Anxiety and emotion regulation in cancer patients

A diagnosis of cancer is often associated with substantial changes in everyday life and with psychological distress for afflicted individuals and their relatives. Psycho-oncological patient care aims to reduce the distress of afflicted individuals and their relatives by using psychosocial and psychotherapeutic techniques. Cancer-related distress often results in anxieties, which vary interindividually and intraindividually depending on the patient's situation and course of the disease and can even continue after remission from cancer. Thus, it is essential for psycho-oncological consultation and therapy to be able to differentiate between pathological and non-pathological anxieties and to be aware of different facets of anxiety in the oncological context and during the course of the disease. Various emotion regulation strategies have been established as useful tools to address patient anxiety. The theory of emotion regulation provides a useful framework for the selection of counseling techniques and therapeutic interventions. Accordingly, in psycho-oncological consultation, with its high requirement of individuality and flexibility, the individual selection of emotion regulation strategies offers the opportunity to optimally react to anxieties and anxiety symptoms of cancer patients and their relatives.