Feeling burnt out in clerkship

[mew]

I'm dreading going back to clinic on Monday. I spent my whole winter break trying to study and catch up on material/content that I'm weak on but only got through barely 10% of the stuff I wanted to. I'm so exhausted of constantly performing and trying to impress people and worrying about CaRMS and planning my career etc. I don't have mentors in med school that I can talk to and everything is so lonely and stressful to try to figure out on my own- COVID certainly hasn't helped. I'm also becoming more aware of all of the rest of life I'm missing out on- my friends outside of med are starting to get married, find houses, start families, etc and I can't picture when those things will be on my horizon. I knew all of these things going into medicine but something about the constant grind of clerkship and never feeling good enough is really wearing down on me. Does anybody have advice/suggestions for managing feelings like this?

[ellorie]

How efficient is your studying? Clerkship is the worst because you don't have any control over when you get time off, you're moving around all the time, and the exams are frequent.  That being said, often there are old materials circulating or ways of figuring out what is actually high yield to study so that you can focus your study time.  There's no need to learn everything, especially in specialties you don't intend to match to.  You don't need to dazzle everybody you meet to succeed.  Sounds like it might be worth looking at whether you can prioritize or make your studying more efficient (e.g. using downtime at the hospital or commute time rather than your valuable home time).

[mew]

 

50 minutes ago, ellorie said:

How efficient is your studying? Clerkship is the worst because you don't have any control over when you get time off, you're moving around all the time, and the exams are frequent.  That being said, often there are old materials circulating or ways of figuring out what is actually high yield to study so that you can focus your study time.  There's no need to learn everything, especially in specialties you don't intend to match to.  You don't need to dazzle everybody you meet to succeed.  Sounds like it might be worth looking at whether you can prioritize or make your studying more efficient (e.g. using downtime at the hospital or commute time rather than your valuable home time).

I guess it's probably not as efficient as it could be because I feel like I'm studying literally all the time- I'll take a few days off studying at the beginning of a rotation (mostly because I need downtime from the last exam). There's a repository of old exams/materials floating around but they're all from the early-mid 2000s so haven't been of much help, unfortunately.

[ellorie]

5 minutes ago, mew said:

 

I guess it's probably not as efficient as it could be because I feel like I'm studying literally all the time- I'll take a few days off studying at the beginning of a rotation (mostly because I need downtime from the last exam). There's a repository of old exams/materials floating around but they're all from the early-mid 2000s so haven't been of much help, unfortunately.

Maybe see what your classmates on the same rotation are doing?  You need to build in some rest/downtime consistently, not just at the beginning of a rotation.  Medicine is a marathon as you know.

Personally I used to study on the weekends and take weekday evenings off because that was what worked best for me, but some people do the opposite.  Whatever rhythm works for you.

I'm not sure what your standards for yourself are, but personally (as many in medicine) I can be a perfectionist and when I went to medical school I was fairly used to excelling (though maybe less than some because I majored in English which was really fricking hard compared to my science courses) and I had to learn to change my standards for myself from perfection to (in clerkship) what I needed to do to match and be prepared for residency in my specialty and (in residency) what I needed to do to be a safe/competent psychiatrist and eventually pass the RC exam.

Medicine can be really toxic and ultimately the solution to wellness SHOULD be systemic change, but as it stands right now, we all have to find ways to protect and prioritize our own well being as best as we can within the current culture.

[Haribo7173]

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