Healing Healers promotes stress relief
The first thing that went out the window was personal hygiene. When I stayed up the night before an exam, my body reflected all the usual battle scars: sleep deprived eyes, coffee breath, and 3-day-old hair. The weeks leading up to finals, my apartment became a national park with mountains of laundry and take-out tray canyons. It was completely normal for my flashcard count to exceed my steps for the day. “This is fine,” I told myself.
Just like on the graphs I had to study, my stress grew exponentially during my first year of pharmacy school. Doctorate programs demand academic rigor of their students, and reasonably so. To become a PharmD, students must receive a thorough training. However, the training you receive can also be applied to yourself. While caring for the outside community is a noble and necessary pursuit, health professionals should do the same for their own community. How can you begin to heal others if you have not healed yourself?
In collaboration with the Howard University Chapter of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, I developed an initiative called “Healing Healers.” The purpose of Healing Healers is to promote healthy aging and stress relief among health professionals.
Lowering stress
Starting with my own APhA–ASP Chapter, Healing Healers is meant to foster emotional wellness, physical health, creativity, and community building. At a typical Healing Healers event, student pharmacists can rotate between four stations: physical health, emotional wellness, create and play, and engage and connect. Our Healing Healers ambassadors facilitate a variety of activities and installations, all for the purpose of lowering stress. For example, participants can contribute to a “stress wall” by writing out their stressors on Post-it Notes, relax with a cup of tea and learn mediation techniques to help manage stress, or take part in beginner yoga instruction.
A place of peace
My core vision for this project is to incubate a sense of mindfulness amongst my peers. My journey with mindfulness is best represented by meditation. Meditation brings me to a place of peace, where my thoughts are neither flawed nor reality. They are just thoughts and nothing more. The stress of pharmacy school can leave students vulnerable to manifestations of anxiety or depression. It is necessary to take time for yourself and nourish the body with relaxation, sleep, and mindfulness. Rather than quiver at the sight of an exam grade, it is better to approach the exam grade with gentleness. This resilience to hardship can be fostered through a daily practice of meditation.
When meditating, my main focus is on breath. Relying on the repetitive motion of the lungs helps to block out any pending anxieties or worries. One should embrace his or her inner child and live in the present. I remember being a child and spending hours playing with plants, not worrying about a thing. How can that child-like wonder be accessed? This is a tool that I rely on each day in pharmacy school. When I become worried about class, my experience meditating helps me stay in the present and block out “what-if” thoughts.
An important aspect to healing the community is providing outside resources. Our Healing Healers team decided to make it a point to equip event participants with a tool set. This tool set includes water, brainpower snacks, healthy recipe cards, at-home workout regimens, university counseling information, and the university crisis hotline number. And of course, it wouldn’t be a stress relief event without coloring books, right?
Call to action
Are you looking to hold stress relief seminars at your school of pharmacy? Consider having a nap room to educate on sleep hygiene. Or perhaps consider hosting a silent disco to get the heart rate up. Community exhibits can be as simple as placing a Jenga set in the student lounge.
It is never too late to change that coffee breath into meditation breath.
Celeste Cowan is a third-year PharmD candidate at the Howard University College of Pharmacy.