Ahhh Royal College/CCFP year. I hope to never go through this again, having just recently finished my RC exam.
Welcome to Part 2 of the How to Survive and Thrive During Certification Year. Last time, we talked about the pillar of Studying. Today, we will explore the pillar of Self-Care.
Self-Care
“This a marathon, not a sprint.” I heard that lots this year – doesn’t make it any less true. To make it to your desired finish line, you need to keep yourself – mind, body and soul – in peak condition. Sometimes, the demands of residency make this near-impossible. But, in applying at least a portion of your mind to figuring out how to optimize peak mental, emotional, and physical health will likely lead to at least one area that could be tweaked for improvement.
The areas I looked are these:
- Eat
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Socialize
- Love
Eat
Do you like cooking? If so, can we be friends, lol? Mr. Sparks and I both prefer cleaning to cooking. However, we pack lunches probably 98% of the time and usually make supper at home. The vast majority of the time we are eating out, it is socially driven, as opposed to “don’t feel like cooking today / nothing in the fridge” feelings. There’s a definite cost to eating out, even in larger cities where there’s a large number of “cheap” takeout or delivery options.
Batch cooking
This is the oldest trick in book. Batch cook a large quantity of a meal on a day where you’re not on call. For the rest of the week, you can come home and put a portion into a bowl, microwave, and you’re set. Bonus points if you batch cook on a weekday so that you can keep whatever weekend days you have purely for enjoyment.
If you have refined taste buds that would protest at the thought of eating the same thing every day for an entire week, consider batch cooking several things, or keep some fast-cook supplementary recipes and ingredients on hand to add flavour variety.
InstantPot/Slow Cooker
I was a slow cooker owner, even well into the era of the InstantPot. Either of these things would work for cooking time-savings. I have friends who would marry their InstantPot if they could, they love it so much. The slow cooker is obviously slower but if you throw things in the night before, by the end of a non-call work day, your batch cooking for the week is done! If you have a large InstantPot, that works too. If you have a smaller InstantPot, at least you can throw things in, hit a button, and come back to a ready-to-eat meal.
Order Groceries Online
This was already an option prior to COVID-19, but it has gotten to be even more refined in the pressure cooker of the pandemic.
I’m of mixed feelings of about this given the extra cost, but for some people, ordering online winds up being less expensive due to less impulse buys (which can add up), and is more time-efficient that wandering the aisles. Mr. Sparks and I tried it out, and while it wasn’t as useful for us, I have friends who swear by it. See if it works for you!
Sleep
Do you already struggle with sleep habits? Well, CCFP/Royal College year is not the year to make sleep habits even worse. You think you’re being more productive or even sufficiently productive, but in reality, you’re not learning or consolidating information nearly as fast, and lowering your defenses against things like the common cold (and feeling sick will really decrease your learning efficiency).
You may have already heard of sleep hygiene. Let’s review some of those concepts again.
- Make time for sleep. With call demands and long training hours, it can be hard to do this, but you’ll want to try your hardest for exam-year.
- Consider setting up a before-bed routine. This can train your body to recognize that sleep time is approaching.
- Exercise during the day, up until early evening.
- Decrease or cease caffeine intake after 2PM. The average half-life of caffeine is 5 hrs, but can range up to 5 hrs.
- Avoid alcohol close to bedtime.
- Stop screen time half an hour before your desired sleep time.
- Avoid being too hungry or too full prior to sleep. (So…I did not know the meaning of restraint on my first business class flight last summer, and ate every crumb of everything served. Even though it was a luxurious, lay-flat situation, I had the darnedest time falling asleep!)
- Keep the bed a place for sleep and intimacy.
If you have insomnia:
- Get up if you haven’t fallen asleep in a half hour, do something relaxing and screen-free, and try again when you’re feeling more sleepy.
- No napping during the day, as you want to consolidate your sleep to night time.
- Set a consistent wake-up time, even for the weekends.
- Consider looking into cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-i). This is a structured course of talk therapy
Here are some sleep apps that the U.K.’s National Health Service has approved of. And MindShift is a home-grown Canadian app mostly targeted toward anxiety but the Chill Zone guided meditations can be helpful for evening relaxation in preparation for bed time.
Exercise
With all the possible increase in sedentariness this exam year, consider being more conscious of scheduling in exercise time if it’s not already an integral part of your week. There are a multitude of free or inexpensive ways to get started, including YouTube channels and free apps. You could just search “exercise at home” on Youtube to start.
I used to use the 7 Minutes Workout app which is both structured and free – which I love – but started doing an exercise videogame at home with Mr. Sparks after he got it, and we turned that into a couple’s activity. I also started doing weekly Zoom workouts with two of my best friends (who are in another province) and we rotated finding 30min of Youtube exercise videos to do together. Workouts can double as social contact as well. Speaking of which…
Socialize
From one of the longest running studies on happiness comes one solid piece of advice: close, fulfilling relationships are better predictors of a long, healthy, and happy life than social class, IQ, or genetics.
I think this relates to why the advice to study in a group is so common. Trial by fire, but significantly better with compatriots than alone.
Even outside of study groups, however, I would encourage keeping healthy social threads going. I know mine helped me stay balanced in the long, endless-seeming grind of studying.
Love
Your loved ones – be they family and/or closest friends – deserve some forewarning that these are going to be a hard few months where you will be more preoccupied and less available for them. In the time that you do spend with loved one, be fully present. Set down the exam stress and get in the moment. The last thing you want is to get to the end of the exam, raise your head, and realized you’ve alienated the people who are most important in your life.
Here are some questions to help you figure out this area:
- Who are the most important people in your life?
- In this past month, how have you shown up for them?
- What is something you can do together to show them how important they are to you? And when is the next time you will schedule this for?
As always, these are some of my thoughts on what I’ve found helpful and/or useful! What resonated with you? Do you think anything is missing? Would love to hear from you 🙂
-Dr. FIREfly
