APhA 2025: Navigating Stress and Well-being in Pharmacy Leadership

In an interview with Pharmacy Times®, Lauren W. Bristow, PharmD, MBA, senior director of Pharmacy for Providence, Bristow discusses the critical importance of personal well-being for pharmacy professionals, highlighting her presentation at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) Annual Meeting & Exposition.

Bristow emphasizes the need to recognize individual stress signals and develop personalized strategies for managing burnout. She highlights that not all stress is negative, and that resilience requires experiencing some level of discomfort, while advocating for techniques like deep breathing, physical movement, and taking meaningful breaks. Bristow stresses the importance of leaders supporting their teams by encouraging delegation, recognizing early signs of stress, and creating an environment that prioritizes long-term mental health without sacrificing productivity. Her approach focuses on understanding one's personal "dashboard" of stress, implementing proactive coping mechanisms, and maintaining a balanced perspective on professional challenges in the pharmacy sector.

Pharmacy Times

What are some strategies to balance the demands of a leadership role with personal well-being?

Lauren Bristow

That is a difficult question. I think it is very personal for every individual as well. I think for me, it really came down to knowing myself and knowing what I needed, and so it took a lot of trial and error to figure out what those things are. I know for me; it is needing to move my body really complete the stress cycle. Get some of those catecholamines that work causes me to release, get some of those processed through my body. Spending time with family, and then just taking time away. Really, I feel like rest is necessary, and something that we're almost encouraged, either by personal desire for achievement or leadership or striving or the weight of our profession to not do. And so, I feel like rest is also important. What is restful for you? Sometimes it's active, sometimes it's doing nothing. All of that is a replenishment process that helps make sure you're ready to handle what's coming at you every day and restart the next day.

Pharmacy Times

What strategies have you found effective for preventing or managing burnout in yourself and your team?

Bristow

I think the easiest and most effective way to prevent burnout is really what I call knowing your dashboard. So, you need to know what your signs and signals are, and if you don't know what they are, you can probably ask those around you. Your loved ones or team members, who can tell sometimes before you can that you're wearing the stress that you're feeling on the outside. The best way to see through that is again asking those questions and thinking back what happened before I ended up in tears in my office. I consider something like that either lashing out or going home and maybe losing it at a family member, a signal that usually has nothing to do with that one situation. But think of it like you're blowing a pressure gage. So, there were some warning signs before you got to that point, and you need to figure out for you what those things are. Then when you see those — things I've discussed with team members before is it depends on your circumstance, of what you can do about that. If you're a pharmacist working online and, in a shift, you can't just take a walk outside, necessarily for 20 minutes, especially if it's not time for a break. Or some people I know don't even get breaks. Sometimes it's a 60-second-deep breathing exercise where you're listening to your breath or doing square breathing, or other techniques that help, again, lower your heart rate, slow everything down, your emotions, your thoughts, to get you out of that spin cycle.

There's a lot of different things that people can do for that sometimes, even if you're an analyzer, over thinker, like I said, what I call that spin cycle when we tend to perseverate about an issue or a problem, whether it be short term or over a course of a few days. Sometimes even singing or reciting a poem or doing something that switched to another part of your brain helps you get out of that repetitive space. Maybe it's reciting something, for me, I use scripture a lot of times. I'll think of a verse that I memorize and just keep repeating that until the rest of my body comes alongside what my mind is trying to get everything else to get in line with. And so that's what helps me, depending on the severity of the stress, but again, if you can prevent it on the front end by identifying your signals and figure out what you need before you get to that point. Take a walk around, any kind of moment that produces awe, maybe it's taking a 5-minute break on Instagram to look at travel photos from another country you want to go to. Or just anything that gets your brain out of the monotony or the circumstance that you're currently in, I think helps get you back to okay, I'm at a place where now my stress level has come below that lip of the bucket. Now I can show up at least more of myself than I had a few minutes ago, to be able to approach it rationally.

Pharmacy Times

How can pharmacy leaders support a culture that prioritizes well-being without sacrificing productivity?

Bristow

I think that's important, and it's a question I keep asking is, how do we help people grow in resilience? Unfortunately, there's no way to grow in resilience without a certain level of discomfort. What I mean when I say that is I want to make sure we haven't gotten to a place where we all believe or are teaching that stress is bad, not all stress is bad, right? When it comes to if I were in a car wreck and the team taking care of me, I would want them at a high level of stress, because I want them acting quickly and decisively to do what needs to happen for me or my family member in that situation. I think we're doing better at acknowledging the weight of that stress on us. I think it's a matter of, like I said, the dashboard of what is healthy stress. I feel motivated, I feel the right amount of pressure to be productive and get things done. And then where do I hit that point on a spectrum? Because I do think we need to look at burnout and stress even as a spectrum of good; okay; I'm tolerating; I'm about to fall over the edge, right? And so, helping people identify that faster. Sometimes I find with frontline pharmacy staff, they feel such a burn to take care of the patient. I think sometimes they don't feel either equipped or permitted to hand off to other teammates. They want to handle it themselves, and so sometimes they will refuse to take breaks, or feel like if they're letting down the team or sacrificing patient care to do that. I see it a lot with leaders, honestly, with newer leaders, especially where they have that I'm the only one who can do this, or I can do it better, or I shouldn't burden my team members with this. But the reality is, I want them to be here 5 years from now, not thinking about leaving leadership a year from now, because they refuse to let some of those pieces go. I see that with pharmacists as well, if we don't find ways to take some of the things off our plate and or change our mindset and our ability to handle certain levels of stress, and again, our decisiveness. I think we can say no more than we let ourselves. I know I have to tell my leaders to say no quite a bit, because I do want them here 5 years from now, and not wanting to go back to frontline shift work, where they get to leave it all at work in a short period of time.