Mentally preparing yourself for surgery isn’t something that most people take lightly. It can be considerably stressful anticipating being cut open. Even though your surgery may come with the promise of improved physical health, it may come with a lot of worries, which can affect your mental health.
When there are so many scary stories surrounding surgeries, you may be worried that your surgeon will perform an error, or you may not respond well to the anesthesia. However, statistically, surgery errors are rare and aren’t likely to happen to you. Rather than fixating over everything that could possibly go wrong, you should instead mentally prepare yourself by doing the following.
Find a Support System
If you’re having a significant amount of anxiety surrounding your appointment, then you should get the support that you need in order to make it through. A support system will help you stay focused on positivity. Many aspects of surgery can be very difficult to imagine undergoing alone. For this reason, it’s important to remind yourself that you’re not alone.
Building a support system for yourself will ensure that you have someone to turn towards when things get hard. In addition to finding support amongst your friends and family, you can also look to other places like online forums. You may be able to find other people who have had the same surgery and can reassure you about the process going smoothly.
Practice Self-Soothing Techniques
It’s helpful to practice calming techniques to calm yourself down during moments of anxiety. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with things like deep breathing and calming techniques. Having the tools to calm yourself when you start to feel overwhelmed by fear is incredibly helpful for the time when your surgery will arrive.
Rather than giving in to your fears and feeling out of control, you can rely on your self-soothing techniques to calm you down.
Be Optimistic
It’s easy to fall into patterns of negative thinking. Assuming the worst is often much easier than trying to imagine the best-case scenario. Try to be as positive as possible when looking towards the future. Why should it be more likely that things could go wrong when they could just as easily go right?
The way to achieve any sort of success in life is to try to maintain a positive attitude. Worrying and fixating on potential negative outcomes won’t just add to your stress levels, but according to some people. It can even increase your chances of things going wrong.
Many people believe the mind is a powerful tool that can harness extreme power. Rather than potentially manifesting a negative situation for yourself, try to imagine a good situation!
2018 ·