(upbeat music) - Welcome to the ASHP official podcast, your guide to issues related to medication use, public health, and the profession of pharmacy. - Thank you for joining us for Hot Topics in Community Pharmacy Practice. This podcast is a forum where you can listen in as members share strategies, best practices, and exchange ideas about key topics in community pharmacy practice and education. In today's episode, we'll be discussing student wellbeing and resilience. My name is Lieutenant Commander Calli Atri, and I'm here with Dr. Jason Wong. We are members of the ASHP section of community pharmacy practitioners advisory group on education, communication, and training. Dr. Wong, would you like to say a few words about the podcast before we introduce our panelists? - Sure. Hello everyone, I'm Jason Wong. Together with Calli, we've been talking to a group of wonderful students about wellness and resilience, and we thought it would be a great idea to bring them with this podcast and do a special recording for you out there. So you get to know what the students live are, what they had experience, and what are their thoughts about wellness and resilience. Calli will be taking the lead as a host today, so go ahead, Calli. - Thank you, Dr. Wong. With us, we have four PharmD candidates, and I'll have them introduce themselves, starting with Amanda. - Hello everyone, my name's Amanda Lay. I'm a student from the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. I currently reside in Washington, D.C., and I'm a P3 pharmacy student. Thank you, and Caitlin. - Hi, my name is Caitlin Moe, and I'm a P3 at the University of Wyoming School of Pharmacy, located in Miami, Wyoming. Welcome, Dima. - Hi, my name is Dima Nasla, and I'm from Western University of Health Sciences in California on the West Coast, and I'm a second-year pharmacy student. - Thank you, and Kirsten. - Hi everyone, my name is Kirsten Glista. I am from Salem, Ohio. I go to Northeast Ohio Medical University, and I'm a first-year pharmacy student. - Thank you all for joining us today. Let's go ahead and get started. And, Kristen, I'm gonna go ahead and start this one off with you. What do well-being and resilience mean or look like to you? - To me, resilience and well-being is defined by how you handle challenges that come about and how you allow them to shape you later on. Being able to adapt to difficulties and learn from the challenges you face, I feel like said a lot about how strong you are, and I believe really characteristics of a good leader. Well-being to me, I feel like it's just a balance inside, and it's important to keep it at the forefront in pretty much everything we do. I feel like if you're not focused on your well-being, you're not able to perform at your best self, and I feel like managing your well-being is the most important thing that we could do. - Thank you. Deema, do you have anything you'd like to add? - Yeah, so for me, well-being is being comfortable and calm. So not feeling overwhelmed or overly stressed. I mean, everybody has stress, but having excess stress or being overwhelmed can push somebody to do subpar or less than they would like. Also having a balance in all aspects of your life, so feeling that you're not missing out on anything important to you. And also, for resilience is pushing through difficulties without risking your health. - That's a very good point. Amanda, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. - Yeah, so just to build a little bit more on that, so basically we have been talking about being a good place mentally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually happy for students. And there's that saying where you need to make sure that your cup is full before you pour out to others, essentially just investing time and energy in yourself so that you can do the things that you need to want to. So to me, resilience is when your cup is running a little low, but you still need to push forward. So I was talking to a classmate about what resilience means to her, and she said something that I thought was absolutely fantastic and I thought I would share it with you guys. She said, "To me, resilience is hope in action, "which means that when you get pushed down, "you stand back up." And I really loved how she phrased that because while we're at pharmacy school, lives just don't stop. Sometimes we deal with missing all our different events with our loved ones such as like birthdays, baby showers, or even something as serious as maybe a family emergency. So in those moments, we have to do our best to balance our time and energy while continuing to push forward towards our dream. - I love that hope in action. That's great. Kaitlyn, what do you think while being in resilience meaner look like to you? - Well, everything that everybody has said so far has been brilliant. I love that 'cause you're going to get pushed down. That's just how life is sometimes and you can't prevent it. So how are you going to stand back up? Is what I kind of wanted to add to conversation because well-being in resilience to me is answering the question, what do I need to do to thrive in this difficult situation? And I think it's important to ask this question in every position because what you need to thrive is going to be different for each situation. But yeah, I think well-being occurs a little bit after resilience when you are able to surpass those struggles and show yourself some love. - That's awesome. Again, a lot of you have talked about kind of pushing through, you know, filling your cup, getting past that kind of sticking point. So Amanda, I'm going to take it back to you. What strategies do you use to balance the demands of pharmacy school with other aspects of your life? - So the way that I personally use different strategies, I use kindness and I use organization to try to balance all the demands of pharmacy school and other aspects. I know it sounds a little bit weird to say that I use kindness. But what I've noticed about myself is that I'm always working for the next thing. There's always something to do, trying to stay one step ahead in my studies during school. You know, I push myself to the point of near burnout and I'm definitely my own worst enemy when I don't get things done. But throughout the years, I've learned that I need to be kind to myself. I am human, I make mistakes. I need to make sure to rest and take care of myself before I can keep going. If I don't treat myself with kindness, I won't be able to move forward due to just pure exhaustion. So to avoid this, I try to schedule some recovery time, you know, periodically to ensure that I have the energy and ability to keep going. So for a time, I tried many different things to try to maintain an organization, an Excel sheet, a digital calendar, Canvas calendar, email reminders, alarm reminders, everything that you could possibly think of. And the main strategy that I found myself always coming back to is brain dumping and creating a task list. So I find this most useful when I'm feeling very scattered. I'm sure like everyone can relate to having a task list a mile long, right? Like, you know, when you sit down and you realize you have an assignment due, a study guide that needs to be done, a quiz and exam coming up, you need to make sure to check in on your family, you need to plan dinner that you promised you were gonna do, network with other professionals, go to conferences, it's just never ending. So when I'm in that moment, my head's spinning, I sit down and I use a psychology strategy called brain dumping, which is where you write down all of your thoughts and ideas on a piece of paper to free up that space in your brain. Anything that I need to get done, I write down, it doesn't matter, the order that I write in, my goal is to release all of my thoughts onto the piece of paper. Once I can't think of anything more to add, I look at that paper and I figured out how to organize it. I figure out what task is most urgent and then I start a new list. Then I organize it in terms of urgency and then write down the actual step that I can take to achieve everything that I need to do. So using these strategies during my pharmacy school career helped me stay on top of everything that I need to do. - Well, that brain dumping, I think I've done that, but I didn't know there was a name for it. So that's great. And I also love your comments about kindness. Caitlin, I know you responded pretty positively to that. Do you wanna add any? - Yeah, first of all, I also didn't know I was brain dumping. It's just, it feels like there's no other way to make sure you get everything done, especially in the order that it should be done if I don't do it that way. In addition to doing that, I also absolutely schedule everything. If I'm having a video call with my sisters or if I want to meet up with friends, volunteering events, going to the gym, anything that I want to do, I schedule, including like time to do anything. For example, on the weekends and between my certain time, I might schedule two to three hours to be spontaneous where I could do whatever I want during that time. That way I can still feel spontaneity in my life and stay on track to do the things that I need to do. One other strategy I've been using to make sure I can do everything that I want to do is say no. You can't say yes, Sabrina. Do I want to? Totally, especially after I went to a talk recently and then said say yes to everything because you can never know what we might accidentally turn down all would be amazing. And this doesn't really work for my lifestyle. So my mantra is it's okay to say no. One thing I do before I say yes to something is ask, what do I need to sacrifice to say yes to this? Do I need to sacrifice time with the significant other? Do I need to sacrifice time with my family and friends? Do I need to sacrifice time studying? Maybe my grades will suffer? And am I okay with their consequences? And that's on another strategy I'm using to enroll friends. - That's awesome. I love that and everybody has talked about scheduling and responsibilities and some different strategies. So Dima, I'd like to ask you, how do you manage your schedule and responsibilities, especially to ensure some of that time off? - So I do have a classmate who actually allowed me to share her story on her behalf. So she does have two kids and she says like to organize her schedule. She has one calendar with all her class times, all her appointments, like her kids appointments. And she also adds in time to like study and work. She also tries to take out her kids once a week for dinner. One week in a month that's dedicated to her kids somewhere in like an amusement park, a museum or a library. And she also has a time where she does homework at the same time as her daughter. So like they're doing homework together and then they go to sleep together. So she tries to make time for everything. - That's a lot I think scheduling and balancing. It's all definitely a balancing act, I guess you could say. And Amanda, I wanna come back to you to kind of talk, you've talked a lot about ensuring that your cup is filled, that you are taking care of yourself before you can take care of others. So I wanna know how you end up coping with anxiety or with insecurities about your studies, future professional relationships. How do you cope with all of that? - So I'm a firm believer in saying everything will work out in the end. Currently in my pharmacy school education. So I'm in a distance education pathway at LECOM, which means that most of my school is virtual. So life for me looks very different than most traditional pharmacy school students. I can't go grab a cup of coffee or dinner with my classmates just to de-stress. I can't go to professor office hours to discuss my grade 'cause people get busy. They don't always respond to their emails quickly. So you miss a vital part of interacting with your peers. So it can be very isolating and foster that anxiety and insecurity. And there's more pressure on us to go out and make connections independently, to find professional contacts, even if it's cold calling or emailing different places to try to find rotations in order to even graduate. So at the end of the day, pharmacy students are all stressed in similar ways. Everyone has different ways to cope. In my personal coping mechanism to deal with the anxiety and security about my studies, my future, I try to talk to my friends. Every day, it's gonna look different. When we're having anxiety about our studies, I talk to my classmates. Often when I feel like I'm alone, I'm really not. There's a sense of camaraderie and being able to get together with like a small group and say, man, today just sucked. And wow, I feel like I'm drowning. There's just a lot going on. So after these conversations, my friends and I feel like a small weight that lifted off of our chest, because you're not alone. You're all in this together. And then when I'm having anxiety about my future or the pressure of making connections, I try to talk to someone who's gone through it before me. So I ask them for advice. I ask them about their story and how they got to where they are. I learn about that many people genuinely want to help. And so it never hurts to have these conversations, even if it's reaching out to a stranger on LinkedIn, asking if you can pick their brain about their life experiences and how they got to where they are. So as terrifying as the unknown can be, I lean on those around me to try to call my anxieties and my insecurity about my study. That's great. And I think, like you mentioned, nobody's alone in this. There are so many people that are experiencing this. And I think that's what's great about this podcast is we're kind of bringing that conversation to the forefront. So if it's okay, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this difficult subject, but Dima, I was wondering if you'd be able to talk about if you've ever had a panic attack and how you handle it? - Yes. So since pharmacy school, I have had a couple. But usually I try to leave the environment that I'm in. So like if I'm at my desk, I go to an area that I'm not usually in, like maybe my backyard, I walk outside, I go to my car or I go to the living room, the kitchen somewhere that I'm not usually at. And I make sure to change my environment to change the stimulus that's causing the anxiety or attack. So that allows my brain to like relax and then see a different stimulus that doesn't cause panic or that that can relieve some of the stress that, so this allows my brain to recharge, relax, and then it makes it ready to learn, memorize, and retain information. - And Kirsten, I know this has come up in conversations with you as well. Would you care to talk about this as well? - So like Dima said, I think it is really important to kind of get out of the environment and maybe that is like causing the stress. I have been in, it was probably a couple years ago, I would say something came over me in anxiety and panic overshadowed my whole life. I was doing my master's program and I lived away from home and toward the end of it, I just, I let the stress of school and I didn't really have a good balance. I kind of let it just take over and I lost control with it. And there were times I couldn't even go in the grocery store. And the only thing that would help would be like Dima said, going and sitting out in the car and things like that. So usually I've gotten the help I needed and without my family support, there's no way that I would even be able to talk about this today to be honest, but I was able to get the help and I was able to get the resources that I needed to get me through it. So I am a lot better than I was a couple years ago, but usually if I have a panic attack, I let myself acknowledge that it's happening and I try to ground myself by recognizing where I'm standing. So I try to describe like what my feet feel and like the pressure that I feel standing there. And I also use a technique. It's like the five senses technique. So I try to list like what I see smell, feel, hear, and taste just to take my mind back to describing how I'm feeling in the present time. And basically all that is just to try to reel my mind back in and feel okay again. And yeah, those are some of the techniques that I use and they really have been helpful. Sometimes you get in positions where you can't necessarily leave and you have to be in the moment, say, okay, I'm having this happen and I know what's happening and what am I going to do to reel myself back in. I am okay, I'm safe, the show must go on. So it's a very real thing and a lot of people, it is hard to deal with panic attacks in the moment. It's so hard, but once you find a strategy and the support that you need, you have good people around you that understand that you're going to feel safe, you're going to feel okay and you will get through it. - Yeah, I really appreciate kind of how you framed that grounding and using the five senses. I practice a similar meditation called Wheel of Awareness where you kind of check in with all these things and pull yourself back into the present. But I feel like we could talk for hours about support networks, both school, work and home related. But I do want to go on to this next question and get a couple of different perspectives. Caitlin, I'm going to start with you. So when you think about transitioning from student to professional with the possibility of serving as a preceptor or residency program director, supervisor in some capacity, what aspects are important to consider when assessing your own or someone else's wellbeing? - Yeah, so firstly, I don't want to go back to something Amanda said, which is you have to help yourself before you can help others. So it's important that you are helped in yourself first. I want people to use the cup phrase. I like to use the phrase that people use in airplanes all the time, make sure you put your oxygen mask on first before you help others, but they're oxygen masks on. - So true. Secondly, I think it's important to just listen. I think everybody just wants to be listened to, everybody wants to be validated. So it's important to really acknowledge what people are saying that their needs are. And thirdly, just to add a little bit of something that might be a bit more actionable, I took a mental health birthday course open summer at the University of Wyoming and the like tenets of self-air that they mentioned are emotional, physical, community, spiritual, financial, intellectual, occupational and environment. So when you're making sure those needs are being cared for, then you're making sure that person or yourself is being cared for. So some examples I have are one, make sure you're looking at all aspects of health. I mentioned some that might be a little bit more of steer, like financial health or occupational health, environment health, what does that mean? For me, it means financial, I make a budget. That makes me feel secure in my finances. For environment, I have been sitting at my desk all day and I cannot participate anymore. So take a walk outside. The main person mentioned this a little bit earlier in their discussion with a panic attack, but it can help in lots of other situations too. I also want to make sure that you address all other topics. For example, for physical health, we think of exercise. Some people might think of diet instead of exercise, but we need to think of the full culture, including physical safety or are you sick or are you ill? Yeah, those are just some examples I had at that time. - I love those, those are great examples. And Kirsten, would you care to add anything, especially from the perspective of somebody that's kind of just entering into the pharmacy career? - Yeah, so being a P1 student, it's kind of hard because I have three more years to see myself in those professional shoes at the moment. From my perspective, as someone that's about to start it be rotations and get familiar with how rotations work, I feel it's important to be aware of some of the signs that come with like burnout and being overwhelmed and feeling too much pressure. I feel like a lot of environments that you get into can be really stressful and unfamiliar. So I feel like as a professional acknowledging that and creating an environment where someone feels comfortable enough to tell you, hey, I'm feeling this type of way or hey, I'm feeling overwhelmed. Like maybe can I just take a couple minutes? Like just creating an environment that is professional, it's respectful, but it's also an environment where people feel welcomed and that their feelings do matter. I feel like that's really important for being a future professional or future supervisor is having the ability to make people feel that way because I would want someone to make me feel that way as I enter my rotations also. - That is great insight. I think just generally on this topic it feels like it's always something that we can be working on on ourselves with other folks. It just feels like there's a lot of room that we can make strides and really work to take care of ourselves. I would love to keep the conversation going, but that is all the time that we have today. So I wanna thank our speakers. Thank you so much for sharing, for joining us today to discuss student wellbeing and resilience. If you haven't before, I encourage you all to check out ASHP's online resources for community pharmacy practitioners at ashp.org. You can find member exclusive offerings such as the Community Pharmacy Resource Center, which includes examples of best practices, advanced practice, case studies and more. Thanks again for joining us for this episode of Hot Topics in Community Pharmacy. (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to ASHP official, the Voice of Pharmacists Advancing Healthcare. Be sure to visit ashp.org/podcast to discover more great episodes, access show notes and download the episode transcript. If you loved the episode and wanna hear more, be sure to subscribe, rate or leave a review. Join us next time on ASHP official. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
