“Dangerously overglorified.”
This was what physician Tricia Robredo said after suffering the health effects of working too hard and pushing her body to the limits while she pursued her studies at Harvard Medical School.
The second eldest daughter of former vice president Leni Robredo reportedly took to Instagram Stories to share her reflections about work-life balance at the end of Holy Week.
Tricia on Sunday admitted that she has grown “obsessed” with her smartwatch, planners, and “unsustainable routines.”
“Busier was better and I had to be mobile every waking minute,” she said.
“My physical health took a beating for it this week, and it was by far, the scariest thing I’ve had to deal with since living alone. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t even drink. I was very weak,” she confessed.
“I used to think that self-care was abused and overused. It had to come to this for me to realize that it’s not always the case. I respect and subscribe to the hustle, but productivity has been dangerously overglorified,” the physician added.
“[I don’t know] if [I am going to] fall into that cycle again, but I’m dropping this as a reminder that it comes at a cost. So take care of [yourselves] friends, may we all find balance,” she continued with a smiling-face-with-tear emoji.
Copies of Tricia’s Instagram Stories were posted by supporters on a Facebook page.
Leni also shared that her middle child “got sick,” saying it was “one of the few times” they were not together during the Holy Week.
“Tricia got sick, which got us all worried. She was alone, could not tolerate anything (even water) and was too weak to even go to the bathroom. Thank you to Jill who took the train from New York to Boston to visit her this weekend,” the matriarch said on Facebook.
Jillian, nicknamed Jill, is Leni’s youngest daughter based in New York.
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“Tricia is much better and they were already able to celebrate Easter Mass together. They sent us this pic [picture], which they took at sunset along the banks of Charles River,” Leni said on April 11.
“Aika is joining me in a few days for the last two legs of our pilgrimage,” the Angat Buhay NGO chair added, referring to her eldest daughter.
Last year, Tricia was accepted at Harvard Medical School’s Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery (MMSc-GHD)
The two-year program provides training in research, program design, and management that students need “to become leaders in the emerging field of global health delivery,” according to her acceptance letter.
Harvard says MMSc-GHD offers a rigorous cross-university curriculum focused on developing the tools needed to perform social and delivery science and policy research in resource-limited settings.
Tricia previously earned her double degree of Doctor of Medicine and Master in Business Administration from the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health.
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She also helped in the former vice president’s COVID-19 pandemic response initiatives when the latter was still in office.
The licensed doctor additionally led house-to-house campaigns with volunteers to support Leni’s presidential bid in the 2022 national elections.