How to Get Through Medical School without Hating Your Life

Studying to become a physician is the most rigorous graduate training in the US. Time is limited, stress is high, and the threat of burnout lies around every corner.

While about 20,000 MD med students graduate each year, as well as another 8,000 DO students, many med school graduates end up miserable and burnt out, and a substantial portion even regret their decision to pursue medicine at all.

But pursuing medicine shouldn’t mean sacrificing your health and happiness. Here’s how to get through medical school without hating your life.

1 | Fix Your Relationship to Delayed Gratification

The first step is fixing your relationship with delayed gratification.

There are two camps of people—those who need to practice more delayed gratification and those who need to practice less. The easy part is determining which camp you fall into. The hard part is trying to work toward the middle.

Many, but not all, young people don’t prioritize delayed gratification.

This is most clear when it comes to their finances and health. Young people often rack up credit card debt without understanding the true long-term cost and downsides of doing so. They also party too hard, neglect exercise, stay up all night, and eat junk food because they think they’ll live forever.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Some people are overly focused on delayed gratification, saying things like, “I’ll be happy when…” or “I’ll relax after this one more thing…”

Many of my friends and I are in this camp, and I imagine quite a large number of other medical students are as well, especially when compared to the general population. After all, medical school is a risk-averse profession with an extremely long training path. Delayed gratification is the name of the game.

For anyone who prioritizes delayed gratification a little too much, realize that there is no elusive “then.” Life and happiness don’t start later. Your life is happening right now, in this moment. As John Lennon famously said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

That’s a lesson I didn’t learn until my late twenties because I was always overly focused on the next step. By understanding this truth, I was able to better appreciate each day rather than habitually looking forward to the next thing on the horizon.

This also helps you find balance in your life during the relevant seasons, which I’ll touch on later. You probably still won’t love your USMLE Step prep, but you’ll likely find the week after more enjoyable.

But it’s not just about escaping with vacations either. There’s joy and pleasure to be found even in the mundane, unsexy things of everyday life. For example, we all need to exercise. Is there a type of exercise that excites you? Personally, I love speed and drifting cars on the race track—see more on my Jubbal & Cars channel—so cycling gives me a speed fix while also catering to my love of complex machinery.

If you’re someone who falls into the camp of needing to practice more delayed gratification, work to cultivate self-discipline. Start by recognizing your triggers—those moments when you feel the urge to give in to immediate pleasure, like scrolling on TikTok when you should be going to bed or reaching for a bag of chips out of boredom.

Set clear goals and reward yourself for progress towards long-term milestones rather than immediate gratification.

Surrounding yourself with the right types of friends can make a world of difference. Spend time with people who help you focus and prioritize your goals rather than those who try to convince you to ditch your responsibilities and chase oblivion.

2 | Know Your Seasons

The next step is knowing your seasons.

You will have seasons that are more or less intense, and how you approach each is going to be the difference between maintaining your sanity and burning out.

During your seasons of intensity, don’t shy away from grinding hard, pushing your limits, and seeing what you’re capable of.

If you’re in your 20s, test your limits because you won’t ever have another time in your life where you’ll be able and willing to push yourself this hard. You’ll have the energy, the relative lack of commitments and responsibilities, and for some, the need to prove yourself.

When you’re in the middle of a Sigma season, remember it won’t last forever. It’s just a temporary stage.

The time leading up to the MCAT or USMLE Step 2 is also going to be quite intense.

Focus, eliminate distractions, and optimize every minute if you want to have a top result. Now, not everyone does, and if you’re okay with more ordinary results, then you can take a more ordinary approach. There’s nothing wrong with either strategy, and there are tradeoffs with both. But whatever you decide, be intentional about it.

After a big test, do whatever you can to relax and take a breath. It can be helpful to schedule a small vacation afterward, even if it’s just a couple of days, to unwind and recharge.

After I took USMLE Step 2, I went on a 4-day excursion with classmates to Zion National Park, and it was amazing. It was the perfect way to connect with nature and celebrate our accomplishment.

Slower seasons, like the second half of the 4th year of medical school, need to be cherished.

When we’re in middle school and high school, we take summer break for granted. Sometimes, it may even feel overlong and boring.

But in medical school, you can’t let any free time go to waste. It’s imperative that you know when your free time is coming up and plan accordingly.

During the summer before medical school, travel, throw yourself into your hobbies, and spend as much quality time with your loved ones as you can. You will never have free time like this again, so don’t waste it. Even in medical school, the summer between MS1 and MS2 will likely be focused on research or other medical school extracurriculars. And there’s no summer break after that.

The second half of your fourth year of medical school is another opportunity to travel if it interests you. The reason is you won’t get many opportunities in residency. Your next big break will be when you complete your residency and start your life as an attending physician.

I was able to book trips I could never have paid for on my own thanks to the power of credit card churning, which I speak about over on the Kevin Jubbal, M.D. YouTube channel.

And then there are hybrid seasons to consider.

For me, this was the winter break before taking my big USMLE Step exam. I mostly relaxed, but I also did 1 to 3 hours of studying each day.

But don’t think that there’s just one right or wrong approach. You don’t HAVE to grind during the winter break, and you don’t HAVE to do zero work either. The key here is to be intentional. Don’t fall into the autopilot trap.

3 | Embrace Hedonic Adaptation Intelligently

Next, embrace hedonic adaptation intelligently.

Hedonic adaptation is natural and refers to our tendency to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness after experiencing major positive or negative events or life changes.

For example, if you’ve ever spoiled yourself with something nice, you probably were elated the first couple of times you did it, but after a few more times, it just became your new normal.

It’s difficult to escape hedonic adaptation, and none of us in modern society truly have, despite some people’s wishful thinking. We’ve adapted to the comfort of a bed we like, and going back to a crappy old spring mattress simply won’t do. We’ve adapted to traveling with A/C, and driving a car without it is miserable.

We naturally seek and prioritize comfort, but we can game the system to improve our enjoyment.

The best way to approach hedonic adaptation is to make slow and stepwise increases to your lifestyle.

In med school, I tracked every expense down to the cent, and I was living off of $22,000 per year during my clerkships. I had my own apartment, and although it was a bit old and small and not in the best part of town, having my own space was a luxury. I ate out a great deal but did so frugally and with intention. Even special occasion meals were never more than $35 per person.

Looking back, I was actually quite frugal and living well within my means of scholarship, student loans, and credit card points, but I felt like a king because it felt far more luxurious to my college and early medical school lifestyle, which was far more restrictive.

From medical school to residency to entrepreneur life, I went from crashing in the cheapest hostels to crashing in the cheapest hotels, which felt like an upgrade. Then I went from the cheapest hotels to lower-range hotels, to mid-range, and then finally, after several years, the more luxurious hotels.

Even though I was able to easily book the more luxurious hotels with points, I strategically slowed down and spread out the progression. With this strategy, I was happy at each stage because each was an upgrade on the former. I never felt like I was missing out since I hadn’t experienced anything better. And I didn’t want to adjust to the higher bar since I would lose out on the joy of these smaller incremental upgrades.

Similarly, in medical school, don’t jump straight to maximizing your budget or living with unnecessary luxuries, as you’ll quickly adapt to this level of luxury and won’t be willing to downgrade.

Rather than living in your own apartment, start first by sharing your living space with others. Rather than living in the swanky new high rise at the heart of downtown, choose something on the outskirts of town that might be run down and with fewer amenities. Rather than owning and driving a car, start off by using a bicycle and public transport. These are all things I did as well—mostly out of budgetary constraints, but also with some intention—so that when I eventually did get my own place, or didn’t have to use my bicycle to get around, I experienced the hedonic bump in pleasure.

The slow, intentional progression of upping your lifestyle will allow you to extract the maximum enjoyment without the stress of living beyond your means. And it’ll make the experience of medical school that much more enjoyable.

For more guides like this, check out the Med School Insiders YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button to participate in contests, polls, and weekly trivia.