How to Meditate During Chemotherapy
- Ceallaigh Lorenz
- Mar 3
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Recently, while in a session with a new client, she shared that her friend suggested she try meditation for her anxiety. She laughed a little and said she could barely sit through an infusion without crawling out of her skin, she said. “Now someone wants me to sit still on purpose?”
I hear some version of this a lot when it comes to cancer and meditation. Every time, I say the same thing: meditation, especially during chemo, does not look like what you think it looks like.
Most people envision sitting cross-legged in a quiet room for an hour. But it is not that. It is also not about clearing your mind or even about being calm. Meditation comes in many forms and serves various purposes. During active cancer treatment, it is about giving your nervous system a short, deliberate break—even for just two minutes—in the midst of a challenging experience.
Why Meditation Can Help During Treatment
Chemotherapy puts your body in a sustained state of physiological stress. Your nervous system stays activated, sometimes for weeks. This manifests as anxiety, sleeplessness, nausea, brain fog, and a general feeling of disconnection from your own body. You are not imagining it; these are well-documented treatment effects.
Meditation, even very brief sessions (think 1–2 minutes), is one of the most studied non-pharmacological tools for addressing this cluster of symptoms. Mindfulness-based interventions have been researched in breast cancer populations for over two decades. The evidence is strongest for short-term improvements in anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms. A 2024 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that mindfulness-based stress reduction may help reduce cancer-related fatigue in breast cancer patients undergoing treatment.
The benefits are often short-term. The effects on long-term outcomes, like immune function, are still being investigated. But here’s the thing: during active treatment, short-term relief is significant. It can be the difference between getting through a day and not.
How to Start Meditating During Chemo
During treatment, I begin by teaching meditation in tiny doses. One minute, sometimes two, is an accessible and safe way to train your body and mind. The first goal I give patients with heightened alert states is to notice their breathing and let one exhale be a little longer than usual.
Here’s what I recommend to patients who have never meditated before:
Notice Your Hands: Place both palms flat on your thighs. Without changing anything, feel the warmth and texture of your hands. Next, notice the weight of your hands on your legs. You can close your eyes or keep them open with a soft focus—whatever feels best. I suggest trying both and approaching everything with curiosity.
Breathe Normally: Just notice your breath. Continue to breathe normally for three breaths. Do not try to change anything. Just count them: one, two, three.
Extend the Exhale: On the fourth breath, let the exhale extend for just a beat longer than the inhale. Do this for five breaths.
Stop: That’s it! That is enough to create change in your nervous system and a great way to start exercising the skill of meditation.
If your mind wanders (and it will—I promise it does for everyone, including me), the moment you notice, just say the word “thinking” and bring your attention back to your hands or breath. Guess what? That act of noticing is the whole practice. Each attempt to come back is what creates the change.
When and Where to Practice
I tell patients to pick one consistent time or place rather than trying to meditate whenever they remember. In the end, this really helps. I often refer to Pavlov’s Dog when it comes to time and place. It doesn’t matter when or where you choose; it’s the consistency that makes a difference over time.
Here are some options that work well during treatment:
Right After an Infusion Starts: Once the nurse finishes setting up and leaves the room, you have a bunch of time. Using it to practice a skill like meditation instead of doom scrolling can create massive change. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Believe it or not, I have some women who actually look forward to that time!
Before Bed: Even if insomnia has got you in its grip, remember that practicing meditation is not about achieving an outcome, like sleep. It’s about focusing your attention on the present moment. This signals safety to the nervous system, and when your nervous system gets practice relaxing, sleep tends to be easier over time.
During a Wave of Nausea or Anxiety: This might seem counterintuitive, but it can help the nervous system once you’ve been practicing for a little while. One intentional breath and a long exhale give your nervous system a brief signal that you are safe and can help mitigate symptoms. Research on brief breathwork interventions supports this. Even a single extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” system. It counterbalances the fight-or-flight response that chemotherapy keeps switched on. When you lengthen that exhale, you are literally tapping the brakes on your stress response, even if just for a moment.
Again, the key is frequency and consistency. Two minutes five times a week will do more for you than one twenty-minute session you never get around to.
What If I Cannot Focus During Meditation?
Good news: you do not need to! “Chemobrain” is real, and if your concentration is compromised, that’s okay. Most people struggle to concentrate even when they aren’t dealing with cancer and all that comes with it. The simple attempt to settle the mind is the goal. Just the attempt. Meditation during chemo is meant to be a sensory reset. If counting breaths is too much, try this instead: hold something cold (an ice cube, a chilled water bottle) and notice the sensation. That is a one-sense meditation. Temperature, attention, ten seconds. Done.
The Bigger Picture
In the research we are conducting at Jersey City Medical Center with RWJ Barnabas Health, we are studying how combining patient education with hands-on wellness practices affects quality of life during and after breast cancer treatment. Meditation is one treatment we are studying during active chemotherapy treatments. I hope this helps you access a no-cost, portable piece of that research that you can start using today. You just need to be willing to try two minutes and see what happens. That is where it starts.
— Ceallaigh
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