time management

How can you take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself? We believe pouring from an empty cup has been a problem in healthcare for far too long. Achieving proper self-care is a challenging yet crucial goal for pre-meds and physicians, especially since medical students have 15-30% higher depression rates than the overall US population.On August 2nd, 2021, we posted an article regarding the state of self-care in pre-med and med students. We interviewed three medical students (from pre-clinical and clinical years) and asked them everything you’d want to know about their self-care journey in medical school. With the start of a new busy semester, it’s the perfect time for you to add self-care onto your to-do list, incorporate it into your daily routine, and make it a habit.

The pre-med years are infamous for their high stress and burnout rates: the striving for straight A’s and 528s on the MCAT, the anxiety of meeting a gazillion deadlines, accumulating shadowing hours, working on those extracurriculars, and much more! As you can probably already imagine, you will encounter many more stressful situations in your journey from medical school to residency and so forth. If not addressed promptly, these elevated stress levels can lead to burnout and empathy erosion over time. Thus, it can be helpful to home in on those stress-management strategies right NOW and give yourself a head start. We’ve collected some statistics to give you a better view of the level of stress medical students endure throughout their journey, and the habits some of them have adopted to deal with the high-stress environment of medical school. 

We’re not saying that you need to be hyper-obsessive and plan out every little detail, and we’re not saying that you can’t change your mind or take time to explore. BUT getting into medical schools is HARD, and the competition is STEEP, so careful planning will be crucial to your success. And it’s not just about planning in general. You’ve probably heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” The same idea applies here. We want to help you “plan smarter” by offering you tips and insights that will give you a strategic advantage.

Imagine a pot filled with cold water, with a frog peacefully swimming in it. A fire is lit under the pot and the water becomes lukewarm. The frog finds this rather pleasant and keeps swimming, but then the temperature keeps rising. As the water turns hotter, the frog grows uncomfortable, but it also becomes weak, so it stands the heat as long as it can and does nothing.