Zack R.
Photo provided by Zack R.
If you're reading this, you can find balance in medicine.
Medical school has a unique stigma of consuming the lives of people who decide to pursue it. The volume of material, the weight of the responsibility, and the relentless pace of it all can make it feel like your day needs to be centered around studying. As a rising second-year student, I can tell you that I have felt that pressure deeply, but as with many challenges in life, you can always find a way to get through, even when the answer isn’t easy or obvious.
For me, the antidote was an unlikely one: training for an Ironman. Every day, after hours spent consuming lectures and fighting through practice questions, I would make my way over to the gym, and then time would slow down. This is when I would feel this balance, just me and the agonizingly long workout that I signed up for (and paid thousands of dollars for). No upcoming exams, no clinical skills to rehearse, no mental noise, just the present moment. What started as a physical challenge quickly became one of the most important tools in my mental health arsenal. Training taught me how to be present, how to silence the noise, and how to show up for something even when I was tired. Those same skills, it turns out, translate directly into becoming a better student and a more grounded person.
Training for an Ironman during my first year of medical school taught me another very important lesson about my mental health and my approach to my everyday life. This lesson was that you only have control over 2 things in your life: your effort and your mindset. That's it. You can never control the outcome of something. All you can control when things start to go wrong, or you are bogged down in schoolwork, is how you continue to push through and how you choose to feel about it. Simplifying and recognizing this lesson has served as an incredibly valuable driver of my ability to stay positive and always remember what I can and cannot control.
No matter how difficult each day gets, I encourage you to find something outside of medicine that you are genuinely grateful to do. It doesn’t have to be some insane goal; it just has to be yours. That thing will not take anything away from becoming a great physician. It will remind you of the person you are becoming along the way.
Stay positive,
Zack R., Second Year Medical Student
Several studies have revealed that medical students, physicians, and healthcare professionals experience mental health symptoms at rates significantly higher than the general population. Stethos[Cope] is a chapter of IfYoureReadingThis designed to help medical students and professionals cope with the unique stressors of medical training and change the narrative of mental health in medicine.
To read more letters and interviews from students, and to learn more about mental health in the medical community, visit the Stethos[Cope] home page.