When you’re wide awake at 3:00 in the morning after spending too much time googling your diagnosis and treatment options, your anxiety is dialed up to eleven, and there’s no one to talk to, pull out your journal – or even just a piece of paper and a pen. Adding a cancer diagnosis on top of our already complex and stressful lives can be overwhelming. Your head spins with everything you need to do and manage, all the changes and complexities, everything you’re worried about. It’s amazing how a few minutes of writing each day can help take your anxiety down a notch or two. Below are two simple writing exercises that can help you cope with anxiety:

Journal Exercise #1 – Mindful Writing

Set a timer for ten minutes (timers help to put boundaries around writing exercises, and let you know when to stop), pick up your pen, and start describing the space you are in right now. Describe the room without judgment. You don’t see a mess of laundry on the couch, you see shirts and pants tangled together with red stripes and white terry cloth towels and dark blue denim jeans. The mess of wrappers on the floor could be described as half-inside-out, with the white inside obscuring part of the orange wrapper. Get as specific and detailed as you can about describing each item you see without being judgmental.

As you are describing the room, keep your ears open. Listen for any sounds nearby and those far away. Describe the hum of the refrigerator, the tinkling sound of the aquarium, the car off in the distance, or someone snoring in the other room. 

Where are you sitting? How does the couch or chair feel underneath you? What textures do you feel? How does the floor feel under your feet?  Write until the timer goes off.

The purpose of this exercise is to pull you away from your spinning brain and center you more in your body, right here, right now. After ten minutes of deeply diving into observation mode, you might find that you end this exercise feeling much less stressed than you were when you started. This kind of mindfulness activity can be helpful when you’re feeling anxious, especially if you don’t have anyone to talk to at the moment.

Journal Exercise #2 – Brain Dump

To do a brain dump, set your timer for 10 minutes. Now start writing. Write everything that pops into your head. No editing, don’t worry about spelling or punctuation. Just write without letting your pen stop. Don’t stop to read. Don’t stop to think. If you run out of things to write, write “I don’t know what to write” over and over again until something else pops into your head. Keep your pen moving until the timer goes off.

Once you’ve completed the exercise, you can go back and read it. Figure out what you need to do and pull out some action items. You might even discover a new perspective on something. I always find something that surprises me after a brain dump. I carry stuff around in my brain that I don’t think about consciously, but they show up in the brain dumps.

There are many ways journaling can help you manage your life, along with the stress and anxiety. Even if you’ve tried journaling before, trying different exercises, or even trying it again at a different point in your life can make a difference. Cancer Lifeline offers many classes on writing and creative expression. Check out the calendar and register for a class today.

Judy Schwartz Haley is a cancer survivor and health and wellness writer with a passion for helping people understand and live well despite complex diagnoses. Judy also teaches writing and creative expression classes to groups and individuals. She can be found online at CoffeeJitters.net