and to understand what they mean. Your body learned to walk well before you could run and with both of them, you had to practice these skills to master them. You even needed help, right? Parents helped you learn to walk and teachers helped you learn to read. During this learning, your mind was processing and working to make sense of these new skills, working together with your body. Here you are today, so good at reading and running you don’t even have to think about it, it just became a part of YOU! Your body and your mind figured out how to work well together for these tasks.
Now, cancer has come crashing into your life.
To help you understand and cope with this traumatic life event, now more than ever you need both your mind and body to work together. When you were diagnosed with cancer your medical team sprang into action and got to work right away to make your body better. Your doctor decided what treatment plan is right for you and what chemo’s or radiation are needed to attack the cancer.
In fact, your body often is the main focus of attention and that means unfortunately, the other half of the friendship, your mind, can feel left out. But let’s face it, hearing the words you have cancer is like a bomb exploding right next to you! How can you even make sense of it or know what to feel? There are no right or wrong feelings to have. You may have no idea what to tell your brain, which is totally normal, when you have a million thoughts and emotions flying through it! Remember, you are not in a normal situation anymore!
So how do you turn the pain into power?
Unfortunately, many teens and young adults think asking for help to understand what their mind is thinking and feeling is a sign of weakness. That to beat cancer you need to be strong. But, think about this… many times in your life, you accepted help and didn’t think twice about it or feel bad asking for it. Learn Algebra by yourself? Don’t think so! Make sense of Shakespeare? Not without a teacher explaining it, that’s for sure! Driving a car? Not without a lesson first!
All these normal skills needed help. And dealing with cancer is anything but a normal life skill. Right now is the time to consider learning ways to harness the power of your brain. So why not ask for some help? There are many forms of help out there, you just need to find one that fits your personality and what you are interested in.
Your brain, after all is one of the most powerful organs in your body, so let’s teach it some new wellness tools that can help you cope with that stress that a cancer diagnosis brings.
