Mindfulness in Surgery

Explore how mindfulness can support well-being. When you experience stress, you can become caught up in it that to where you don’t realize how the stress affects physical discomfort and connects to your emotional state. A body scan medication can help release physical tension—even the tension you don’t realize you’re experiencing—and reconnect you with your body. Mentally scanning yourself allows you to bring awareness to each part of your body—to notice any aches, pains, tension, or discomfort—and to get to know the pain and learn from it so you can manage it.

Practice a body scan using the audio, provided by Dr. Carter Lebares, MD, FACS, Assistant Professor of Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, who has developed a tailored MBI for surgeons called Enhanced Stress Resilience Training (ESRT) through the UCSF Center for Mindfulness in Surgery.