Matt Kelly tells newly diagnosed cancer patients to keep journaling and start a daily gratitude practice. Gratitude feels wrong during illness, he says, but it reminds you what's still good and helps your mental health through treatment.
Things such as journaling— many people already do that, and if you are doing it, please don't stop if you, you know, have just gotten your cancer diagnosis or if you're dealing with it. What I find is a lot of these things, avenues that we use for self-care, sometimes you get a bad diagnosis and it's easy for those to go by the wayside. So, journaling can be very, very useful. If you haven't done that, you might look into that. The other thing which you can look up pretty simply on the internet nowadays is to develop a gratitude practice, and it's sometimes a little hard and seems incongruous when you have a cancer diagnosis to be grateful for much of anything, but a gratitude practice really is about reminding yourself every day of what's going right in your life, and that might be one thing or it might be a number of things. We all have things that are still going right even though we may have a very bad diagnosis that we're dealing with.
