Wellness Committee of Touro Middletown

After two weeks of 6 exams, hours of lecture, so much snow, and so many other things going on, we know how hard it is to keep track of all the things you need to do in the day. The Wellness Committee has your back! For this month’s Wellness Initiative our focus is on goal setting through the Zorro Circle. The Zorro Circle is a powerful metaphor for how we can achieve our most ambitious goals as students and future doctors by first limiting the scope of our efforts. The met...aphor is based on the Legend of Zorro and his struggles to battle injustice. This month, through a series of mindfulness exercises you can learn how to use the Zorro Circle and take control of your performance at school while also chipping away at the stressors in your life. For the last week of February, we want to share resources for making to-do lists! This may seem really rudimentary to some, but for those that have trouble even prioritizing doing laundry or cleaning dishes, making a to-do list with even the smallest tasks can make life just a tiny bit easier. And what a wonderful feeling to check tasks off that you finished! A to-do list could be on a post-it, on your white board, on an index card, or even on a napkin. However, here is a website that provides free and downloadable PDF templates that you can add to your tablet, computer, or print. If using a tablet, you can transfer the PDF to a note-taking app like Notability (my personal favorite) or Goodnotes. We hope this can help guide those of you that may need a little bit more direction when trying to plan out our incredibly busy days.

After taking the month to re-center and empower yourself, it’s time to learn how to empower those around us! Part of being a leader is helping others reach their fullest potential. A few ways to empower those around you: building trust with them, fostering open and honest communication, celebrating their successes and failures while reassuring them it is okay to fail, provide constructive feedback, and finally be sincere.

What is the hardest part about creating resolutions for the new year? Keeping them. One way to not only keep, but maintain progress towards your resolution is accountability. When creating your New Year’s Resolutions be ambitious! (But also be realistic). Make sure to document your progress towards your new goals. Take pictures, write it down in a journal or on sticky notes! Most importantly, make sure to celebrate the small victories! When things seem to stagnate or become difficult, reflect upon your progress. See how far you’ve come and think about what you may have learned along the way. If you need to re-evaluate your goal, that is okay!! It is then time to start again.

As we end 2020 this week, we urge everyone to rest, relax, and recharge before the New Year and new semester. Check out these suggestions from COSGP for movies, books, and more!

Winter break is a great time recharge before Spring Semester gets hectic. Here are some Marie Kondo x COSGP tips to help make your winter break productive and relaxing!

The COSGP Wellness Committee is wrapping up this month of gratitude with a reflection on how to integrate these practices into medical school. It can be seemingly impossible to integrate wellness into the academic challenges of medical education. But, gratitude is perfect for medical students. It does not take a huge time commitment, that should be a selling point for everyone reading this caption. As with the previous post, gratitude is more than just being thankful. Be mind...ful about when you practice gratitude. For preclinical students, this may look like sending thank you texts/messages to your study group, expressing gratitude to members of your class who share study resources, appreciate your support system at home and at school, and recognize your own accomplishments. Yes, we encourage you to be grateful to yourself. This might be a difficult task for some, but we assure you that it is okay to recognize how’re handling didactic education during a worldwide pandemic. For clinical students, we encourage you to count the victories (big or small). Healthcare is about celebrating victories whenever we can. As 3rd year students further navigate rotations and 4th year students participate in residency interviews, write down at least 3 victories at the end of each day. Then, when a day comes where you feel burnt out, you can look back on what you have achieved. See more

The COSGP Wellness Committee is going to continue with the November initiative of gratitude by giving a brief introduction to gratitude journaling. If you’re one of those people who just hasn’t been able to keep up with a journal, this is a quick and effective way to jot down the things that make you feel grateful. All you need is a journal and a pencil. First, write down 5 things that make you feel gratitude. They can be concrete things like my dog, my white coat, or my mor...ning coffee. They can be abstract things like the kindness of others, the opportunity to learn medicine, or the joy of waiting for residency interviews. Regardless of your choices, be mindful and meaningful. This activity works best when you are listing things that genuinely inspire gratitude within us. Now, we want you to try to do your own try at a gratitude journal. However, we have put a twist on the gratitude journal we have described previously. Use the template graphic at the end of this week’s post to write 5 things you are grateful for within school and 5 things you are grateful for outside of school. It is important for us to frame our gratitude within school since we spent so much time learning, but also recognizing gratitude in other aspects of our lives. Post your response on your story! Make sure to tag @COSGP and your COM’s MED in the post caption AND use the #COSGPgratitude. See more

The COSGP Wellness Committee is happy to introduce November’s Initiative: Gratitude. Throughout the month, we will be learning about gratitude by practicing gratitude. The following weeks will allow us to express gratitude to important individuals in our lives, start a gratitude journal, and figure out how to integrate these practices into medical school. But first, we will define what gratitude is! In the journal article Gratitude and Well Being, authors Dr. Randy Sansone... and Dr. Lori Sansone eloquently define gratitude as the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself and represents a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation. As their definition points out, gratitude is an action and feeling. There are numerous ways to both practice and experience gratitude as described in our above graphics. A review through research articles reveals that gratitude is actually good for us! Of the list of benefits in the graphic above, the one that sticks out is grateful individuals experience more positive emotions and less negative emotions. As we progress through the 2020-2021 school year, we encourage all students to use gratitude to quell any negative emotions one might encounter in medical school. See more