Episode 28 Shownotes - Are You Thriving or Just Surviving?

You are listening to Best Life After Cancer, Episode 28!

Hey, my friends! How are you today? I feel like this week I am running around like a crazy person! There is so much going on these last weeks. Work has been a bit crazy – the patient volumes are up, I think lots of people trying to get everything done before the holidays and before Covid worsenes. I was out of town for a week – I turned 50 and my husband and I decided to get away for a breather. The Covid numbers are rising so quickly, so my brain is spinning on what that will mean. But, I try to remind myself – it is all ok. Everything in it’s time. Life will unfold, exactly as it will, and nothing I think or say will change it. I just read a book called “Hollow Kingdom” and there is a quote that life is like the tides – in and out, in and out, like life is up and down, up and down. I thought – how true, and fighting the up and down is like a child trying to hold the tide back from their sandcastle as it washes away more and more with each wave.

I have been thinking a lot about how we live our lives and face our challenges. I wanted to take some time to talk with you about Thriving vs just Surviving. I am seeing this with Covid. People who have put everything on hold, waiting for the pandemic to end. Not doing anything, except watching the news and waiting. I see the same thing for some people after cancer. It is so interesting – for so many people, their only goal is to survive their breast cancer. I have to say, I think this is a shitty goal. On your bucket list – I made it through breast cancer? No. For sure, not a bucket list item. Yeah, I get it. You have to survive first. But, that shouldn’t be it. Never the end goal. The goal should not just be to survive. It should be to thrive. I worry about this for people. In both of these scenarios, if you are just surviving, life can just drift by, with no memories being made, no life really being LIVED. What is the solution to this? Be all in. Create even more than you had before. Not just living in fear that your cancer might come back, but expanding your life and your mind and your time here on this planet. What do I mean by that? Well, in my mind, saying you survived breast cancer is sort of like you survived a dog fight. You end up a mangled, mangy mutt, with an ear with a piece bitten out of it. Yep, you survived, but how much worse for the wear? Is that really the goal you want? I don’t think so.

Or do you want to thrive post cancer? Find the real reason you are put on this planet? What makes you special, unique, perfect? What the world would forever be lacking if you weren’t in it? What? If you said “There isn’t anything that would be lacking?” Then you, my friend, may just be surviving. I have felt recently like there is more meaning in all of this. More that we are meant to learn. More that we are meant to share. More that we are meant to BE. That we all are here to learn certain lessons, and even more than that, to contribute to the world as a whole, and share our unique gifts.

So let’s think about the difference between surviving and thriving. I think surviving is a clinical thing. Your heart is beating. Your lungs are breathing. But is says nothing about your mind and your soul. Your body is able to keep plugging along through the days, but really, you are just living day to day, only doing what you have to do to get by. You eat food, you move around as much as you need to to work and do what has to be done. But people who are just surviving are not committing to understanding all that they can do to decrease their risk, or are not implementing the things they know they should be doing. Just surviving means you are not taking the time and energy to do all that you can to maximize your odds, improve your fear, and create joy. So – let’s identify some of the things that often are going on in just surviving. This might include feeling like you are too tired or worn out to do anything other than just get done what has to be done. Getting through work and laundry, but not much else. I have said this before, but to feel better, you need to work at it, and make it a priority in your life. Getting back to feeling like you did precancer requires getting back to the same level of physical fitness. So, if you are not committing to exercise, then you are just surviving. For some people, that is not possible where you are currently. This doesn’t mean do nothing, it means then committing to PT to get to a point where you have enough fitness to begin a gentle walking regimen. I actually don’t recommend heavy weights or excessive running, because they can increase cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and I believe this often is not the best after a cancer diagnosis. I encourage brisk walking or other activities that raise the heart rate, but are gentle on the body.

Just surviving may mean that you are using alcohol or food to feel better emotionally. It is normal to feel fear after cancer, but using alcohol or food to suppress it is not optimal. Alcohol is known to be a recurrence risk for breast and other cancers. Overeating, gaining weight, or not getting to an optimal BMI also qualifies as not taking all the steps to optimize health and reduce risk. We need to address the fear, not push it down to move from surviving to thriving.

Finally, people who are surviving may be doing things that numb them. They endlessly surf on facebook. They spend hours of distracting games on their phones. They mindlessly eat chips and watch TV, to avoid being present and thinking about life. Again, in this group, fear is keeping them from thriving, and we for SURE should be trying to address it, to free them from that place.

I see many patients like this. They come in, slowly gaining weight visit after visit. They admit they don’t exercise, and when I check back, it seems like they drink more now than before. I ask what they are doing. Going to work, stuff around the house, sometimes seeing family. Not because they don’t have time or money to travel or do things that create memories. They just don’t have the motivation currently. Often, they don’t even realize what they have created, until I start questioning. They are just waiting to feel better, and feeling like they don’t want to make plans until they feel better. I ask them, “what are you doing to feel better?” Surprising how many say, “nothing, really!” If this sounds familiar, I have a free video series on my website that allows you to understand what you can do to improve your odds and your outlook. I had a patient tell me it was the best use of their time to date in moving forwards.

Enough about just surviving . Let’s talk about thriving – so much more fun and interesting. Thriving is about more than just the physical body. For sure, it means learning what you can do and taking steps to support your physical body, but it also means you have to find the WHY of your survival. It is not enough to just BE HERE, with your body using up food, breathing oxygen, and putting nothing back into our world. You have to find a why for being here. What are you creating? If your body is here surviving, and your brain is only in that place, too, just surviving, then what are you adding to the balance of nature? What even is the point of being here????? I have heard this called our overarching WHY. What motivates us to be our best self. Maybe it is to be an example for your children. Maybe it is to be the best grandmother possible for your grandkids. Maybe it is to leave the world a better place for future generations. Maybe it is just to see and experience as much of the world as possible during your time here. All I know for certain – for 98% of us, it isn’t about spending more time at work or playing candy crush. It isn’t living in constant fear of the cancer. And it isn’t just letting the days slip past just “getting by”.

For starters, I’d like to point out some of the characteristics my happiest patients share. First, they know and follow what they need to do to be healthy. They prioritize eating well, exercising and limiting alcohol. It is clear that the patients who make time in their schedules to exercise both feel better, and do better overall. The goal is 150 minutes of mild to moderate exercise per week, but clearly the data shows that any exercise is better than none, and even starting after treatment provides a significant health benefit. They know the statistics and limit their alcohol. For women, it is recommended that you keep your alcohol to 5 drinks per week or less. And the giant balloon wine glasses don’t count for one – it is an 8 oz pour of wine, a shot of hard alcohol or a 12 ounce beer.

I have also seen that doing the work to eat healthy and learn what optimally fuels their bodies has led to a group with more energy, lower body weights, less aches and pains, and less chronic problems. I am a huge believer in figuring out what makes our bodies feel the best, because I think that is also the healthiest for the body. For most people, limiting sugar and carbs might feel like crap in the short term, but over weeks leads to much better energy and sense of wellbeing.

Once they have their physical well being taken care of, patients who are thriving can turn their attention to their mental well being. I want to take a moment to tell about a client, Michelle. When she finished treatment, she realized she was struggling. She was hunting for a way to get a handle on everything – she wasn’t ready to go back to life pretending this all hadn’t happened. She knew she needed more than just the follow ups with the oncologist. She needed a plan to feel better on all fronts. She hunted – not looking for just a blog where everyone is bemoaning their lot in life. Serendipitously, she found this podcast soon after I started it, and through it, the facebook group. She is the one who told me that she had been googling “thriving after cancer”. I loved that so much, I dedicated an entire podcast to the topic, and to her! Ultimately, she joined my first coaching group. But before she had even started the coaching group, she had cut back on the wine that she loved, because she loved herself more. She started walking, because she took to heart the information that she’d feel better quicker if she did, and guess what? Her energy improved! When I invited her to be part of the initial coaching group, she agreed, and has been all in, learning to question the things her brain tells her, finding ways combat her fears. When a complication came up in her journey with her reconstruction, she took it in stride, knowing that she had the tools to face the fear, and move forward, not needing to turn back to food or alcohol for comfort. She had had a mastectomy followed by an implant reconstruction, and there was a degree of scar tissue that limited the implant and made things very uncomfortable. She saw the surgeon, and they offered a flap reconstruction, which would remove the implant and use her tissue to reconstruct it. Understandably upset and worried, we had a moment to talk about this. Her thought initially was that she “HAD” to do this. It was so helpful to her to work through that she didn’t have to do anything. It is a pandemic. She could choose to manage the discomfort, and not have surgery. She could have the implant removed, and go flat, either until after the pandemic or permanently. She could have the flap reconstruction done now, or after the pandemic. Asking her brain what her choices actually were lead to such a feeling of relief and freedom for her. And really recognizing that it was a hassle, but not life threatening also helped to calm her fears so much. I couldn’t be more proud of her, or more grateful that I was able to be on this journey with her.

Today, I want you to ask yourself. Are you just surviving? Or are you thriving? If you know you are just surviving, join the Best Life After Cancer MD facebook group. Get the free video series at my website, Best Life After Cancer. Figure out what you can do to maximize your odds, and then DO IT! If you are thriving, come and join the group to share your secrets of success and be supported by like minded people. Because truth be told, sometimes we all need to be reminded to live mindfully.

As you go about your week this week, I want you to think about this as a function of your whole life. Not just your medical life. If all you do is get up, go to work, spend your time eating food and drinking alcohol, watching TV and playing on your phone, I think in the grand scheme of things, that is just surviving. It is not thriving. What if we start to ask ourselves what is our purpose? What do we want to get out of life? Do we want to put all our focus on work, and then collapse in a chair, shut off our brains and watch TV, day in, day out, for the rest of our time here? I am reading the book by Mo Gawdat called Solve for Happy. He tells how for many people, the last 20 years seem to have passed in a flash – the years seem like weeks. He theorizes that that is because some people actually only have a few weeks a year of really living and making memories. So all the rest of the time they were just surviving, there was nothing their brain wanted to store. That time drifted past, almost unused. I want to share a thought about thriving that I think makes sense in all of our lives. If we found out tomorrow our life was ending in 24 hours, would we look back on the last years and be glad we spent the time the way we did? If we spend the next 10 years worrying and nothing bad happens, how will we feel about those 10 years that withered away while we stressed and worried? If we chose to just live in today, creating connection and joy, no matter if it ends tomorrow or in 20 years, we will look back and think, wow, I am so glad I lived it the way I did. If you are struggling with this, join us. I would love to help you get past fear and thrive.