End of Treatment

The end of your cancer treatment is over but you may still feel mentally and physically unprepared to join the ‘normal’ world.

This may lead you to experience increased anxiety, stress, and low mood. This aims to outline some coping techniques that can help you to get back on to the right path.

There are links between how you feel physically and how you feel mentally and vice versa. For instance, if you are feeling physically unwell, you may find yourself more short-tempered or more easily upset than you would be normally.

Similarly, if you are very worried about something you may find that you are more prone to headaches or muscular tension than you would be normally.

Therefore, at times when we are feeling physically ‘under the weather’, it is important not to neglect our emotional or mental wellbeing, and to ensure that we do things to help us feel emotionally better.

At times of illness it is easy to forget about looking after our mental wellbeing although, in many ways, this is one of the times we need to think about it the most.

Recent research suggests that as many as three-quarters of people with cancer experience anxiety as a result of their cancer diagnosis and nearly half experience low mood or depression.

This is an extremely natural reaction to have in times of increased stress, and these feelings are likely to lessen and go away completely with time, but there are many ways that the symptoms that you are experiencing can be helped, it is important that you discuss these concerns with a health practitioner.