Today I had a little practice meltdown...
One of the other things that has intrigued me whilst reading PhD-related stories and anecdotes has been the frequent reference to meltdowns, being overwhelmed, stress, anxiety etc. There is a really scary level of poor mental health outcomes associated with PhD study (see, still not a proper enough researcher to reference that 😉), which doesn't make good reading. I am going into this eyes open, knowing full well this is both possible and even likely. But without knowing exactly why things come to be stressful and overwhelming etc, it's difficult to prepare yourself! I suppose this blog may also be about trying to document any insight I gain around that side of things.
Last week ended up being a bit of a write off due to a combination of lovely things, like having family visiting and attending a practitioner conference which reconnected me with many former 'colleagues' (in the literal and wider sense; this was a very life-giving experience and helped root me back in the 'why I left my job I loved very much to come and do this PhD' mindset). I say it was a write off but maybe I need to re-frame that into something more positive because I can see that things will very quickly get overwhelming if every measure of success hinges on 'how much of the PhD did I get done'. (Answer: none. But I did reconnect with people professionally, attend sessions that gave me new inspiration and insight, spend time with family...)
So today. Today was my one day where I needed to play a lot of catch up with a quantitative methods course i'm taking, whilst also learning to code in a statistical programme I haven't used before, whilst also preparing a proposal document for some coursework. The beauty of blogging about this is that currently I am feeling drained and overwhelmed because it is 18:51, i've been here since 08:30 and I have nothing, really, to show for my efforts. I have trawled through a lot of datasets, read several tutorials on coding, read many definitions of data types; I still don't have a coursework proposal.
But at one glorious point earlier today, I managed to make the software programme produce something! I don't know what it was or what it meant but at this stage, even making a computer follow an instruction feels like a win.
It is now several hours later and I have been for a run and eaten tea, so even now it's difficult to reconnect with the headspace I was in a few hours ago. But I think the best way I can describe it is a sense of having a close circle of bewilderment around me (one with a finite edge that I could see) but then peering beyond that and realising the circle was actually sat within an infinite set of circles, each bigger and slightly more bewildering! At least with a Masters, you take it one module at a time and there is an end to each individual bewilderment. I think the difference with a PhD is that lurking beneath the surface of one individual task that doesn't go quite to plan straight away, there is a whole 3+ years of what feels like interconnected stuff that then becomes exponentially bewildering when you realise you can't even manage one small part of it. It's the interconnectedness of the whole thing I think, with what feels like very few constituent parts to master.
The lesson here, of course, being to step back and the minute you can feel the rest of PhD eternity swooping in, walk away and well, go for a walk! Tricky discipline though. Taking things one step at a time has never felt so crucial and yet so difficult to actually enact... At least it was only a glimpse of a meltdown though, rather than anything more severe. I guess a bit like a practice meltdown. Perhaps that should be added to the Researcher Development training programme 😏
Last week ended up being a bit of a write off due to a combination of lovely things, like having family visiting and attending a practitioner conference which reconnected me with many former 'colleagues' (in the literal and wider sense; this was a very life-giving experience and helped root me back in the 'why I left my job I loved very much to come and do this PhD' mindset). I say it was a write off but maybe I need to re-frame that into something more positive because I can see that things will very quickly get overwhelming if every measure of success hinges on 'how much of the PhD did I get done'. (Answer: none. But I did reconnect with people professionally, attend sessions that gave me new inspiration and insight, spend time with family...)
So today. Today was my one day where I needed to play a lot of catch up with a quantitative methods course i'm taking, whilst also learning to code in a statistical programme I haven't used before, whilst also preparing a proposal document for some coursework. The beauty of blogging about this is that currently I am feeling drained and overwhelmed because it is 18:51, i've been here since 08:30 and I have nothing, really, to show for my efforts. I have trawled through a lot of datasets, read several tutorials on coding, read many definitions of data types; I still don't have a coursework proposal.
But at one glorious point earlier today, I managed to make the software programme produce something! I don't know what it was or what it meant but at this stage, even making a computer follow an instruction feels like a win.
It is now several hours later and I have been for a run and eaten tea, so even now it's difficult to reconnect with the headspace I was in a few hours ago. But I think the best way I can describe it is a sense of having a close circle of bewilderment around me (one with a finite edge that I could see) but then peering beyond that and realising the circle was actually sat within an infinite set of circles, each bigger and slightly more bewildering! At least with a Masters, you take it one module at a time and there is an end to each individual bewilderment. I think the difference with a PhD is that lurking beneath the surface of one individual task that doesn't go quite to plan straight away, there is a whole 3+ years of what feels like interconnected stuff that then becomes exponentially bewildering when you realise you can't even manage one small part of it. It's the interconnectedness of the whole thing I think, with what feels like very few constituent parts to master.
The lesson here, of course, being to step back and the minute you can feel the rest of PhD eternity swooping in, walk away and well, go for a walk! Tricky discipline though. Taking things one step at a time has never felt so crucial and yet so difficult to actually enact... At least it was only a glimpse of a meltdown though, rather than anything more severe. I guess a bit like a practice meltdown. Perhaps that should be added to the Researcher Development training programme 😏
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