Medical Students: Can We Really Enjoy Our Vacations Or We Are Just Workaholics?

As medical students, we spend all our college life studying and being fully busy that we miss nearly all the social events and life around us.

After graduation, we have to get enough experience in our field so we try to seize every single moment in practicing and studying more and more.

Till reaching the point when we are satisfied with our experience, still learning but when we have built up our career, when does this usually happen? In, at least, 5 years of graduation.
“Finally! Now I can have some days off and have a break”. Really ?!!

You are on your first day of your short vacation, waking up early out of habit and deciding to spend the whole day relaxing and doing nothing else. Few hours later, “this is so boring” you think, and you start thinking of work and cases you have faced.

Has this ever happened to you or it is just me? Am I a workaholic?!

A recent Sermo poll asked their doctors if they considered themselves workaholics. While 54 percent answered yes, a strong majority, 46 percent, said they happily were not.

As one physician put it, “I believe I am a workaholic due to circumstances and would be happy not to be one … much of it stems from a reality of expenses and uncertainty of our future, with a desire to save for an early exit”.

Many doctors noted workaholic tendencies form during med school and residency.

So do you think that you are one of them? Or this thoughts are just due to getting used to have a too busy schedule all the time.

I think most of us feel like workaholics due to the too busy schedule on work days since study days!

Maybe if we tried to make a fully busy vacation schedule we will be able to enjoy vacations without having second thoughts about work or studying. Even machines have to have some rest!

We have to believe that meeting our needs will make us better doctors for sure. This can be done by dealing with them as if they are of our duties. For example, if I want to start doing exercises, I should prioritize going to the gym at least once per week. I can make my schedule flexible by not determining the exact day, but it should be done weekly.

We should believe that we shouldn’t be workaholics to be good doctors. We can have a normal, social life. We can enjoy our vacations in peace of mind without getting bored and thinking about work. We MUST determine what our needs are and meet them to decrease our career continuous stress. We should deal with ourselves as humanbeings.

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So, do you have any suggestions that may help us reaching this goal?