Debunking Self Care: Myth or Truth?

Pharmacy school is difficult. And I don’t mean to say that as in a “duh, we know” way but to say it in an “you have no idea how difficult it really is until it’s 3 in the morning and you’re sitting in your underwear in the midst of pharmacotherapy notes five hours before an exam Googling alternative career choices” way. It sucks everything out of you — your friends, your sleep, your appetite, your desire to live. I’ve probably cried more in the past month than my entire life. I haven’t had a regular eating or exercise schedule since the first week of my first year. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught myself asleep either on top, surrounded, or covered by my lecture notes. I’m running on autopilot right now — up by 6, out the door by 7:45, in class by 8, leave at 5, study until it’s done. Rotations on Thursdays. Work on Saturdays. Rinse and repeat. Exam after exam after exam. I haven’t seen the sun in months. Sometimes I don’t even realize what I’m doing because I’m just so used to this tedious, draining schedule.

And then I learned about this term that I have never heard before in nearly 25 years of life: self care. It’s this phenomenon that my therapist (if you don’t have a therapist now and you’re in grad school — or if you don’t have a therapist at all — get one. They will save your life, even if you think you’re in the best place in the world. But more on that later) has recently started to pound into my head ever since I mentioned how much I felt like I was suffocating in school. “You have to take care of yourself first,” she told me initially, when she was trying to convince me that this self care concept wasn’t some sort of hoax. “If you don’t take care of yourself, how can you expect to take care of someone else?”

I paused. She had a point there.

I walked into Dante’s 10th circle of hell because I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life. I wanted to make things easier for people, to protect them from all the nasty in the world and maybe save them from it a little. I wanted people to know that even though they feel like their 15 minute visit to the doctor is just another item off of a to-do list, that they’ll always be a priority in the pharmacy. I have worked under some incredible pharmacists that go above and beyond to care for patients in ways I never thought could be done by that role.

But never in a million years did I imagine that I could be my biggest roadblock to that — I just assumed nothing could happen to me, without even knowing I was assuming that. I put everyone else first before I put myself, and that landed me in panic attack in my therapist’s office.

Here’s how she defines self care: taking time to do things for yourself, and for yourself only. It’s 10, 15, 20, or maybe even 30 minutes of your day where you can tune out the rest of the world and do whatever it is you want to do. She described it as me time, which I always understood to be the time where I would just binge on Netflix for 7 hours straight or go on a shopping spree with my dad’s credit card. But it’s the opposite of that — it’s supposed to be an integrated part of your day, not a binge. It’s supposed to be as important as eating, sleeping, or studying. Time should be set aside for it and should never be interrupted until it’s over. You shouldn’t be interrupted when you’re taking care of yourself.

My first reaction to this concept is probably the same as yours: what a waste of time. I could do so much with those 20 minutes — like actual important things (sleeping, eating, studying) and I can always just save all that self care for the weekend, when I have time to. But she was really pushing this concept, so I promised her that I would try it for a week: I’d set aside 20 minutes of every day and just have Tracy time.

Here’s the verdict: I breathe a little better. I feel a little less overwhelmed. It gives me time to regroup and take a break. But I’m not completely sold on it. It could be because I’ve only been practicing it for a week and otherwise have been pretty inconsistent with it since the week ended — or it could be because I spend those 20 minutes just worrying about wasting 20 minutes. But if you really think about it, it’s just 20 minutes of your day that you would have otherwise spent procrastinating. And now, it’s a scheduled 20 minutes for you to both procrastinate and take care of your mental health. It is so important to take care of your mental health. This is especially important for when you’re in school, because it sets you up for when you enter the work force. When you are conscious of your mental health, when you work on it and learn coping mechanisms to deal with certain feelings and situations, then your chance of depression, of anxiety, of insomnia, of so many other psychiatric conditions decreases significantly. I have zero scientific data to back this (and I’m sure there is) but in my class of 80, nearly half the class is on some sort of anti-anxiety medication or anti-depressant. All of my friends are. My sister was in pharmacy school. I’ve been tempted to try it out. Mental health is a scary, dark hole that you can lose yourself in if you don’t take the time out to take care of it and to practice self care. Self care is supposed to be made into a habit, so that you can take time out of your day to give your brain a chance to chill, even if it’s just for 20 minutes. Those 20 minutes could be the difference between you having yet another mental breakdown in the middle of the week and getting through the entire week with serenity. I didn’t burn out as much as I usually do during the week when I did this, so there was some sort of improvement from my baseline. I definitely got a lot less worked up when I took the time out to take care of myself and breathe.

But don’t take my word for it — try it for yourself. Take 10 or 20 minutes out of your day every single day and just do something for yourself. Go for a walk, watch an episode of Netflix, indulge in some chocolate, or just sit and stare at the wall — give your body a break from all the stress that you’ve put on it for the other 1,420 minutes of the day because it deserves it. You only have this one life, and this one body so you better make the best of it.

But if you don’t want to do it for yourself, think about your patients. A burned out pharmacist (or literally any other career dealing with customer service) is a recipe for disaster. One of my biggest fears is not catching a physician’s or a technician’s mistake at the final verification — that falls on me. It’s no longer their error, it’s mine. All because I was too tired to focus on what was going on in front of me, or I was too zoned out, or I was too overwhelmed, or I was just not in the right state of mind to decide who gets dispensed what medication. At that point, their safety is in your hands. Would you trust a pharmacist who was working non-stop for a week straight without a single break to carefully review your medications?

I didn’t think so.

So if you do nothing else today, or if you’ve just realized you wasted 5 minutes reading this, then at least take this with you: learn how to breathe. Learn how to take care of yourself. Learn to put your needs first. Maslow wasn’t kidding when he decided to make that pyramid — you are the most important thing to yourself. You are all you have. You are all your patients have. You can’t be the best you if you’re constantly operating at 50%. Spend time to get yourself back up to 100%. Take care of you, nourish you, and learn to love you. So self care? Truth.