By Laura DeKraker Lang-Ree, childhood cancer advocate, speaker, and bestselling author of The Cancer Parent’s Handbook: What Your Oncologist Doesn’t Have Time to Tell You
cancerparentshandbook.com

Key Takeaways

• Healing continues long after treatment ends. Survivorship is built day by day, through small, repeatable practices rather than one big finish-line moment.
• Daily rituals create stability. A quiet, phone-free ritual, guarded fiercely and done consistently, gives your nervous system a reliable anchor while you recover from trauma.
• Your body needs hands-on care too. Massage, acupuncture, and restorative yoga are evidence-backed ways to lower stress hormones and calm a body stuck in fight-or-flight.
• Writing and giving back reshape your outlook. Morning Pages release the worry loop, gratitude journaling trains your brain to notice the good, and volunteering shifts your focus outward.
• Support is strength. Therapy helps survivors and caregivers process trauma, and for those experiencing PTSD after treatment, it’s imperative.

This blog post is designed for our whole community: the parents and caregivers holding everything together, and our adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients navigating this in their own bodies. Many of these tools are yours to use directly; others you can adapt for a younger child. Take what fits.

What Does Everyday Healing Look Like in Cancer Survivorship?

A post-treatment reset routine is a set of small, repeatable everyday practices—daily rituals, body-based therapies like massage and restorative yoga, expressive writing, volunteering, and therapy—that help survivors and caregivers move out of prolonged fight-or-flight mode and build a calmer, more sustainable life after cancer. These practices don’t require special equipment or big time commitments, and most are free or low-cost to start.

In part one of this two-part series, I shared ways to begin resetting after years of cancer treatment. Simple, in-the-moment tools to support your nervous system and your physical foundation. These steady, practical shifts can make a meaningful difference as you begin moving out of the role of patient or caregiver and back into your life.

In this blog post, we explore tactics for your everyday life—small, intentional practices that help you build a version of survivorship you can truly live in and return to with ease when you get off track. Nothing complex and overwhelming, just thoughtful steps that meet you where you are and help you move forward in a way that feels manageable and uniquely you.

So let’s get to it.

How Can You Reset Your Mind and Body After Cancer Treatment?

Below are 5 tried-and-true strategies that helped me, my daughter, and so many families I’ve walked alongside during treatment and while writing The Cancer Parent’s Handbook. These are gentle, practical strategies you can begin using today to move out of continual fight-or-flight mode. And they are all backed by science. They are small, actionable things you can do right now, even in the hardest moments, to find a little more calm, connection, and hope as you transition into survivorship. And if you are in active treatment, they will work for you, too! It’s never too early to start.

Create Rituals

I cannot overstate how powerful it is to have a ritual every day that centers you, especially when you are recovering from trauma. I started a silent, no-talking, no-phone morning routine with tea and a short spiritual reading during treatment, which was pivotal to my sanity. At night, I kept a gratitude journal to remind me of what was still good in my world. I still do both to this day because they changed my life for the better.

Coming up with something that feels right for you as a daily ritual is a very personal choice. Your ritual can be anything that is quiet, gets you off your phone and out of your head. Guard those moments fiercely (no interruptions!) as it’s sacred time. Consistency is key.

Body-Based Healing

Since trauma lives in the body, modalities such as acupuncture, massage, and restorative yoga are fantastic ways to rebalance your cortisol (your fight-or-flight hormone) and calm your mind. And you can come back to them again and again throughout your life.

Massage
Your body works incredibly hard taking care of you and your family in good times, and you have just recovered from cancer treatment as a caregiver or patient—that’s a lot! Give massage a try. It’s one of the best ways to detox from stress, release muscle tension, and improve your mood by boosting neurotransmitter levels. Research shows the benefits run in both directions of the caregiving relationship: in one study, family caregivers of cancer patients who received regular massage saw improvements in anxiety, cortisol levels, and sleep quality. If you can swing it financially, find a regular massage therapist who can get to know your body and understand the demands of what you are going through to more effectively help you reset.

Acupuncture
An ancient modality, acupuncture is a powerful, complementary therapy that helps your system remember how to heal. Leading cancer centers like Memorial Sloan Kettering describe acupuncture as a supportive option for people recovering from chemo, radiation, or surgery, whose bodies are often stuck in a high cortisol pattern: fatigued, inflamed, wired-and-tired. Acupuncture works like a subtle tuning fork for the nervous system, using shallow, hair-thin needles (not the horrific ones endured during treatment) at specific points to encourage flow, calm, and repair rather than more drugs or more force. It’s incredible. The National Cancer Institute has even reported on clinical trial results showing acupuncture can help cancer survivors manage chronic pain. 

If you are still in treatment, give it a try for yourself or the person you are caregiving for as a complementary therapy, as it can reduce or eliminate many different symptoms from nausea to muscle pain. If you are post-treatment, let it help you recover and detox from all the meds.

Restorative Yoga
This is not power yoga as a workout. Restorative Yoga is designed to calm the entire nervous system through a series of floor poses that are held for several minutes and guided by a professional. The science here keeps getting stronger: a large randomized trial presented at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting found that just four weeks of gentle hatha and restorative yoga improved mood, anxiety, fatigue, and insomnia in cancer survivors. Try it out at the end of the day, and see how powerful it is for relaxing both your mind and body.

Want more? Head to the CAC2 Survivorship Toolkit to find more low-cost or free support in all of these areas. All are incredibly helpful in restoring mind and body. You’ll also find entire chapters dedicated to both patient and caregiver’s body and soul in The Cancer Parent’s Handbook.

Write It Out

There are a few ways that writing can help you process trauma. Research on expressive writing has linked putting difficult experiences on paper to improvements in both emotional and physical health. Two approaches that have been particularly powerful for both my clients and myself are Morning Pages and a Gratitude Journal.

Morning Pages:
Morning Pages are a powerful way to let go of worries, quiet your mind, and break the cycle of recurring negative thoughts. Here’s how it works: Before your day gets underway, sit down with your coffee or tea and “worry out loud” on paper. No holding back, no editing, no making it pretty. Just write whatever’s on your mind. Strive for 10–15 minutes of uninterrupted dumping of your thoughts, and when you’re finished, tear up or toss the pages. That’s it. You’ll be surprised how awesome it feels.

Gratitude Journal:
Joy really is everywhere, and this ritual gently trains your mind to notice the tiny joys that happen even on the hard days. According to the Mayo Clinic Health System, studies show a regular gratitude practice can improve sleep, mood, and immunity, and can decrease depression, anxiety, and difficulties with chronic pain.

Here’s how it works: Find a simple notebook to use just for this. At the end of each day, take a moment to write down five good things that happened: a yummy breakfast, a fun text with a friend, a glorious sunset, or nailing a work presentation. Everything counts, so long as it’s positive. Seeing the good laid out on the page reframes our mind and our tendency to focus on the negative. A gratitude journal makes it easier to see that your day was good, maybe even great, and provides reassurance that more joy can be found tomorrow.

Volunteer

As you work towards regaining your center, a helpful way to stop worrying about yourself is to focus on someone or something else. Volunteer! Maybe you pick up a former passion project, or you could consider giving back to the cancer community. If you are a young adult and new to volunteering, pick something that makes you happy, that you care about, and where you can make a difference. Love to read? Volunteer to read at a children’s library. Crazy about pets? Volunteer at your local shelter!

Shifting your focus outward is not only a nice thing to do, but it’s also linked in research to lower depression and greater life satisfaction. Even cooler, volunteering reduces our perception of our own problems, giving us the capacity to move forward. For me, once I realized that, I was hooked. I had the capacity to help newly diagnosed families get their bearings, which eventually became the seed for my book.

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” –Gandhi

What comes to mind for you? One idea is to take an experience or frustration from your treatment years and turn it into something better for others. A side benefit of volunteering in the cancer space is that you will be surrounded by people who get what you’ve been through and what you are experiencing now as you help newly diagnosed families. Win-win.

There are dozens of amazing cancer organizations right here as CAC2 members! Check them out and reach out to see if they are a fit for you.

Therapy

No matter what your emotional state during or after your cancer journey, don’t underestimate the power of therapy to help you reset. Therapy is an incredible resource for processing trauma, intentionally shaping our future, and learning to focus on the good in our lives. And this matters for the whole family: researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia note that 30–45% of parents and siblings, and 15–20% of childhood cancer survivors, experience post-traumatic stress symptoms years after treatment has ended. For those who experience PTSD after treatment, therapy is imperative.

Your Next Step in Survivorship

Hopefully, one or more of these 5 strategies resonate for you. Try one and give yourself some time to shift out of fight-or-flight mode and into a calmer, more centered way of living as a Survivor. Be patient, loving, and kind to yourself as you regroup. You deserve it.

If you remember nothing else, remember this:

Whether you’re a patient or caregiver, you did something incredibly hard. And you’re still doing it! Cancer treatment takes a toll, and even long after the last dose, the last scan, the last sleepless night, triggers will happen. When they do, try one of the 10 steps shared throughout this post and my previous post and see how much more positive and constructive life becomes.

And if you can’t shake the negativity off or get unstuck, seek help. Talk to someone who’s trained in trauma therapy and process this journey and your understandable grief. Asking for support isn’t a failure; it’s one of the strongest, bravest moves you can make.

Healing isn’t linear and doesn’t follow a predictable schedule. So stay in practice and make space to focus on yourself every day.

You’re not alone. I’ve got you. See you next month in my next blog post!

Frequently Asked Questions