Helping Fatigue with Rest and Exercise
Cancer-related fatigue is helped by a combination of rest and exercise. Enter The Recovery Room to find out the 2 criteria are you should meet to take a guilt-free nap.
Cancer-related fatigue! Chemotherapy and radiation can be the physiological equivalent of running a daily marathon for your cells. If you are in or recovering from cancer treatment, two things become critically more important. One is exercise and the other is rest.
The topic in The Recovery Room today is napping. Yes, I said napping! Is it okay? If it is, how much is okay? How much is too much?
Here are my recommendations. WELCOME TO THE RECOVERY ROOM! Oops… Did I wake anyone up?
There are two requirements you need to meet before you can take a guilt-free nap. First, you must be fairly routinely sleeping through the night. Second, you need to be fairly routinely getting the American Cancer Society’s guidelines for exercising 150 minutes per week. Let’s break this down. Uninterrupted sleep is critical for good health and recovery. Three 2-hour naps do not and cannot replace the physiological benefit of 6 to 8 hours of continuous sleep. If you are not getting a good night of uninterrupted sleep, you should NOT be napping. If pain, anxiety, or insomnia are keeping you awake, talk with your cancer doctor or nurse so that they can help you with sleep support. Yes, it is that important.
Back to the exercise… the other requirement of napping is getting in the proper amount of exercise. The target is about 20 to 30 minutes of daily exercise or 150 minutes a week. If you are not exercising 20 to 30 minutes a day on most days, you could lose muscle mass as well as heart and lung strength and should NOT compound this more by napping.
So, if you are recovering from cancer treatment and are sleeping through the night and getting proper exercise, then…. NAP TO YOUR HEART AND BODY’S CONTENT! Let’s get you out of the emergency room and into The Recovery Room!
I’m Dr. Leslie Waltke. Sleep well. We’ll talk again soon.