Receiving a difficult diagnosis from your doctor can be scary and life-changing. It’s normal to go through a wide range of emotions when you get news that you don’t want to hear. Your diagnosis affects you, but also your family and your future. Here are six ways to conquer a scary diagnosis and help you cope.
Let yourself feel
The first step in coping with your diagnosis is to let yourself feel and express your emotions. When faced with a difficult diagnosis, it’s normal to feel a range of emotions, including:
- Anger
- Denial
- Fear
- Anxiety
- Depression
Don’t try to hold in your feelings. While people express themselves in different ways, research shows that people who share their feelings and emotions when dealing with a bad diagnosis have a better adjustment psychologically than those who try to hold everything in. Even if you aren’t normally an emotional person, letting yourself feel and letting others know how you are can help you better cope with your diagnosis.
Part of letting yourself feel your emotions is giving yourself time to process your diagnosis. Just as you express your emotions, there is no set timeline for this and it varies from person to person. It may take a few days, weeks, months, or more. At some point, you will feel acceptance with your diagnosis and can start to move forward. If you continue to deny the reality of your diagnosis, it can set you back when it comes to treatment and care.
Get support
As you deal with a scary diagnosis, don’t isolate yourself. You may feel alone or that your friends and family can’t understand what you’re going through. However, it’s important to reach out for support. Having support through a difficult diagnosis can have a big impact on your mental health and overall outlook as you process and cope.
Your support network can also help you with tasks that you may need help with later on. Your supporters can:
- Give you transportation, such as to medical appointments
- Help you run errands
- Help you out around the house and do chores
- Prepare meals
Beyond your friends and family, you might consider joining a support group. Dealing with a scary diagnosis might not feel so difficult when you are surrounded by others who are going through the same thing.
Learn as much as you can
When you receive scary news from your doctor, learning about it could help you. Sometimes, having all the facts helps to calm your fears as questions are answered and you learn what to expect.
Make a list of your questions and talk to your doctor about them. Your doctor should be able to provide you with specific information to help you cope with your diagnosis. This includes steps toward maintaining a good level of health. You can also continue doing research on your own.
QUESTION
What percentage of the human body is water? See AnswerManage stress and stay positive
It’s easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed when dealing with a bad diagnosis. Stress can have an impact on your health, so try to keep it in check. To help your overall health, make sure that you’re getting enough sleep, eating well, and finding ways to let off some steam.
To help you manage your stress and stay positive, you can:
- Exercise regularly
- Practice breathing exercises and techniques
- Practice mindfulness or meditation
- Connect with nature
All of these things can help you focus and the here and now.
Think about the future
As you face your diagnosis, take some time to think about your goals and priorities in life. Facing a scary diagnosis can actually help you decide what’s important to you. This can include spending more time with family and friends or doing something that you’ve always wanted to try.
As you think about what you really want out of life, try pursuing things that will make you happy and keep you positive:
- Pick up a new hobby you’ve always wanted to try
- Get involved in your community or volunteering
- Learn something new or further studies you've already begun
- Enjoy activities with people that make you happy
Maintain a normal routine
One thing that can help you take things one day at a time is to maintain your everyday routine. You might find that it needs to be modified, depending on your diagnosis. But living your life as normally as possible can help you reduce stress and be present in the here and now.
As mentioned before, this includes leading a healthy lifestyle and finding ways to relax. If you find it hard to cope or maintain your daily life, seek out help from a mental health professional who can listen and talk things out.
American Psychological Association: “Coping with a diagnosis of chronic illness.”
Dignity Health: “4 Tips to Help You Cope With a Difficult Diagnosis.”
HelpGuide: “Coping with a Life-Threatening Illness or Serious Health Event.”
Mayo Clinic: “Cancer diagnosis: 11 tips for coping.”
Stanford Medicine: “Coping with Cancer.”
Tufts Medical Center: “How to handle bad news from your doctor.”
Top Ways to Deal and Cope With a Scary Diagnosis Related Articles
Anxiety, Stress, and Worry
What is the definition of anxiety, stress, and worry? Find treatments to relieve stress, eliminate worry, and combat anxiety as you discover how stress affects your body. Learn whether stress fights colds or encourages them, why some stress is bad and some is good, and why exercise and diet can be relaxing.
Breast Cancer and Coping With Stress
Being diagnosed with breast cancer is stressful. Learning relaxation techniques, exercising, eating well, getting adequate sleep, receiving psychotherapy, and maintaining a positive attitude can help you cope. Creating documents, such as an advance directive, living will, and durable power of attorney will outline your wishes in the event that you are no longer able to make decisions regarding your care.
Can Stress Cause Alzheimer's?
Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disorder that starts most commonly in old age. Many studies conducted on animals have suggested that stress can cause Alzheimer’s and worsen its progression. However, whether it causes Alzheimer’s in humans is yet to be established.
Common Medical Abbreviations & Terms
Doctors, pharmacists, and other health-care professionals use abbreviations, acronyms, and other terminology for instructions and information in regard to a patient's health condition, prescription drugs they are to take, or medical procedures that have been ordered. There is no approved this list of common medical abbreviations, acronyms, and terminology used by doctors and other health- care professionals. You can use this list of medical abbreviations and acronyms written by our doctors the next time you can't understand what is on your prescription package, blood test results, or medical procedure orders. Examples include:
- ANED: Alive no evidence of disease. The patient arrived in the ER alive with no evidence of disease.
- ARF: Acute renal (kidney) failure
- cap: Capsule.
- CPAP: Continuous positive airway pressure. A treatment for sleep apnea.
- DJD: Degenerative joint disease. Another term for osteoarthritis.
- DM: Diabetes mellitus. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes
- HA: Headache
- IBD: Inflammatory bowel disease. A name for two disorders of the gastrointestinal (BI) tract, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis
- JT: Joint
- N/V: Nausea or vomiting.
- p.o.: By mouth. From the Latin terminology per os.
- q.i.d.: Four times daily. As in taking a medicine four times daily.
- RA: Rheumatoid arthritis
- SOB: Shortness of breath.
- T: Temperature. Temperature is recorded as part of the physical examination. It is one of the "vital signs."
Stress-Reducing Foods
While there are many ways to cope with stress, one strategy is to eat stress-fighting foods. Find out which foods to eat as part of a stress management diet.
Female Screening Tests
What is a health screening? Why is it important to know your blood pressure? How long will your health screening take? Learn about wellness screenings for women for breast cancer, HIV, diabetes, osteoporosis, skin cancer, and more.
How Do You Instantly Relieve Stress?
Managing stress leads to a state of “well-being and contentment.” Maintaining a stress-free life takes work and time. One can accomplish that by taking steps each day to reduce stress and increase joy. What makes one person happy does not necessarily work for another person.
Pain Management: One-Move Fixes for Pain and Stress
A quick stretch, yoga pose, or on-the-spot exercise can help fix sudden aches from head to toe. Learn how to quash pain with just one move.
What Are the Physical and Emotional Signs of Stress?
What effect does stress have in the body and mind? Learn about stress and its symptoms, signs, causes, and treatments.
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychiatric condition, can develop after any catastrophic life event. Symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, sweating, rapid heart rate, detachment, amnesia, sleep problems, irritability, and exaggerated startle response. Treatment may involve psychotherapy, group support, and medication.
Stress
Stress is a normal part of life, but chronic or severe stress can be harmful to your health. Learn what happens in your body when you are stressed and how you can manage your response.
Stress and Heart Disease
Stress itself may be a risk factor for heart disease, or high levels of stress may make risk factors for heart disease worse. The warning signs of stress can be physical, mental, emotional, or behavioral. Check out the center below for more medical references on stress and heart disease, including multimedia (slideshows, images, and quizzes), related diseases, treatment, diagnosis, medications, and prevention or wellness.
Stress Quiz
Stress creeps into everyone's life at one time or another, while some people will suffer from poorly managed chronic stress. If you're suffering, there are things you can do. Take the Stress Quiz to learn what you can do to beat the long-term effects of chronic stress.What Are the Common Signs of Stress?
Stress is your body’s natural response to challenging situations in your life. So, feeling stressed once in a while is completely normal. It is your stress that makes you finish ‘that’ important project faster and within the deadline, than you would have in the absence of stress.
What Is the Effect of Stress?
Stress is the body’s response to a situation. It is typically a change in the environment that requires one’s body to react and adjust. These changes evoke physical, mental and emotional reactions in a person. Short-term stress will have no significant impact on the body. Long-term stress may cause various issues. The diseases that often arise due to long-standing stress are called psychosomatic diseases.