The combined intervention group will receive the combined psychological resilience and self-efficacy intervention.

The single intervention group will receive the mindfulness intervention.

The control group will receive routine care. Routine care mainly includes postoperative precautions, management of postoperative complications, and postoperative dietary care such as the type, time, and amount of food required, etc. In addition, we will add the patients' WeChat and send relevant health knowledge to the patients regularly. The control group theoretically will not receive any additional psychological interventions. However, they will be entitled to receive either the combined psychological resilience and self-efficacy intervention or the psychological resilience intervention once the combined and single intervention groups have completed the intervention.

Based on the content of the literature analysis and the group's previous research, a joint intervention programme on psychological resilience and self-efficacy for patients undergoing surgery for oesophageal cancer has been developed. The programme consists of 6 sessions in total, including preoperative period and one month after discharge, covering the period when patients' postoperative symptoms occur most severely. The intervention will be conducted in an individual, offline face-to-face format during the patients' hospital stay; considering the smooth implementation of the intervention after the patient will be discharged from the hospital, we will conduct the intervention in an individual, offline face-to-face format during the patient's outpatient review, and set up a WeChat group in case the patients are at home to conduct the intervention in the form of an online punch card.

Psychological resilience will be measured using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), which was developed by American psychologists Connor and Davidson in 2003 based on a research project on post-traumatic stress disorder to measure the level of psychological resilience in the general population and in clinical patients over the past month. It is now widely used to measure levels of psychological resilience in patients with cancer and chronic diseases. The scale consists of 25 items, including three dimensions of resilience, self-improvement, and optimism, and each item is scored on a 5-point Likert scale, with scores of 0-4 indicating from "not true at all" to "true nearly all the time". The total score ranges from 0 to 100, and the higher the score, the higher the psychological resilience. In 2007, Yu Xiaonan and other scholars translated it into Chinese, and the Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.91.

Self-efficacy will be measured using the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES), which was first developed in 1981 by Professor Schwarzer, a leading clinical and health psychologist at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues, and has now been translated into several languages and adopted worldwide. At first, it consisted of 20 items with a 4-point scale, but later it was improved to 10 items with a Likert scale of 1-4, ranging from "not at all true" to "exactly true", with higher overall scores indicating stronger self-efficacy of the individual. The scale was translated into Chinese by our scholars Zhang Jianxin and Schwarzer in 1995, and Chineseised by a Chinese scholar Wang Caikang in 2001, with a total of 10 items, an internal consistency coefficient of 0.87, a re-test reliability of 0.83 at an interval of about 10 days, and a half-way reliability of 0.90.

Anxiety and depression will be measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), which was developed by Zigmond et al. in 1983 and is a simple and easy-to-use scale with good reliability, validity, and psychometric properties. It consists of two subscales, anxiety and depression, with a total of 14 entries, of which 7 entries (single number) assess anxiety and 7 entries (double number) assess depression, and it is a self-assessment 4-rating scale, i.e., each entry is divided into four rating scales, which are recorded as 0, 1, 2, and 3, respectively, and the total scores of both anxiety and depression subscales range from 0-21. This scale was introduced to China in 1993 by Ye Weifei and other scholars, and was revised and translated into a Chinese version suitable for the Chinese population, with reliability analyses confirming that the coefficients of the anxiety and depression subscales were 0.72 and 0.68, and the total Cronbach's α coefficient was 0.785.