The Ways that Pharmacist (et al.) is an Exhausting Job are Underappreciated
It's a post about willpower.
I’ve been taking advantage of Zvi’s recent The Best of Don't Worry About the Vase to retread some old great ideas and work through some I haven’t yet. This post is inspired by the Choices Sequence. The most important single link there is probably Slack1 but the meat of this is related to the first four posts in the sequence: Change Is Bad, Choices Are Bad, Complexity Is Bad, and Choices Are Really Bad. Strongly recommend reading everything linked here if you have the time, but only those last four are going to be important for what I want to touch on here.
Really, most of what I’m going to be doing here is reframing those ideas from a practical context, hoping that this will help you, the reader, more easily recognize these problems in your own life.
Here’s our important jumping in point, Zvi:
Willpower is a controversial topic, and laying out even my simple model would be beyond scope. What matters here is that in the short term, exercising willpower is a cost (whether or not such use has long term benefits). Most of the time, you would prefer to spend less willpower to get the same result.
Often making the otherwise right choice will require the spending of willpower. When you consciously think about eating another cookie, or checking your email, not doing so costs a non-zero amount of willpower. Making that choice over and over could end up not only being distracting via being in choosing mode, but also end up sapping your willpower.
In addition to willpower, Decision Fatigue is a thing as well. Making choices (decisions) is draining something else that is related to but not identical to willpower. At some point, decision fatigue makes further choices carry an increasing cost. Some people have this problem more often than others, but there is always the risk that this will happen to you.
I’m almost tempted to just end here with an “in summary, you now know that willpower-as-a-resource is a thing2”, but we can draw the lines a little more thoroughly than that.
To be maximally reductionist about what it’s like to be a pharmacist, it’s being stuck in decision mode from the moment you walk in the door. For every prescription you’re being asked to call up your decision machinery at minimum twice, once to ask if the prescription makes sense and is accurate as entered (maybe arguably twice here) and then again later to ask if what’s in the bottle is what you say it is. Every question you have to ask yourself is wearing you down little by little. Is this a problem that needs to be elevated to someone else’s attention or should I just fix it? Do I answer the ringing phone or deal with drive-thru? Someone asked me a question, how much do they need to know?
Recognize that if you feel mentally exhausted at the end of your shift it’s very possible this isn’t any kind of sign of poor health so much as a consequence of merely using your brain. If you sprint yourself into exhaustion you would rightly recognize the exhaustion as normal. What’s probably less healthy is if that occurs continuously over long periods of time, or noticeably worsens sharply. Like a training marathon sprinter, you need adequate time to rest or you risk real injury.
Recognize also that there’s nobody to help you here. There’s profit to be made in denying that you need adequate rest. Expect that your employer, your coworkers, your local board of pharmacy, and APhA aren’t going to help you here, because again there’s profit to be made in denying the problem ensuring you’re working to your maximum potential at all times.
Self care! It’s all about self care now! Never mind preventing the burnout, just take a vacation and try not to notice how difficult we’ll make it for you to do this.
So what can you do? Well, I’m definitely serious about recognizing that there’s not going to be anyone in the professional sphere to help you here3. Hopefully you have an adequate support system at home, if not definitely put in the effort to get it before you drown. Definitely have things you enjoy doing regularly outside of work, though be careful those don’t also become willpower drains. I would caution using passive entertainment like television or extra sleep in this manner, but everyone’s different enough that this might be what you need.
Willpower seems to trainable. Keeping your mind sharp in whatever ways you can may help. Adapting to the stresses of your job will improve your ability to handle them to a point. Be more willing to be lazy at your job.
If you need to, quit.
We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves though, next up: commentary on the Moral Mazes Sequence.
Which also mentions the Uruk Machine, another tremendously important series of posts, though that runs off in a far different direction.
(probably)
I mean, arguably not even me but I promise I’m trying here.