How to Tell When Your Stress Level Is Becoming Harmful

When left unmanaged, chronic stress can weaken your immune system, lead to burnout, and rob you of the reason you wanted to do this critical work in the first place. You can’t control a lot when it comes to this virus, like the exposure you have to other people’s suffering, or how many patients you may need to treat with the resources you have, but with the right strategies, you can change how you respond to these distressing situations. 

The Ultimate Guide to Wellness in Your Health Professional Program

Becoming a student in the health professions comes with hurdles before you even begin, whether it’s making it through pre-med, the MCATs, or even simply the challenges of keeping your grades up while maintaining those resume-building extracurriculars. There’s a good reason that the time leading up to school is so grueling: it helps prepare you to shift into the big league. 

The theme of our guide is connection. Building connections with your work, your peers, and yourself will provide a path through some of the most difficult times you’ll face ahead. Let’s take a look at some of the common challenges students face during the first years of school, and some proven ways to overcome those obstacles.

Mindfulness in Medicine

Medical school can be overwhelming. With 8:00 AM lectures after 2:00 AM study nights, cadaver dissections with the omnipresent taste of formaldehyde, changing from white coat to scrubs to physical exam attire back to scrubs all in the same day, committing intricate biochemical pathways to memory, and coming home to an empty fridge. It’s hard to remember to breathe amidst it all. That’s where mindfulness and meditation come in to play!

Breathing Practices to Calm the Mind Before a Test

So how do you make friends with that stress response? One thing you can do is teach yourself breathing techniques. Respiration and the nervous system are closely intertwined. A stress response can cause your sympathetic nervous system to get revved up which in turn leads to fast breathing or hyperventilation. If you do that for long enough, you start to lose too much CO2. As a result you develop a respiratory alkalosis, in other words, your blood pH rises. So the solution is to simply hold on to some of that CO2 by breathing more slowly and allowing your blood pH to settle back down. By regulating your breathing, you can shift your physiological response to stress and help yourself calmly breathe and mindfully focus through whatever is in front of you.