 I have no time for myself as a third-year med student. I'm tired on my rotations, I'm stressed, I'm overworked, I'm losing a part of myself, I want to avoid burnout and find balance. That sounds like you guys, I promise you are going to love this video. This video is for you because in this video I'm going to give you my top nuggets to just not only find balance in your clinical rotations but make it your most successful year in medical school yet. We're gonna get to those nuggets after this intro. All right guys what is going on? Alex here from the MD journey helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. If you're new to this channel first of all welcome. I am a fourth-year medical student going into internal medicine and for the last two and a half years I've been helping both pre-meds and med students on their journey via study tips, productivity and a huge hint of motivation. So if that sounds exciting to you first of all subscribe to this channel and then if you like this video give it a like. And before we get into our six nuggets on how to find balance and avoid burnout during your third year rotation I want to ask you are you struggling on learning how to study? Do you want to step by step way? If you do check out the link in the description there'll be a free guide on exactly how I study for every single rotation. This is like the guidelines that I use to help me crush all my shelf exams and get honors on my rotations. If you guys are interested again those will be in the description below. But let's get to the nuggets which is I'm feeling stressed out. How do I get over that feeling? How do I find balance? And guys using these six nuggets that I'm about to share with you I was able to make my third year rotation my most successful year yet. That's also the same time where the MD journey grew to almost 200,000 visitors in a year, grew a YouTube channel to over a thousand, wrote a couple of books and video courses. I found time for myself and I think I also enjoyed my rotations a lot. So I'm going to give you those tips because I think if not all of them some of them are going to apply to you can at least make a little bit of adjustments to your daily life as a clinical student. So let's get into the tips. So the first nugget is a tip that I love giving for just productivity and balance in general is that you have to schedule your fun first. And this is a tip that most students don't get on the surface level and it's really hard to apply as a clinical student. But on the surface is what you do is you find all of the time requirements that are unadjustable. You know this means your clinical schedule. If you have clinic, if you are in the hospital, you generally know what times or time ranges you can be in the hospital. You may go early into the hospital on your wards a month as early as like five or six. And you may stay as late as five or six unless you have a call that even later. But you roughly know what those days are going to be like. So in your calendar, if you know when your call cycle is or if you know what your clinical schedule is, you know, overestimate a little bit and give it some buffer room. But outside of those hours, don't schedule your studying time first. Don't think about what chapter you're going to read of the review book because you're most likely going to just come home and nap. So instead, find one hour for yourself. It's not going to happen every day. I'm going to tell you that, but find one hour for yourself and schedule something that you enjoy. This may be going to the gym. If you are somebody that likes to be a health freak, this may be just sitting in the couch eating some ice cream, watching your favorite TV show or Netflix. It's totally okay because you are finding a balance. You're finding time for yourself. That may be something also such as like spending time with your significant other. If you're married, coming home from a clinical rotation is hard because you're tired and you don't have time for, you know, your spouse. So find that hour, whether it may be dinner, going to a date, find it and schedule in first. Then after those are scheduled for every single day possible, you may not be able to do it on a call day or on a day that's a little unpredictable. After that schedule, you're in your studying and we're going to talk about studying and one of the other nuggets, but schedule your fun first, schedule your wellness first, because once you do that, guys, you'll find that in addition to being a medical student, there are also elements of you scheduled into your life. So it's really important. I give these tips in a lot of my videos. So if you guys have more questions, comment down below, but make sure you schedule your fun first. So tip number two, and this is getting right into the studying is you have to avoid bulky study strategies and kind of schedules. As a clinical student, you can't go to the study schedule immediately where you're reading a text and then you're going to do, you know, hundreds of practice questions. Also try to do thousands of flashcards and finally wrap it up with a bunch of practice exams. And who knows what videos you it's going to require you to have a very lean machine when it comes to your study. That means one resource for maybe your viewing one resource for your questions. And that's pretty much it. And then having some system evaluating it. So again, if you want to know the system, I'm going to go ahead and give you my system that I used linked in the description. It's going to be a free guide and you'll see step by step on how I did it. And the very end of the video, I'm also going to forward you to where you can go next if you want to learn kind of how to study more via more advanced techniques that I've used. But you have to go as lean as you can. So you can try to use every resource. There's some great ones out there. I recommend a lot for my rotations, but I still recommend that you use no more than maybe two or three and one ideally if you can. So resources like online method are amazing because they're kind of an all in one inclusive resource. And that way you don't have to go through a lot of different things and avenues to learn what you need to know. So again, OME is going to be linked in the description with a discount if you're interested in. But find lean study strategies. And I'll give you a quick example. Normally when we study, we go through some type of book, we try to review, we take notes, and then we try to assess our learning your practice questions. You may not have time for that a question, you know, a rotation like your internal medicine rotation, you may just have way too many questions and a shelf exam or a board exam. That's way too broad for you to read a huge text and do all the questions. So what you can do instead is do the questions first, evaluate what you're missing. You may not have learned about some of the stuff on your rotation. If you're not using a review book, just use those questions to evaluate what you don't know, make a list, make some flashcards if you love using software like Anki, and then review your weaknesses as you're doing your questions. You can go back to the review book to kind of look at what you don't know versus reading a book and then try to evaluate what you don't know. Do the questions and then use that to guide you on where you need to be spending your time. So as a good example of a lean machine when it comes to studying, another quick thing I'll give you and I'll make a totally different video on how to study during clinical rotation. But things such as using small bits of time to do like flashcards or quick reviews on pieces of paper. These include like your lunch hours, times that you're waiting for attending. There's a lot of room for you to be effective. I was studying while walking back and forth from the hospital to my car and those are usually like 10 minute walks. So 20 minutes of studying there took out another half hour I didn't have to do at home. So again, be lean and be very efficient. Nugget number three, this is going to seem very strange to a lot of you guys, but you want to under commit yourself by seven hours. Seven hours, that's a random number, not really. I think it's also the perfect number because that's usually a good time that we could sleep if we're low on sleep. But basically what you want to do guys is after you schedule and you're fun first. Before even actually you start to schedule and you're studying. Find seven hours, you're just going to block off for nothing. You may do something fun during that time. You may sleep during all those seven hours. A great example is if you have a Saturday that you don't have any rotations, you may be on like a clinical schedule, then make that day off. Give yourself at least seven hours and not do anything that includes studying. If you are on a rotation like internal medicine or surgery where a day off is very hard, find seven hours somewhere. You may have to be more flexible if your rotation requires more of your time, but usually you should be able to find some seven hours and they don't have to be at the same time at all. But find those seven hours and block your time off to do absolutely nothing. You know, then once you get to those time frames, you can be productive if you feel like studying, you can. If you want to go to the gym, you can. If you want to sleep, do that. It is good for you, but find those seven hours and then find time for your studying. Again, if you guys, if you've understand the idea of Parkinson's law, which is saying that work will fill in the time that you allocate to it. So if you give yourself 10 hours to study, you are going to take 10 hours to study. If you give yourself six, you are going to take six and you're going to be probably just as effective in those six as you are in the 10 hours. So use the Parkinson's law method, take seven hours away from your study kind of bucket and give that to yourself for rest, whatever it may be, doing absolutely nothing, watching TV, watching sports, you pick what you want to do, but those seven hours are going to be golden and most of your classmates are probably going to fill it in with studying and they're probably not going to be that effective. So again, make your studying lean and then use these seven hours before you've been scheduling your studying. I think you guys, if you try it, you'll probably will find that it works wonders. Worked wonders for me. Those are the seven hours I used to put back into this blog and get to the point that it has. So again, seven hours, find them and then take them away from your study allocation. So nugget number four, this is really big for anyone that feels like they're losing a part of themselves. Maybe they feel like medicine has now taken over their life and they're really rethinking the decision of going to medical school and becoming a physician because they don't want to see a life in the future that looks like that, you know, they want to see some balance. So my tip to you is finding one meal a week that you can schedule with somebody that's special to you that's outside of medicine and don't talk about medicine. So if you have a significant other, this is really easy. If you have a spouse is even easier, schedule one meal, maybe away from your home, away from your first aid, whatever it may be, and don't talk about medical school. Don't talk about your clinical rotations. Talk about them. Talk about you. This could be your friend. This could be your parent. This could be, you know, whoever it may be, your colleague, but don't talk about medical school. This is a great example of how to basically force yourself to have balance in an environment where it feels like it's medicine all the time. You have to choose when you don't talk about medical school. You are not a medical student 24, 7, 365 days a year. It may feel like it, but to avoid that, you have to do these small forceful kind of techniques to put yourself out there. And that means basically if you have a significant other for me, I would usually see my now fiance once a week, if not once every other week, and we would find some time to do dinner or just go hang out, whatever it may be, but I would try my best. Sometimes I failed or try my best not to talk about medical school because then you can be there with that person and you can not be a medical student, which sometimes sounds glorious. So try that out for any of you guys that feel like you are losing a part of yourself. So nugget number five, this is one that's probably really obvious, but it's kind of a trick to being efficient is using the power of meal prep. Basically the tip is guys, you have to watch your nutrition. You have to watch your sleep and you need to minimize your caffeine. It's all about taking care of yourself in terms of health. So first tip in this broader category is using meal prep. I loved cooking on my day off my seven hours, whatever it may be, and trying to at least cook for half the week. That way I didn't have to be unhealthy. I like the school cafeteria. I didn't have to waste a ton of money. And usually my food tasted just as good, if not better than the cafeteria options. So just kind of keep that option out for you. Meal prep, if you're new to it, you know, there was plenty of options and kind of training online on how to do it, but super effective, save yourself a lot of money is very easy. Number two in this kind of thing is getting enough sleep. So sometimes all I would do is I would come home, especially it was a call day, and I wouldn't commit to any studying. I would go to bed because I wanted my seven, you know, I usually function well at six and a half, but I wanted my seven to six and a half hours every night. I didn't always get it, but that's really more on me than my clinical schedule. So you need to prioritize sleep as much as you prioritize your study. And finally, this is really hard, especially for me as a coffee lover is to limit your caffeine because you will find that the more caffeine you take, especially on those busier rotations, the more tired you are without it, you know, makes sense. And so you're going to be dependent on this thing, and it's going to be a struggle, you know, clinical and third year rotations, if that is basically kind of your energy boost, you need to find those natural times of energy when you can, turn a coffee when you need to, but avoid caffeine supplements whenever possible. I promise you, you know, take a detox. I took one for six months during my clinical rotations, and it was probably all the best things I did for myself. So avoid it when you can at all costs. Tip number six, golden nugget number six is probably my most important because when we're trying to find balance, when we're stressed out, sometimes it's a time management issue, sometimes it's a mindset issue. And I hopefully you guys have found some tips before in the first five that can help you. But the last one is sometimes students hate their rotations and they're not looking at it probably the right way. I did this too, where for example, I wasn't going into surgery. So during my surgery rotation, was I a happy student? Absolutely not. I was trying to find reasons and excuses of why I was miserable during surgery, the long hours, you know, didn't care for the patient population that was not the field of medicine I want to go into. You know, no offense to anyone going into a field. It's amazing. It's just not for me. I was finding excuses and thus I was being miserable because it was an eight week rotation. But during the rotation, I stopped halfway and said, what do I enjoy about surgery? And I enjoyed the patient care. So I tried to find as many opportunities to spend during my patient or to spend on patient care. Sometimes my attendings would let me leave the operating room to go check on the patients post-op. And I enjoy that. And I did that more. So basically, this is a long way of saying, find your golden nugget. You're going to need this multiple times. You're going to need multiple golden nuggets during your third year rotation and all of that school. But usually you get a result. For example, you may work really hard on building a relationship with the patient. And it works out amazingly well. The next time you see a patient, you're going to try to put just as much effort because you want that result. You may not always get it, but you know that the result was good enough that the effort is worth putting in every single time. So for you, that golden nugget may be learning something, being able to teach something. I love doing that, which is why I do all these YouTube videos. I love finally something clicking and then saying, okay, I'm going to teach this somebody. And so I continue to find those opportunities where I learned as best I can and then try to teach. Doesn't work out successful all the time, but I try my best. Those are my golden nuggets. For your clinical rotation, you're going to find those golden nuggets. You're going to have to try to find those patient interactions. Those examples of where you studied hard and you did really well in your shelf exam or step two exam, whatever it may be, find those little reasons, ask yourself, why am I doing this? Was it worth it to put in that hard effort to get that result that I really enjoyed and then try to continue to put that effort and day in and day out? What you'll find is that the time will go by much faster. The more golden nuggets you have, the more motivations you have to keep you going through the day. And you're going to get tired. You're going to come home tired and still want to take a nap, but you're going to enjoy the process a lot more. It's going to be quicker. And that process of I feel like I'm losing myself. I'm not enjoying myself and I'm being burnt out. You know, obviously the other tips that I provided are going to help, but this is really important. You don't want to go the third year and saying, oh, thank God that's over, because that's going to be your life in some form or fashion. You're going to be in the clinic. You're going to be in the wards. You're going to be a doctor, obviously, when you graduate. So you don't want to say, oh, thank God, because it's going to get tougher. I'm about to become a resident and then there's some anxiety coming through how busy I'm going to be. So understand you need to find those golden moment moments to get you over those homes that are going to come with you, tired or unmotivated. So hopefully that little bit of motivation that they kind of helped you guys out. Just understand those six nuggets guys. I think that if you apply those tips, you will not only make third year, something that you survive, but something you're really going to thrive in and enjoy. So if you guys enjoyed this video, a quick question, you know, what's your biggest takeaway from this video? What's one tip that you can really apply that maybe you haven't started to do already, but you could see it's having some potential and making your clinical rotations a little bit easier. You know, tell me that tip. Go ahead and just comment down below. I love to hear what advice I gave you that really resonates with you and share any questions that you guys have in the link in the description below as well. But hopefully this video was helpful. Before I conclude, I wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of learn where to go to next. Again, if you are a clinical student, being burnt out probably is not your only problem. You want to learn how to study better. You want to learn how to get honors, how to do well in step two, how to prepare for residency applications, all of that while being a successful and sane medical student. So if you are interested, I'm creating my newest book and my newest kind of product called the clinical guide. I'll put a link or kind of a screenshot of it here. That's a preliminary book cover, but it's going to be a more of a product or more of a project than just the book. And to learn more about it and to help me create it, I'm giving you the opportunity just add your name to the link in the description. It's an email list where basically I send you feedback. I ask you what do you want to learn? What do you want me to teach you in this guy? What do you want me to teach you in this product? And then I put it in there. So I want to really make this project not only something that I am giving you advice of, but I'm answering your specific questions. So if you're interested, you want to join the clinical guide project, then go ahead and add your name to the link in the description and you'll be the first to know when it goes live. It is also getting some bonuses as well as free training, exclusive free training on crushing your third year rotation. If all that sounds exciting, again, link is in the description, but I'm going to stop babbling quickly into this video. Again, if you enjoyed it, give this video a like, subscribe, last thing. I'm always going to put this in the kind of the bottom as long as I can do my editing magic. I'm trying to get to 25,000 subscribers this year. So I'm very far from that goal, but I try to make big goals because we'll see if I even accomplish it or not. But I need your help obviously to get there. So I'm currently at about 1200 and I'm trying to get to 25,000. So help me like this video, subscribe to the channel if you're not. Share it with somebody you think this will kind of resonate with will be helpful. Share it with your med school class if you're brave enough. Just or tell a friend be a word, whatever it may be, word of mouth. Just help me out. Help me help as many medical students as possible. Hopefully I helped you a little bit on your journey and thank you so much for joining me on mine. But I will end this video. I will see you guys in the next one. Take care my friends.