Try THESE FOUR STEPS to Wellness while Med Schoolin' at UBC (doctors hate him)

Note: This post is intended for UBC Med Students

Recently my dear friend Alex cajoled me into being a panelist on the UBC WIN Presentation about wellness in medical school for the incoming class of 2024. The question I got asked waaaaas:

How do you maintain your mental and physical health in medical school while also ensuring you are meeting academic milestones?

Simple, obviously. You don't.

But you can try. And you probably should. As I drove home from the hospital, the thoughts started flowing. Thankfully, bluetooth has made people stare less at you while you rant at your windshield these days. Since I seemed to have a fair amount to say on this topic, I thought I’d write it down and create a post about it for posterity.

Without further ado, here’s Cam’s Brief Guide to Wellness in Medical School, written for you 2024's starting out.

1) Sort out what you need to do to be healthy / basically OK on the daily

For most humans, “wellness” usually means some combination of regular, good, 7+ hour sleeps, exercise most days, eating #canadafoodguide style, managing stress, and having some meaningful personal relationships +/- a couple hobbies. It’s not THAT complicated, the challenge tends (especially in medicine) to be fitting it all in.

For me, wellness all starts with the morning routine. For the past several years I've been getting up early, doing a few bleary-eyed yoga poses while the kettle boils, pouring some tea, and doing a bit of mindfulness meditation while it steeps. Once I'm suitably zen, I grab my tea and my computer, write a bit, and plan my day in my moleskine notebook over a little Earl Grey. It’s pleasant as hell and I defy anyone to do it and not feel blissed out AF. When I’m done my tea, I grab my mason jar of food from my Meal Prep Sunday because I’m full on hipster, and I head out, generally hitting the gym on the way to work.

I know that sounds kinda crazy but it’s what I actually do. If you want you can follow my inspirational insta account and check me out on youtube, don’t forget to smash that subscribe button. Anyway, that’s a big part of what staying healthy looks like for me, you just have to figure out what amount and types of exercise, sleep, food, friends, and stress management YOU would ideally have to stay happy and healthy if you haven’t already.

Cam’s Tip: If you think about those foundational aspects of health – sleep, exercise, eating well, managing stress, relationships, etc., and think to yourself “I’m super deficient in one or more of those”, think about making a shift. Taking gradual, attainable steps to build more of it into your life will only lead to positive things, I promise.

2) Figure out your time constraints AKA your goals in medicine (and life)

Once you know what self-care and wellness are for you, you have to sort out what your life constraints are – for most of us here, our primary life constraint is med school. It turns out that med school is insanely busy, and the amount of work you COULD do is endless. So it behooves you to sort out your approach, because you’re only human, and all work and no play makes everyone a dull boy.

Simply ask yourself: what am I looking to get out of medical school? Are you cut-throat-gunning opthalmology straight out of the gate? Do you want every scholarship you can get your hands on? Or are you unsure where you’re going to end up and looking to meet people and explore? Maybe you are happy just skating by with the P=MD attitude, partying it up on the weekends, and generally basking in your own narcissism for the doctor you'll one day be. None of these are right or wrong, it just takes a bit of digging and self-reflection to sort it out. It might even mean zooming out further than just medicine and considering your life goals more broadly - that's some nerdy Tony Robbins stuff, but it can be super helpful. Get yourself a notebook, try it out, I dare ya. Cam’s Tip: I’d generally advocate for leaning towards the P=MD attitude – the reality is that unless you’re after scholarships, your grades don’t matter and once you get in it is VERY difficult to fail med school at UBC. My philosophy was that every percentage point over 70% I got on a test was time I could have been using to do other things that are just as important, whether it was working on an extra-curricular like a research project or an interest group, hanging out with your classmates outside of school, or just doing something you love, like seeing a partner or going skiing. Med takes a ton from you, don’t let it take more than it has to.

3) Figure out the above, then prioritize accordingly

My master’s supervisor always said “everyone only gets 24 hours in a day, you have to figure out how you’re going to spend them”. I think she was trying to get me to work harder. In any case, once you know your goals and have a sense for what you need to do to be happy and healthy, it’s just a matter of figuring out what your top priorities are, and using planning and organizational skills to stay on top of them. You, do have those, don’t you?

4) Get efficient and organized - lifehacks FTW

Regardles of how organized and woke you are about your priorities in life, there's no avoiding the time sink that is medical training. As such, it will help to become an efficient machine of a human so that you can maximize your free time. In no particular order, here are some life hacks I live by:

• Become a lame organizational nerd - I remember hearing some terrible self-improvement guru say something like "discipline begets freedom". I hated it when I heard it, and I hate it more now that I agree with it. The more organized you are, the more you'll be able to truly enjoy the free time you have. I love my combo of Google Cal, Trello, and my daily AM notebook. Figure out what works for you.

• Batch EVERYTHING you can - for example, turn off email and text notifications that you don’t need to be constantly blowing up your phone, and reply to them all at a couple pre-set hours in the day. Another huge game-changer for me was Meal Prep Sunday – me and my partner prep a whole bunch of food every Sunday and keep it in the fridge to grab and go through the week. Check out the reddit sub r/MealPrepSunday for inspo.
  

• Use habits and routines to make self-care mindless – We’re habit machines, read a summary of Duhigg’s Power of Habit if you haven’t already, and use the strategies in there to tackle the habits you want to create.
  

• Be grateful and do things daily to decrease the bad juju – as lame as it might be, in my daily moleskine that I use to lay out my day, I always start with three gratitudes.(Actually, I just digitized my moleskine into my own little daily notebook, so it actually looks like this now.) It's not much, and some days it feels dumb, but it helps. Like, a few percent. But a few percent matters, over time. Also, I fully advocate for minimizing social media use as much as possible to free up cognitive space, decrease anxiety, and generally stop the algorithms from taking over (I know the irony of saying this after posting this on social media - this is the world we live in).
  

• Get up early – don’t forego sleep, but if you can stomach it, the early morning wake up was a game changer for me. Every hour you're awake before the rest of the world wakes up is worth double. No texts, no emails, just "you time".

Cam’s Tip: Frequently I ask myself – “how would Tim Ferriss do med school?” and try to do that.

That’s all for now – hope some of that helped someone out there! Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat further!