Some of us get dealt a bad hand in life. No matter what your attitude towards health is, you could be exercising seven times a day, eating the right foods, and doing everything you can to maintain your body at an optimum level, some people can get struck down with illness or disease and it can cause a major hole in your life. If you are young, and you get diagnosed with a debilitating illness or a life-threatening disease, is there any way for you to have an effective coping strategy? Put simply, there is.

Learning About The Condition

We get stressed and anxious about something we don’t understand. The best way to overcome this in the wake of a condition or disease is to learn as much about the illness as possible. So, if you are undergoing cancer treatment, becoming involved in the treatment and exploring every option, as well as developing relationships with the providers of the treatment, will decrease the stress. Going through something like treatment can be an anxiety-inducing situation, but if you know every single option available to you, this gives you a better control over how it affects your life.

Practice Gratitude

It can feel difficult to practice gratitude, especially if you feel angry at being singled out by this illness. But you can practice gratitude every day, and it will have a profound effect on your state of mind. In finding things that we are grateful for every day, gives us the ability to relax under stressful circumstances and will impact our outlook on life for the better. It could be very easy to feel embittered and full of rage if you are constantly ill, which is why practicing gratitude is an essential one.

Be Accepting

It’s certainly easier said than done, but if you can learn to accept your illness, you can move on in life. A lot of people view an illness as a stigma, or something that stops you doing something. If you can understand and accept what your condition is, this becomes your life’s baseline, and it frees you up in an emotional sense. Acceptance is making peace, and if you can make peace with something, this is incredibly liberating.

Know Your Support Network

We all need a group of people around us that can provide emotional support. Of course, when you have an illness, you can end up relying on your loved ones a little bit more. But this is why it’s important to have the right support network in place. You can build friendships with people, only for them to lose their courage and back away when they realize what they’ve left themselves in for with you, and while it’s not healthy for you to screen every potential new friend to see if you can trust them down the line, it’s still important for you to have a network of friends and family who will be there for you in your hour of need. But the right people will be there for you regardless, and you will know when you find those souls.

At a young age, coping with a chronic condition or a debilitating disease can be almost too much to bear, but to develop an effective coping strategy is the key to getting yourself through it.