Lifestyle

How To Mentally Prepare For Surgery

When you’re preparing for surgery, it can be a stressful time. However, worrying can delay your recovery and worsen your mental health during this time. Below, we explore how you can prepare yourself for surgery and put yourself in the best possible mental state to recover.

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Educate Yourself

Fear of the unknown can make you feel worse prior to the surgery. Instead, by educating yourself about the procedure and recovery, you can feel more prepared for the day. Ideally, you’ll do this by speaking to your doctor: they have the experience and expertise – plus the knowledge of your case – to calmly walk you through what will happen.

On top of this, you can speak to other patients who have had a similar procedure about their experiences. This should help you calm down before the surgery. Reading up online can sometimes be helpful, but obsessively searching online can actually increase your stress during the build-up.

Use Support

Ideally, you’ll have a support network to back you throughout the process. This will usually consist of your friends and family. You might want to chat to this group in the build-up to surgery to take worries off your mind. But also don’t be afraid to accept offers to help from this group. During your recovery your loved ones can support you and help you at home, giving you peace of mind that you can focus on getting better.

Surgery Day

Minimizing stress on the day is crucial for your experience. The first step is to get plenty of sleep the night before – this can be tricky if you’re worried, but a good night’s sleep can help lower stress. It’s also important to get to the hospital with plenty of time to spare to ensure that there are no external worries on the day.

Finally, try and have normal conversations with your loved ones to take your mind off things. Banal conversations about work or the weather will keep you in a relaxed frame of mind, as opposed to frantically discussing the surgery.

Calming Exercises

You can also try calming exercises to prepare yourself for surgery. This could take the form of relaxing yourself with meditation. Or alternatively, you could try breathing exercises to calm yourself down whenever your anxiety starts climbing.

Sometimes though, regardless of your preparation surgery might not go according to plan. However, even in this scenario, you can have peace of mind that you’ll be covered. By working with medical negligence solicitors on a no-win, no-fee basis you can ensure that you’re financially covered if you have to take any extra time off with recovery.