How does a PhD *actually* feel? Reflections from the eye of the [current] storm, plus rabbit holes and alarm clocks.
I'm going to start by reiterating once again that the entire point of this blog is to capture elements of PhD life live, in the moment. Rather than relaying on looking back and trying to reconstruct past feelings from a future perspective, which in my experience is never as accurate (even if having some retrospective insight is very useful in other ways). Apologies that the blog will therefore almost inevitably be sparked by an emotional peak or trough - often trough - I still hope it's worth reading for someone, somewhere. It's not a cry for help, nor necessarily an invitation for management strategies... Just an honest reflection on how things feel, for those who are interested.
I have spent the last couple of weeks testing new systems of PhD life; new ways to organise my time, personal life, work life, exercise etc, having recognised that the 9 - 5 (10 - 6) wasn't working for me. The first week consisted of doing whatever I needed to at any given point to remain calm, which entailed a lot more working from home (often in my pyjamas), more eating of biscuits, more running at random points in the day. Oh and very deliberately not allowing myself ever to think about how much I was, or wasn't, getting done. Mostly it worked. With a few blips (I felt guilty much of the time for not doing 'proper' things like getting dressed). But mornings were still a problem; feeling like, as a night owl, I was constantly fighting my natural energy routine.
So this last week I tried not setting an alarm, thinking that might lead to better mornings and more productive evenings (a sort of dream world, in my head, so I thought). I lasted two days before I had to start setting some sort of alarm, at least, even if a later one. Because without one, I was waking up and immediately panicking about time, every morning. Actually, on the days where I had nothing in the evenings, I could work through until 8 or 9pm and I had some quite productive sessions but overall, it was a disjointed and quite stressful week, with disrupted sleep cycles (although curiously, I found myself marking the individual days higher on the "how happy am I" scale than I did in the first week...)
Learning? Some things work, others don't. Combinations and flexibility are important. Alarms in the morning, perversely, are useful for me. Fitting in with the rest of life is challenging when you're manipulating your own sleep/wake cycle. So I thought all was feeling a bit better and I might be slightly more on top of things...
Until this morning. I had set an alarm but I failed to wake up for over an hour. Once I did wake up, what felt like a sledgehammer worth of The Whole of Life descended and I was completely, utterly paralysed. I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't calm my mind down long enough to make sense of my thoughts sufficiently to allow myself to make any kind of strategy for dealing with things. I cried for a bit, which didn't help either. It was bewildering and once I eventually did manage to get up, the only way I could calm everything down was to just get stuck straight into my laptop and start doing things. But every time I hit even a tiny pause or stumbling block with the writing and editing, the whole of the background panic started to seep back in.
Weirdly, given the situation, I managed to do some of the most difficult work i've done to date - trying to shift around and make sense of the 10,000 or so words of literature review that I have so far. It's so random and all over the place that it's proving really, really difficult to shape into something with a coherent thread through it. The perils of the need to review literature in a certain sphere (urban design, in this case) and needing to pick my own path through it, which would ideally have relevance to my research questions, which I can't really develop until I have reviewed the literature. And here is the crux of the entire difficulty of the PhD at this stage, I think. Endless pressure to be doing something, producing something, but without a sense of the totality of what that thing is. It's like trying to walk across a lumpy field in the pitch black without a torch and stepping into multiple rabbit holes, which make you lose your footing. Then every time you peer into the darkness and think you can see the traces of a path in front of you, it disappears (like things do when you try to look straight at them in the dark). Then you have to try a different direction, but you realise you already walked there days and days ago...
I think the specifics of the meltdown this morning were to do with the overall lack of mechanisms for charting progress, as I was writing about previously. That feels much more difficult to me than just writing down what i've done, as it's tied into this lack of bigger picture problem. I can only list what i've done, not interpret that as a percentage of a whole, so it's more listing tasks rather than charting progress. I also think this is worse because i'm about 4 weeks post-supervisor meeting so that's a long time of self-directed work with no one looking at it. I have a supervisor meeting next week and that's providing both a useful milestone but also, tangibly, a stress point because whatever i've done won't feel like it's enough (in my eyes, at least - they're all very supportive individuals).
So in the interests of live reporting, in all honesty this feels bloody difficult at the moment. A good friend pointed out this morning that I knew in advance that it would be emotionally challenging, which is true. But not why or how. Such knowledge never quite prepares you for the actual epicentre of the meltdown either. Maybe you can't really prepare for that; just know that it's very likely that you'll emerge out of the other side and that at that point, it's important to be gentle with yourself and to check your vital signs (are you ok, are you still functioning, are you making time to cook, have you spoken to other people about things feeling difficult...)
On a final, more positive point, I attended a workshop this afternoon which turned out to be useful for lots of reasons beyond that which was intended. It was on developing a professional researcher identity but one of the main tasks was to list all our other 'non-research' identities we have in life. After having thought my way through my practitioner identity, my activist identity, my volunteer identity, I eventually added another one to the board, which was "being a functioning, healthy human being". This is not unique to a PhD by any means but as another workshop participant pointed out, academia (PhDs especially) encourage and reward obsession. Passion, dedication, yes... But obsession, especially where your research topic is also your life and your hopes and your values and motivation and your contribution and, well, etc etc.
I'm not entirely sure what the overall point is to be made here. Other than that being a healthy, functioning human being should be the primary aim, and the PhD a subsidiary to that. Because part of that identity is about who you are to the other people in your life - what you need to be able to give to friends and family in terms of love and support, but also managing your own emotional drain on those same friends and family members. Even a brief exchange with the friend over social media this morning was enough to enable me to walk away from the laptop and go swimming. This focus on the whole feels important to me, in a sort of positive pressure way, as it's the motivation to take my head out of the rabbit hole in the field and perhaps stand still long enough for my eyes to adjust to the dark in the field. I'm pretty sure things always seem clearer that way. Easily said, of course...
I have spent the last couple of weeks testing new systems of PhD life; new ways to organise my time, personal life, work life, exercise etc, having recognised that the 9 - 5 (10 - 6) wasn't working for me. The first week consisted of doing whatever I needed to at any given point to remain calm, which entailed a lot more working from home (often in my pyjamas), more eating of biscuits, more running at random points in the day. Oh and very deliberately not allowing myself ever to think about how much I was, or wasn't, getting done. Mostly it worked. With a few blips (I felt guilty much of the time for not doing 'proper' things like getting dressed). But mornings were still a problem; feeling like, as a night owl, I was constantly fighting my natural energy routine.
So this last week I tried not setting an alarm, thinking that might lead to better mornings and more productive evenings (a sort of dream world, in my head, so I thought). I lasted two days before I had to start setting some sort of alarm, at least, even if a later one. Because without one, I was waking up and immediately panicking about time, every morning. Actually, on the days where I had nothing in the evenings, I could work through until 8 or 9pm and I had some quite productive sessions but overall, it was a disjointed and quite stressful week, with disrupted sleep cycles (although curiously, I found myself marking the individual days higher on the "how happy am I" scale than I did in the first week...)
Learning? Some things work, others don't. Combinations and flexibility are important. Alarms in the morning, perversely, are useful for me. Fitting in with the rest of life is challenging when you're manipulating your own sleep/wake cycle. So I thought all was feeling a bit better and I might be slightly more on top of things...
Until this morning. I had set an alarm but I failed to wake up for over an hour. Once I did wake up, what felt like a sledgehammer worth of The Whole of Life descended and I was completely, utterly paralysed. I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't calm my mind down long enough to make sense of my thoughts sufficiently to allow myself to make any kind of strategy for dealing with things. I cried for a bit, which didn't help either. It was bewildering and once I eventually did manage to get up, the only way I could calm everything down was to just get stuck straight into my laptop and start doing things. But every time I hit even a tiny pause or stumbling block with the writing and editing, the whole of the background panic started to seep back in.
Weirdly, given the situation, I managed to do some of the most difficult work i've done to date - trying to shift around and make sense of the 10,000 or so words of literature review that I have so far. It's so random and all over the place that it's proving really, really difficult to shape into something with a coherent thread through it. The perils of the need to review literature in a certain sphere (urban design, in this case) and needing to pick my own path through it, which would ideally have relevance to my research questions, which I can't really develop until I have reviewed the literature. And here is the crux of the entire difficulty of the PhD at this stage, I think. Endless pressure to be doing something, producing something, but without a sense of the totality of what that thing is. It's like trying to walk across a lumpy field in the pitch black without a torch and stepping into multiple rabbit holes, which make you lose your footing. Then every time you peer into the darkness and think you can see the traces of a path in front of you, it disappears (like things do when you try to look straight at them in the dark). Then you have to try a different direction, but you realise you already walked there days and days ago...
I think the specifics of the meltdown this morning were to do with the overall lack of mechanisms for charting progress, as I was writing about previously. That feels much more difficult to me than just writing down what i've done, as it's tied into this lack of bigger picture problem. I can only list what i've done, not interpret that as a percentage of a whole, so it's more listing tasks rather than charting progress. I also think this is worse because i'm about 4 weeks post-supervisor meeting so that's a long time of self-directed work with no one looking at it. I have a supervisor meeting next week and that's providing both a useful milestone but also, tangibly, a stress point because whatever i've done won't feel like it's enough (in my eyes, at least - they're all very supportive individuals).
So in the interests of live reporting, in all honesty this feels bloody difficult at the moment. A good friend pointed out this morning that I knew in advance that it would be emotionally challenging, which is true. But not why or how. Such knowledge never quite prepares you for the actual epicentre of the meltdown either. Maybe you can't really prepare for that; just know that it's very likely that you'll emerge out of the other side and that at that point, it's important to be gentle with yourself and to check your vital signs (are you ok, are you still functioning, are you making time to cook, have you spoken to other people about things feeling difficult...)
On a final, more positive point, I attended a workshop this afternoon which turned out to be useful for lots of reasons beyond that which was intended. It was on developing a professional researcher identity but one of the main tasks was to list all our other 'non-research' identities we have in life. After having thought my way through my practitioner identity, my activist identity, my volunteer identity, I eventually added another one to the board, which was "being a functioning, healthy human being". This is not unique to a PhD by any means but as another workshop participant pointed out, academia (PhDs especially) encourage and reward obsession. Passion, dedication, yes... But obsession, especially where your research topic is also your life and your hopes and your values and motivation and your contribution and, well, etc etc.
I'm not entirely sure what the overall point is to be made here. Other than that being a healthy, functioning human being should be the primary aim, and the PhD a subsidiary to that. Because part of that identity is about who you are to the other people in your life - what you need to be able to give to friends and family in terms of love and support, but also managing your own emotional drain on those same friends and family members. Even a brief exchange with the friend over social media this morning was enough to enable me to walk away from the laptop and go swimming. This focus on the whole feels important to me, in a sort of positive pressure way, as it's the motivation to take my head out of the rabbit hole in the field and perhaps stand still long enough for my eyes to adjust to the dark in the field. I'm pretty sure things always seem clearer that way. Easily said, of course...
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