Katie Novenario is a third-year PharmD candidate at the University of Washington School of Phramacy and the 2021–2022 APhA–ASP Region 7 midyear regional coordinator.

As student pharmacists, our lives often revolve around the responsibilities that we hold in utmost importance, including academics, internships, research, and many other extracurricular activities. Our busy schedules are built around a commitment we make to push ourselves to grow, but we often forget to center it around that positive sentiment.

Sometimes, 24 hours in a day doesn’t feel like enough, and we constantly wait for the next round of exams to end before we focus on activities that are integral to our well-being. The postponement of these self-care goals is not ideal, but it is also not uncommon. It takes courage to change—courage to step away from that mindset and remind ourselves that we have to take care of ourselves so that we can show up as our best selves for our patients.

Time for self-reflection

I have been guilty of uttering the words, “Maybe I’ll do [insert self-care activity here] after pharmacy school” with many areas of my life. It wasn’t until this last year that I realized this is what patients often say regarding their health goals.

One of my provider readiness classes had us practice and set up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals for ourselves. It was hard. I “failed” to meet an exercise SMART goal. But it helped me empathize with patients and made me do a lot of self-reflection. I asked myself

• How do I spend the time in my day, and how much of that time is spent on helping me recover from my busy days?
• If a patient told me they didn’t have enough time to take care of themselves, how would I feel?
• How do I move on from “failure” in self-care and how can I instead treat it as an opportunity to re-evaluate and respond to my evolving needs on a day-to-day basis?

Figure out a goal-setting method that works

Having one overarching goal related to one aspect of my well-being, I realized, does not work for me. I am the type of person who can hyperfixate on specific goals, so I searched for a more moderate way to approach my well-being in order to better balance my needs.

There are many methods out there to frame goal setting, including the following examples:

• SMART goals
• Randi Zuckerberg’s Pick Three: You Can Have It All (Just Not Every Day), in which she mentions choosing 3 goals from 5 major categories: sleep, work, fitness, friends, and family
• BSQ method: Thinking big in setting goals, coming up with small ways to reach the goals, and acting quickly

I decided to pick 3

The Pick Three method worked best for me. Each day, I would pick 3 areas of my life to focus on.

I modified Zuckerberg’s Pick Three method based on my actual life. My categories were school and work, extracurriculars, fitness, family/friends, and sleep. This helped me categorize the large amount of work from school and work as one category related to my overarching professional goals, and it helped me give myself permission to allot more time to other aspects of my life. It didn’t mean that I started neglecting my school or work, but rather it allowed me to hold other categories as being of equal importance. It taught me to value my wellness as much as my productivity.

There is no absolute, optimal way to set goals for well-being. The most successful methods will be ones that will help us reframe our thinking to remember that we can do more good for others when we take care of ourselves.