Britta Aragon is a cancer survivor and the founder of Cinco Vidas, Inc. She wrote “When Cancer Hits: Your Complete Guide to Taking Care of YOU Through Treatment.”

Photo courtesy of johanlb

I was scheduled to go through radiation as well, but after five months of losing my hair and suffering extra dry skin

and fatigue, tests showed the chemotherapy had done its job, and I didn’t have to go through radiation.

It’s Over, Right?

I didn’t have to go to chemotherapy treatments anymore. My hair started growing back (though more slowly than I would have liked). My energy gradually returned. But I felt guilty, because for me, cancer was anything but over.

Everyone expected me to be my “old self” again, or maybe to be bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. After all, I had gone through cancer, and I had beaten it. I was healthy. No more cancer. Yea, Britta! I was expected to smile and laugh throughout the day. But I just couldn’t do it.

Nothing was the same for me, or would ever be the same. How was I supposed to go back to school and think about volleyball games, Friday nights out, homework, and boys? Cancer had changed me.

I looked different. I felt different. Why had this happened to me, I wondered? And what was I supposed to do now? Everywhere I turned, people expected me to be “normal.” My parents even lost patience with my melancholy. “It’s over,” they said. “Time to move on.”

But how was I supposed to do that? I felt lost.

Post Traumatic Stress and Depression

Years later, I learned that what I was going through back then was completely normal, although I wish I had known that at the time. I thought something was wrong with me, and I’ve since talked to many other survivors who felt the same way.

Fortunately, modern medicine is starting to recognize what many doctors and therapists are now calling “post traumatic stress and depression.”

Similar to victims of a violent crime, cancer survivors go through a difficult period after the treatments are over. Many of us feel depressed, or out of sorts. We struggle to make sense of what happened to us.

While we’re fighting the battle, taking our medications, wearing our wigs and puking up our guts, we have little time to reflect. When it’s all over, however, we have to process the experience, and unfortunately, only few of us allow ourselves the time and space to do so.

Get All the Help You Can

Make no mistake, cancer changes us. It changes our entire world, and our sense of ourselves. We often feel out of control, and have no idea how to reestablish a sense of mastery over our days.

We have all these feelings: anger, resentment, confusion, fear, anxiety, sadness that we don’t know what to do with. Many of us find our bodies permanently changed, and we suffer grief over our losses. Meanwhile we don’t even know where to begin with our emotions.

I never attended a support group, linked up with other survivors, or talked to a therapist. Today, I encourage survivors to do all these things and more. If you don’t, you might end up finding unhealthy ways of coping. For me, it was food. I realized I could control what I ate, so I quickly fell into an eating disorder that took me another several years to conquer.

It’s much better to get the help you need as soon as you can. Following are several tips for how to cope with cancer once it’s over, for it’s not really over until you can process the experience, move through your feelings about it, and become the new person you’re meant to be.

• See a counselor or psychiatrist. Make sure the individual specializes in cancer survivors. Many medical centers and cancer centers offer survivor programs for free or at a reduced rate.
• Attend a survivors support group. Many cancer centers can give you access to area groups. Be willing to listen and share. People who’ve traveled the same road will be more likely to understand where you’re coming from.
• Consider an online support group. Though I believe that an in-person support group is paramount, an online support group can also offer assistance and a place to share feelings, particularly if you feel like ranting at 3:00 in the morning. Try Planet Cancer and Cancer Compass, among others.
• Get your feelings out. Many survivors journal or blog to make sense of their experience. You may want to try art or music therapy, long walks, talks with a good friend, or time away.
• Read the good books. Picking up the Pieces is a very helpful book for the new cancer survivor. I’ve also written a book that talks about all facets of the cancer experience, called When Cancer Hits.
• Realize it takes time. You’re not going to be able to process your experience in a week. Be patient with yourself. When the feelings come up, try to deal with them in a healthy way, and be proactive about your own self-care. Your family, friends, and colleagues might not understand, so take it upon yourself to get the help you need.

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This is a guest post by Elaine Hirsch. Elaine is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and video games. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead.
In addition to enhancing our job productivity and allowing us to have access to social networks on-the-go,

smartphones and tablets can also help us to improve our mental well-being and become more content and self-actualized.

It’s not really that surprising that self-help applications are becoming more popular than ever as buying apps from iTunes and the Android Market become increasingly available to professionals, academics, and master’s degree students. These applications help balance out the power of electronics today and their ability to distract us from our responsibilities.

MyThoughts+

Getting work done while you’re down in the dumps is a hard task to accomplish. Many people swear by the power of positive thinking. Noted cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, credits his uncanny ability to devise hilarious comic strips with his positive attitude.

MyThoughts+ displays positive affirmations on a customizable background, transitioning from one quote to the next while playing soothing music in the background. If you can’t afford a mountain retreat to the Himalayas, MyThoughts+ just might be the next best thing.

LiveHappy

One of the best ways to accomplish any goal or complete any task is to break it down into manageable, bite-sized pieces. LiveHappy is an application which helps cultivate optimism in your daily activities.

Based on the book, The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky, LiveHappy helps you to keep track of your personal progress as you work towards obtaining inner peace. It features a built-in personality test as well as plenty of tips and tricks on conceptualizing a happier you.

iStress

Not only is stress a detriment to your daily well-being, it is a contributing risk factor in illnesses ranging from heart attacks to strokes. iStress is a comprehensive stress management application which features a number of helpful exercises aimed at reducing stress and encouraging positive thinking.

It includes a compendium of motivational sayings and affirmations to help you reduce your stress levels when you feel overwhelmed. It also allows you to keep a journal of positive or negative thoughts and emotions so that you can identify stress triggers and avoid them in the future.

Gratitude Journal

Brought to you by the good people at Happy Tapper, Gratitude Journal is a fun way to give thanks for what you’ve got. Too often in life, we focus on the negative and completely forget about all the positive things that happen to us. Gratitude Journal gives you an easy way to keep a log of what you’re thankful for that you can turn to when you’re down.

The Habit Factor

Most of us are creatures of habit. We tend to perform at our best when we incorporate positive habits into our daily routine. The Habit Factor is a tracking app that allows you to set goals and commit to forming good habits.

You can use the application to monitor your adherence to your resolutions and check them off as you accomplish them. If you’re trying to form good habits in your personal and professional life and stick to them, it helps to have a constant reminder like the one The Habit Factor provides.

In Conclusion

We’ve often been told by self-help authorities that happiness comes from within. Despite being a cliché, the sentiment remains true. Getting your house in order has a lot of direct and indirect benefits. Happy people are more successful, tend to earn more, and have better relationships with those around them in general.

The best way to get to that happy place is to help yourself. After all, nobody in the world understands what makes you happy better than yourself. The applications listed above should help you in taking the first step towards achieving happiness.

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This is a guest post by Evette Gardner. Evette is the author of “21 Days to a Changed Life”, Kindle Edition, “Breaking the Language Barrier: Learning to Interpret Your Dreams” and other spirituality topic eBooks. Her website, YourDivineInheritance.com, is dedicated to exploring the concept of non-duality (the idea that fundamentally all is one) as a catalyst for spiritual awakening. She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

image courtesy of nayand

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This is a guest post by Jack Lundee of Everything Left and Shades of Green.A leader usually has the ability to influence and change his environment, circumstances and even other people.

By being a leader you’re taking control over your life and you’ve the opportunity to accomplish wonderful things like:

peace between countries as a politician or a fortune 500 company as an entrepreneur.

What constitutes somebody as a leader?

Well according to Google’s definition: “The Person who leads or commands a group, organization or country.” However, I believe a leader to be somebody who practices integrity, or abides by a few simple ethical principles. Likewise, I would consider a leader to be somebody who’s enlightened. Here’s why:

Somebody that constantly follows a set of moral life rules will eventually fall into a leadership position, whether it is for an instance in time or many years. Possessing integrity means that you are prone to entertain things like manners, respect, honesty and commitment.

However all of these traits can’t successfully be achieved without having a rational and well-informed outlook on life, which also works in accordance with your perception of the things around you.

So, if integrity is dependent on enlightenment, or a rational outlook on life, and enlightenment is dependent on your thought process as a human being, then it stems back to beliefs and behavior.

You see, in order to reach a certain level of respect for others and yourself, you must always remember to address your surroundings and relationships in a positive light. In other words, having the clear understanding that morality is important in exercising each and every life situation will lead you on a more righteous path.

Being an enlightened leader

A great example of an enlightened leader (and not to sound cliche) would be the former President, Clinton. Alongside close confident Doug Band, Clinton has achieved some wonderful things and created some groundbreaking organizations like the Clinton Global Initiative.

Founded in 2005, the collaborative unit of world leaders, nonprofits and business professionals tackled some of the world’s most pressing issues including poverty alleviation, educational development, climate change and more.

Clinton and Band were able to see a world in need of desperate help in the areas listed above. Through their strong believes and ideas, they provide commitments to action which continue to earn them respect and integrity.

Nonetheless, they yield traits of enlightened leaders, which is why they’re both great models for helping us appreciate the connection between integrity, leadership and enlightenment. As long as you’re utilizing a bit of common sense, the three will always fall into place, and eventually lead you to an ethical, successful and happy life.

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