Ways To Help Your Hospital Anxiety, Surgery Fear, Fear of Medicine
1. Trust Your Practitioner
This is by far the most important part of calming the fear of surgery and hospital anxiety. Trust is the opposite of anxiety. Feeling out of control settles if you feel in sync with the person who is helping you. Knowing you are confident in the doctor makes you feel more in control of the situation. That’s because you know he or she is in control, and that he or she–at least in this instance–is more capable than you to do this procedure. I would do affirmations of gratitude for my doctor, the nurses, all the hospital staff, and my family for their assistance.
2. Trust Yourself
Anxiety implies mistrust of others, but this is just a reflection of mistrust for yourself. Trust yourself to listen to your body. Your body knows what it needs. Make decisions accordingly. Trust those decisions. Trust that you can do what you can to give yourself the highest potential for maximum recovery. For example, eat what they tell you, participate in rehab, occupational therapy or physically therapy as directed, etc. Do affirmations expressing gratitude for yourself. “Thank you so much for all you are putting in to making this work!”
Do guided imagery, seeing yourself recover calmly and doing well.
3. Take Action to Help Yourself
Do things that would be healing for your medical problem as well as your anxiety, like meditate (Tratak meditation is good to clear your mind or just imagine light at the place(s) your body needs healing), eat clean, exercise to build endurance for recovery, spend time with loving people, laugh, journal, pray, spend time outside or with your pets, engage in a creative hobby, clean out your house, or do some volunteer work. Just stay productively active so your mind doesn’t wander to gloom and doom.
4. Educate Yourself
Doing research into your medical issue can calm hospital anxiety and surgery fear (but it also can increase it). You can find horrible, rare accounts online that could terrify you more, but there are also many accounts that could help relax you. For some people, knowing what is going to happen makes them feel more in control and this is calming for them. Also, knowing our body’s capacity to heal itself is so reassuring. Research also can provide tips on the best ways for recovering from your particular medical issue. This information is invaluable!
5. Plan Well
When you are healing, it is great to be able to focus all of your energy on healing. (Not anxiety; we do not want to waste time on anxiety.) So it is great to make a plan for post-surgery. This will give you something to take your attention away from the surgery. Organize people to help and who will do what. Get together the things you might need (books, audiobooks, movies), and some stations for where you will plant yourself, complete with a side table for all the stuff–glass of water, tissues, lotion, lip balm, back scratcher, and the remote–that you will want at arm’s length. Get your kids schedules all sorted out, catch up at work and home so everything is left organized. It feels awful when you cannot get up to be staring at a cluttered and messy room.
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