When Self-Care Meets Strategy: Creating the Perfect Self-Care Plan for Breast Cancer Recovery
So many people who go through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment come out on the other side feeling lost and adrift when all we want to feel is relief.
We get stuck wondering things like, will I ever feel comfortable in my body again, or how do I possibly get started taking care of myself from here?
When you’re unsure what to do next, it’s hard to move forward.
The good news is, you can easily bring order to the chaos by crafting the perfect self-care plan for your recovery and healing.
Today, I’ll show you why STRATEGY is important in self-care and provide 4 components of creating the perfect self-care plan for recovery and healing.
I hope that this will give you a roadmap so you can get started with regaining some control and confidence and making progress towards your short-term and long-term survivorship goals.
What is the perfect self-care plan for breast cancer recovery?
The perfect self-care plan for breast cancer recovery is the one that is unique to you and your needs.
In other words?
There honestly is NO PERFECT plan, but the BEST PLAN is the one that you create for yourself!
Despite many women sharing similar diagnoses, surgeries, and treatments, no two individuals will undergo breast cancer in the same way. You are unique and therefore so is your experience.
Everything from your past experiences and thought patterns to your unique body contributes to how you will assimilate this new chapter into your life moving forward.
It’s easy to want someone else to tell you what to do, especially when you are facing the physical, mental, and emotional side effects that come with breast cancer.
But all the people out there telling you what you SHOULD be doing to take care of your body and mind, may not even know anything about YOU, so how can they tell you what is right for you?
I am going to help you drown out the “shoulds” and find clarity by teaching you how to use strategy to identify your needs and goals along with the activities and practices that will help you achieve them.
Strategy Step #1 - Self-Assessment
Self-assessment is a tool you can use to begin to understand what's going well for you, where you could use some help, and how to prioritize your needs.
It’s really easy to only focus on where you want to be but that sets you up to fall flat when you can’t get there right away and to feel bad about yourself for where you are.
Because before you can get THERE, you have to identify the HERE and NOW of your situation, so that you can make a plan to follow.
Self-Assessment basically has two components:
1. START WHERE YOU ARE:
Try to look at yourself, as you are now, without judgment, expectations, or comparisons to anyone else's experience and start where you are.
Celebrate the areas of your life and healing that are going well (by your standards, not someone else’s!). Acknowledge the areas that could use attention with compassion and reflection.
2. THINK ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO BE:
Think about the areas of your health and healing that you wish were different and look ahead to the progress you would like to see.
Try not to set heavy expectations or timelines right now. Work in baby steps toward your goals and celebrate every step forward and every achievement you accomplish. Seek help from wherever you need it along the way.
Here’s an example:
Maybe before your diagnosis you were a runner and you can’t wait to get back to your daily 3 mile run.
But right now fatigue, muscle atrophy, and weight gain from chemotherapy mean there is no way you can head out on the trail and finish 3 miles without falling over or fainting.
So what can you do? Identify your starting point.
Maybe you can walk a mile. Maybe you can walk around the block. Maybe you can only walk around the house without needing a rest.
You may not like the answer but if you can remove judgment and see it as pieces of a puzzle, you can begin to see the path from point A to point B (and C, and D…).
If your current best is walking around the house then instead of making your first goal the 3 mile run you long to do, try for a walk around the block.
Once you complete that first lap, up your goal to 2 then 3 then 4. Now you're getting closer to walking a mile.
Walked that mile? New starting point, new goal!
You not only are building strength and stamina but you are also building confidence along the way.
The keys to self-assessment are to treat yourself with compassion and to remove judgment as you identify your starting points and give yourself grace in working towards your goals.
And the best part is you can apply the self-assessment step to any area of your life that has been affected by your breast cancer experience (and more!).
Strategy Step #2 - Prioritizing
Odds are that MANY aspects of your life have been impacted by your breast cancer diagnosis.
Prioritizing helps determine the order for dealing with these impacts according to their relative importance.
If you’ve been overhauling the food in your fridge, cleaning up your cleaning products, and maniacally managing the contents of your medicine cabinet but feel like you’re not actually getting anywhere, then prioritizing is likely the piece that’s missing.
Without this, you can end up doing what feels like “all the things” and still not make real progress in any of them.
A really useful technique is to go back to that self-assessment but look at it on a larger scale.
When I’m using self-assessment to evaluate an area of my life, or work towards a goal, I like to use a chart and rate things on a scale of 1 (needs the most improvement) to 5 (things are going the best they can).
By giving each goal or activity a rating I can see how they all stack up against each other.
This can help you make some decisions about what to pursue first.
Say you want to drink more water each day. Currently you give yourself a 3 (based on whatever criteria you apply here) and you’d be happy getting to a 4.
This is likely easier to achieve than going from our example of walking around the house (probably a 1) to running 3 miles every day (5).
By taking on the challenge of slightly increasing your water intake, you are proving to yourself that you can indeed make positive changes in your self-care, AND that increased hydration is likely to help you feel better as you work to increase your physical energy and stamina!
On the other hand, you may have a big goal of increasing the amount and quality of your sleep because you know this will help you feel better in so many ways.
Even if you are at a 1 or 2 and you are eager to get to a 4 or 5, focusing on THIS goal might be the most important thing to you, even if there are easier challenges within reach.
Prioritizing your self-care goals and activities is going to allow you to be more focused and make more progress with less overwhelm instead of trying to change everything about yourself at once.
Wanna see how I use a self-assessment chart to help evaluate my priorities? Keep reading I’ve got you covered!
Strategy Step #3 - Your Values & Interests
Values are basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate you and your actions.
To me, values are like a guidebook when it comes to decision making.
And interests? Well how are you going to stick to any kind of self-care practice if you don’t actually ENJOY it?!
This is how you can really make your self-care plan PERFECT for you by aligning your goals and actions with your unique values and interests.
Here is how I link values and interests to self-care planning:
Identify your values - What’s important to you? What do you feel strongly about?
Identify your interests - What do you enjoy doing with your time? What feels easy?
Then look at the goal in question - How does it align with your values and interests? How can you keep referring back to them as you make progress toward your goals (or use them to modify your goals?)
Here’s a real life story of using values in self-care for breast cancer recovery:
A client of mine was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and booked an “Ask Amy” Virtual Consultation with me to brainstorm self-care ideas.
We discussed the importance of her family (value) - spending time with her husband and young children.
We talked about her views on health and healthcare (value) and her desire to marry conventional treatments with integrative ones as a truly holistic approach to treating the disease as well as caring for her whole being.
She shared with me her love of nature and outdoor activities (interest).
Together we worked to identify some self-care activities and practices that would allow her to stay grounded through the challenges and changes to come with this new diagnosis.
Some of her favorite activities before diagnosis included skiing and rock climbing but her doctors were quick to shut those ideas down because of the possibility of falls and bone fragility.
And while of course she understood the importance of listening to her medical team we also took a closer look at her current physical state and abilities and what she felt comfortable with when it came to adventures.
What if instead of shooshing down a double black diamond she could go cross-country skiing? Or take her sweet son snowshoeing?
What if instead of free climbing the “bouldering” wall at the rock climbing gym, she used an auto-belay or worked with a partner to “top rope” where she was safely and securely strapped in so that she could climb without fear of falling?
I identified local acupuncture and reiki practitioners who had experience with cancer patients so that she could add these practices alongside her chemotherapy or immunotherapy regimens as appropriate.
All of these ideas combined various elements of her values (family and holistic healing) and her interests (nature and outdoor activities) ensuring that whatever she tried would feel aligned with who she is as a person and keep her motivated and enjoying her self-care!
Are you starting to see how this all comes together?
Strategy Step #4 - Your Budget
One element that is often overlooked, or at the very least an afterthought, when it comes to self-care planning is budget.
I think it’s critical to include budget as a piece of your self-care strategy because it is another tool that helps you prioritize what to work on and how to engage in self-care.
If money is not unlimited in your life (which is the case for most of us) then that means you might have to make choices around where to spend your money (or not) for an individual or multiple practices.
The good news is that there are typically options for almost any budget!
Take yoga as an example. I have found yoga classes in the following formats ranging from free to almost $100 per session. This can look like:
You tube videos or online Instagram classes
In-person yoga classes through you cancer or community center
Online class subscriptions and memberships
“Pay what you wish” or “drop in” rates for in-person classes
Small group workshop series
Private one to one lessons with a yoga instructor or yoga therapist
I am not one to say that any of these is a better option than another because even if you can afford a private lesson you may prefer the ease of something online that happens to be free!
The point is to make sure you don’t limit your belief of what you can accomplish based on your budget, big or small.
It’s simply another piece of the puzzle that helps you identify and create your self-care plan.
Putting it All Together for Your “Perfect” Self-Care Plan
There you have it! Four strategy steps to help you create your ideal self-care plan.
It may sound like a lot, but like most things, sometimes getting started is the hardest part.
The best way to start is to pick ONE thing that you want to work on in your recovery and survivorship and begin with the self-assessment step.
From there you might find that things come together pretty quickly!
What’s next? Download my FREE Breast Cancer Recovery “Self-Assessment Guide”
If you need help getting started, my Breast Cancer Recovery Self-Assessment Guide will help you you with the first step of your self-care strategy so you can begin make progress towards your recovery and survivorship goals!
Click here to download your Breast Cancer Recovery Self-Assessment Guide now >>>
I hope this post has been helpful!
Any questions? Comment below or shoot me a DM on Instagram and don’t forget to check out my previous posts here on The Sunday Self-Care Chronicles!
NOTE: The Sunday Self-Care Chronicles and all content written for Amy Hartl, LMT and As We Are Now LLC is written from my perspective as a cis-gendered white woman. Because this is my lived experience and what I know and can speak to, and because MOST people diagnosed with breast cancer are assigned female at birth (AFAB), I often use terms like “she, her, woman, etc..” However I recognize that breast cancer does not discriminate by race, by gender assignment or expression, or any other label or identifier that we use in our society. Therefore, this space, my free content, and my online services are all available to you, whoever you are, if you are living with a breast cancer experience.
I am also well aware that many people who are diagnosed with breast cancer will never see an end to treatment. For those still living with breast cancer, especially metastatic breast cancer, life “after” or “beyond” breast cancer may refer to diagnosis vs. an end to treatment but I use this language interchangeably and invite you to apply it how you will to your personal experience.
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