Student pharmacists’ schedules can often be extremely demanding, with the need to balance schoolwork, extracurriculars, a job, and more. With hustle culture—an environment that emphasizes hard work and long hours above all else—being ever more present in society, it can be easy to think of self-care as lazy or selfish.

Being a student pharmacist is no walk in the park. In fact, it’s far from it. It’s more like running a marathon, but with your brain instead of your legs. While embarking on such a relentless journey, student pharmacists need to remember one thing among all the chaos: to take care of themselves.

Student pharmacists are no stranger to stress, and as members of a health care profession we are well aware of the dangers of experiencing stress long term. In this phase of our lives, it’s important to know when to pause the deep-sea dive of our education to come up for air. This is much easier said than done because these skills can take a lifetime to fully develop.

Burnout, a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion, has become a pervasive concern in the health care profession.

It took me several years after graduating from pharmacy school and finishing my residency to start making good decisions to improve my financial situation. I had some bad spending habits, very little personal finance knowledge, and a boatload of student loan debt (about $200,000!). This resulted in some unfortunate financial mistakes early in my career.