IMSAFE Checklist - The Daily Check You Must Run Before You Get Out of Bed

You woke up after a broken night. The baby was up twice. It's been going on for two days. Now imagine you have surgery at eight and you need to place two dental implants in an older patient, very close to the sinuses.

Most people push through and hope for the best. Will you? Perhaps it would be better to reassess today's patient list.

Pilots never push through and hope. Before every shift we run a six-item self-check called IMSAFE, and if one item is in the red we adjust or we stop. No exception.

Here is the version you can run before your feet touch the floor:

• Illness: am I actually well?
• Medication: anything in my system affecting me?
• Stress: what am I carrying today?
• Alcohol: clear from last night?
• Fatigue: did I really sleep, or just lie down?
• Emotion: am I steady, or rattled?

Say it out loud. "Illness, none. Stress, moderate, the little one is sick. Fatigue, slept seven hours. Emotion, steady."

Now you know what you are bringing to the day before it starts. And knowing changes what you do with it. You can soften the meeting, skip the workout, eat earlier, go easier on the people around you.

Shift workers need this most. A broken night, a new medication, a hard family call. Each one moves your baseline, and walking in blind to it is how an ordinary day becomes a bad one.

You would never trust a machine nobody checked. Run the check on yourself first.