Sharing Your Wisdom Helps You!

http://shareyourwisdom.cancer.im/

Sharing Helps You

A wonderful fringe benefit of sharing your wisdom is that while helping others you are also helping yourself.  If you have completed your cancer treatments and been told your cancer is in remission, you have entered a new phase of your life: that of cancer survivor.  Many survivors report that it can be as difficult living “post-treatment” as it was going through the cancer treatment process itself.  The stress of the process can take a long time to diminish, and many cancer survivors find that they must “keep their guard up” lest they lose their optimism. 

Many around you may feel that your “struggle” is now over, and that life can return to normal.  Others, even within your support network, need to be reminded that life can never truly go back to normal for you.  As one cancer survivor put it:

“You’ve tasted the uncertainty that everybody lives with anyway. You’ve tasted your own mortality and that does put you on a different plane . . . Most people live their lives as though they’re going to live forever .” (Discordant feelings in the lifeworld of cancer survivors  Heather Mackenzie and Mira Crouch Health: an Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine). 

Research has shown that one of the healthiest ways to deal with this new phase of life is by sharing your experience, your wisdom, with others.  One study showed that using expressive writing, for example, to share your experience and most importantly your “feelings” about your experience can significantly impact your post-treatment health.  Some of them showed “significantly reduced physical symptoms” and made fewer follow-up appointments to deal with cancer-related effects than those who didn’t express their thoughts and feelings about their experience.  Another study of patients with metastatic renalcell carcinoma found that those who expressed their thoughts and feelings in writing reported better sleep patterns and improved daytime functioning than those who did not.  Evidence-Based Health Outcomes of Expressive Writing  Sala Horowitz, Alternative and Complementary Therapies, August 2008)