How Do You Look After Yourself

"How do you look after yourself?" is the question candidates prepare least and answer worst. It sounds like a warm up. It is often a scored criterion, and the scoring is unforgiving, because almost everyone gives the same three sentences about balance, exercise and talking to friends.

If your answer could be given word for word by any other applicant in the building, it is not an answer. It is a noise.

Why interviewers ask it at all

Medicine has a well documented workforce problem with burnout, and admissions committees know they are selecting people who will be handed serious responsibility while sleep deprived. They are not looking for someone who has cracked wellbeing. They are looking for someone who has noticed that they are a person with limits, and who has already built one or two real habits around that.

There is also a safety dimension. A doctor who does not recognise their own state is a doctor who does not recognise when they are too tired to make a decision, too rattled after a bad outcome to see the next patient properly, or too proud to ask for help. Assessors are listening for early evidence of self awareness, not for a wellness routine.

If you are still getting your head around how these criteria get applied station by station, our explainer on what an MMI actually is sets out the format this question usually appears in.

What a weak answer sounds like

Here is the archetype, and you have probably written a version of it:

"I think self care is really important. I make sure I have a good work life balance. I go to the gym, I see my friends, and I try to get enough sleep. If I am stressed I talk to my family about it."

Nothing in there is false. Nothing in there is yours. There is no moment, no cost, no evidence it ever happened. An assessor cannot mark it up because there is nothing to mark.

The common failure modes:

• Naming categories, not behaviours: balance, mindfulness, wellbeing, downtime
• Listing hobbies with no link to how they actually help you recover
• Claiming a perfect routine that no busy student has ever kept
• Turning it into a humblebrag about how hard you work despite the stress
• Saying you have never really been stressed, which reads as either lucky or unreflective

That last one is worth sitting with. If you tell a panel that Year 12 or your graduate year was not stressful, you have either had an unusual run or you are not tracking your own state, and the second is the one they will assume.

What a strong answer contains

One specific thing, described properly

Not three activities at surface level. One, with texture. What it is, when it happens, why it works on you specifically.

"I swim on Tuesday and Friday mornings at the local pool. It is the only forty minutes in the week where I cannot check my phone, and I have noticed I make better decisions about what to study afterwards."

That is memorable, it is plainly true, and it tells the assessor you have observed cause and effect in your own life.

A moment it was tested

Recovery habits are easy to keep when life is fine. The question that matters is what happened when you were under real pressure. Did the habit hold? Did you drop it and notice the effect? Either answer is good if you are honest about it.

"During trials I stopped swimming for about three weeks because it felt like wasted study time. By the end of it I was reading the same page repeatedly at eleven at night, so I put it back in. It was not a big insight, but it was the first time I understood the sessions were doing something."

The people part, made concrete

Everyone says they talk to family and friends. Almost nobody names the mechanism. Who, when, and what do you actually say? "My older sister does shift work so we call on Sunday nights, and she is the person I tell when I am not coping, because she does not try to fix it" is a real answer. "I have a good support network" is not.

An honest limit

If you have a tendency to overcommit, to say yes to everything, to leave things until the pressure is unbearable, say so. Then say what you now do about it. Naming a live weakness that you are managing scores better than presenting a flawless system, because the flawless system is not credible.

Personal disclosure: how far to go

Some candidates have a genuine mental health history and wonder whether to bring it into this station. There is no single right answer, and you are never obliged to disclose anything.

A workable rule: only share what you can discuss calmly, and only if it leads somewhere useful about how you now operate. If telling the story would put you in a state you cannot come back from in the remaining ninety seconds, do not tell it. You can speak truthfully about having learned to notice your limits without narrating the hardest year of your life to a stranger with a clipboard.

If you do choose to share something, keep the weight on the present. What you learned, what you built, what you now do. The assessor's interest is in the doctor you will be, not in a diagnosis.

Practising it so it does not sound rehearsed

This question rewards material you already have, not scripts you invent the night before. Spend twenty minutes writing down what genuinely resets you, when you last did it, and the week you stopped. That is your raw supply. Then practise saying it out loud until you can do it in ninety seconds without the word balance appearing once.

The gap most people miss is between an answer that reads well and an answer that survives being spoken to a timer. MasterMed's live AI interviewer runs timed stations and marks you against a rubric, so you can hear whether your wellbeing answer contained anything a marker could actually score. The first speaking station is free on the trial, no card required, and the trial does not convert on its own.

How it connects to the rest of your interview

This station rarely stands alone. It sits next to your motivation, and it should agree with it. If you tell one assessor that medicine is worth years of hard grind to you and tell another that you have never once found study difficult, one of those is not true.

It also sits next to the time management and pressure questions, which is why it pays to prepare the whole family of questions together rather than one at a time. Our rundown of the questions that recur across Australian circuits is a good place to see how they overlap.

The short version

Say one true thing, in detail, about something that actually restores you. Say when it failed and what you noticed. Name a person and a moment. Then stop talking. That answer will be the only one that day the assessor can still remember at four in the afternoon.