When you’ve been in a serious car accident, it can take a long time for you to regain your health. While your recovery will depend on your health before the accident, the damage done, and how the aftermath goes, there are ways to make the recovery process go more smoothly for you. If you’ve been in a serious car accident, keep these things in mind.

Tips for Recovering From a Serious Car Accident

Follow Your Doctor’s Instructions

When you’ve been injured in a car accident, you need to see a doctor immediately. The doctor can diagnose what’s wrong and give you instructions on how to fix it. You need to follow your doctor’s instructions. This goes for all of the doctors that you see in the aftermath. Your emergency room doctor will likely tell you to follow up with your primary care doctor. Your primary care may send you to specialists. Regardless of which doctor says it, you should do what they tell you to do. If you ignore your doctor’s orders, then you won’t take the actions required to repair your injuries.

This may include things like physical therapy. There are 38 thousand physical therapy clinics operating in the U.S., and they treat a wide variety of issues. Many of them require you to do exercises at home in between sessions. If you don’t go to physical therapy or do the exercises, you won’t get the healing benefits of it, so be sure to listen to your doctor after a car accident.

Look Into Disability

Depending on where you live and how severe your injuries are, you should look into disability benefits. Permanent Partial Disability will compensate you for the permanency of your disability. These checks can help you cover the bills as you recover, reducing your stress levels significantly. Stress can make recovery much more difficult, so you want to lower it as much as possible.

Disability can be complicated to navigate, so work with someone who knows the system well. They may be able to help you find benefits you didn’t know existed.

Accept Help

If people offer to help you, take them up on their offer. Life after a car accident is stressful for reasons beyond your health. For one thing, car accidents are expensive. According to the New York Department of Transportation, the average cost of an auto accident depends on where it took place. On the low end, an accident might cost about $15 thousand. On the high end, it might be closer to $63 thousand. Most fall in between $30 thousand and $40 thousand. If you need to borrow money from someone to compensate for this, it’s completely understandable.

Not being able to do the same everyday tasks you could do before your accident can also make life difficult. If you’re injured and having difficulty working, this can cause severe stress in your life. Take advantage of any opportunity to make things easier. Accept offers for things like food, childcare, and company. It will help you reduce your stress and recover more easily.

Get Plenty of Rest

In order to heal, you need to rest. Make sure that you’re sleeping well every night. Follow a healthy sleep schedule and talk to your doctor if you’re struggling to sleep. You should also rest throughout the day if you need to. Sleep is essential to good health, as it’s a time when your body has a chance to recover more thoroughly. If you aren’t sleeping enough, it could slow down your healing or cause other health problems to show up, so make sure that you are prioritizing sleep.

Recovering after a serious car accident is an enormous undertaking. You need to care for your body and mind as you move past what happened. However, certain steps you might take can prevent you from recovering as quickly or as thoroughly as you would like to. Keep these tips in mind to help you regain your health.