FINDING POSITIVITY – THROUGH ROUTINE

Striving to find something ‘positive’ when navigating the many mood swings through cancer, is a recurring theme that threads throughout my book ‘See the Colour in the Clouds’.

It’s hard to stay positive when life throws you off course. And it’s ‘red rag to a bull’ when people tell you to be positive when they can’t begin to imagine how you are feeling. Plus, we as humans are hard-wired to be negative; negative events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. The negativity bias as psychologists call it.

Positivity is something that has to come from you, from within.

Staying positive throughout my illness was a conscious reflex that I had to learn. It took time, but once I started to bounce the negative thoughts away and divert my focus onto something positive, it became a sort of addiction, and I got better at looking for positive things, in unexpected places.

Navigating cancer with two young daughters in tow was challenging, (both emotionally and logistically) but instead of seeing the routine as demanding, I tried to embrace the feeling of normality that it gave me. And it worked, I found that our daily family routines kept me grounded in reality, and stopped me from spiralling into negative space.

The structure of a daily routine (in my case through family) was a powerful catalyst for positivity.

 

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