PhD self-care tips

A bit about Lisa:

“I’m a final year PhD student at The University of Southampton, UK investigating how diets during pregnancy impact the baby’s muscle function in later life. Currently enduring the thesis life! I’m an aspiring science communicator and love to write for my science blog “In a Science World”. I talk all things science and share my life as a scientist/PhD student, but what I really love is sharing tips and advice through my PhD SOS feature”

Blog website: https://inascienceworldblog.wordpress.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisa_inascienceworld/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/inascienceworld

Facebook blog page: https://www.facebook.com/inascienceworld/ 

Working in the world of academia as a PhD student can be very demanding. We don’t get awarded the title of Dr for simply generating some good data or coming up with an awesome idea, we work hard to earn that PhD. Hard work comes with stresses and sometimes a few road bumps along the way.

One thing a lot of us can forget is that all important self-care. A PhD is like an endurance event, it’s a long and rewarding journey, but we need to take care of ourselves to get to the finish line.

So how can we look after ourselves? Here are my top 10 PhD self-care tips:

Stop comparing yourself to others

You may start your PhD the same time as other students but everyone’s PhD is different. Comparing yourself to others on occasion can be a healthy kick up the backside if you’re slacking. But trust me, for the most part it’s unhealthy and causes unnecessary stress and unhappiness. Focus on you and your PhD.

Need help? Ask!

Whether you need help with a protocol or you’re having a few struggles with mental wellbeing, seek help. We all need help at times no matter how big or small the problem is, and there is a wealth of support out there for you. Know the right people to ask for help in the lab, find out what support services your university provides, and read blogs to help with issues related to the PhD life.

Don’t just live for the weekend

Looking after yourself is not just for the weekends. Working 12-hour days during the week with those fun things left to the weekend is going to lead to burnout. Be honest with yourself, how productive are you after the normal 8/9 hour working day? Probably not very. So take time for you in the evenings, whether that’s just relaxing, going to the gym or seeing friends. Living for the weekend can lead to you associating the week with negative thoughts, that’s not exactly a great way to live.

Emails. You don’t have to be attached 24/7.

Does your phone notify you as soon as you get a work email? If yes, I really suggest turning them off. Having them on means you never have a true break from work and in some situations this can lead to anxiety. Also, try not to check emails fist thing. Checking emails as soon as you get to work can lead you off track from your original plan for that day. Try opening them up a couple hours into work so you start your day off well. Are they really so important that they can’t wait a few hours?

Sleep well, exercise regularly and eat right.

Being mindful of the foundations to leading a healthy life (mentally and physically) is so important. Getting those 7-9 hours sleep improves brain function. Regular exercise keeps you fit, allows you to focus on something non-work related and is a great stress reliever. Eating a balanced diet and not relying on sugar to keep you awake whilst working gives your brain and body the right fuel to function well. Being and feeling healthy helps to keep a positive mindset.

Be organised

The deeper into the PhD journey you get, the more studies you’re juggling and the more items you have on that to-do list. Being organised is key to keeping yourself on track, focussed and motivated. These all lead to reductions in stress levels. Set short terms goals. I advise making daily goals at the start of the week or the day before and tick them off as you go along. Small steps make big progress.

Play to your strengths

PhDs come with a degree of flexibility in how you work. If you are most productive in the morning, then start and end your working day earlier. Maximise that time you work well. If you aren’t a good multitasker then set aside blocks of time in your week to do your research, reading and the other odd jobs. There’s no point trying to tackle everything in one day if you know your brain doesn’t function like that!

It’s ok to say no

You can’t take on everything your supervisor and others want you to. Saying yes to everything will lead to burnout. Be aware of the work you can take on without compromising your work/life balance. Developing this awareness does take time but it allows you to then manage the expectations you have of yourself, and enables you to manage your supervisor’s expectations of you.  

Celebrate successes

We work hard so reward yourself when you’ve reached a goal. Allowing yourself treats will help you to stay motivated. For the smaller goals treat yourself to something little like your favourite dinner, and for the bigger milestones reward yourself something super fun like a trip to the pub/cocktail bar or a day trip to the beach.

Time off

Remember we are entitled to time off, everyone needs a break. Taking time off helps us to relax, unwind and gives that overworked brain some nice relax time. It helps us to come back to work energised and proactive. If a certain phase of laboratory work means it’s hard to take a whole week off, make sure you’re planning in some long weekends.

Publishing as a PhD Student

Photograph: Connor Brook 

Heidi Gardner is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Aberdeen’s Health Services Research Unit. Her research is part of a wider initiative called Trial Forge, which is an evidence-based approach to designing, running, analysing and reporting clinical trials. Currently her work focusses on improving strategies to recruit participants into clinical trials. As well as participant recruitment, Heidi is interested in research waste, reporting of science and health-related topics in the media, and public engagement.

To find out more about Heidi’s research and her thoughts on doing a PhD, head over to her blog: www.heidirgardner.wordpress.com, and follow her on Twitter: @heidirgardner.

Publishing is something that’s drummed into PhD students right from the beginning; you need to publish, you need to prove your work is publishable, and you need to learn how to manage the peer review process. Moving from reading journal articles, to being expected to write at that level can be incredibly intimidating. I’m about to enter my third and final year as a PhD student (eek!), and I’ve published one paper as first author, and one as a co-author. Honestly, I think I’ve been very lucky with my supervisory team; they’ve encouraged me to publish, and to get involved with other projects that will lead to further publications. Now that I’ve gone through the publication process as both first author and co-author, I thought I would share a few tips on how to get your work published. 

Publish when you have something to say

The pressure to publish is real, and even at the very start of my PhD I was thinking about how I could build my reputation. Thinking ahead isn’t necessarily a bad thing; but don’t let yourself panic about not publishing. Take time to get to grips with your project, and then work on a first publication that you can really get your teeth into. My first author publication was the protocol for my systematic review (you can read it here), and it took almost a year from first thought to final publication. A year on and the review itself is not published yet – I’m still writing it. These things take time, but rushing to publish early and not having a cohesive piece of work won’t help things. 

Choose the right journal

This is a crucial step, and requires a good deal of research when you’re new to publishing. The ‘right’ journal should have a track record of publishing the types of article you plan to submit; so don’t submit a clinical trial protocol to Nature. I chose the Journal of Systematic Reviews for my first publication – for pretty self-explanatory reasons. This journal is also open access which was important to me, and it has a good track record within my research field. Ask your supervisors, other PhD students in your department, and then have a look at which journals you tend to read similar papers from. The most important thing for a first submission it’s important to set your sights on a realistic journal; the last thing you want is to get your first rejection at this stage. 

 Expect revisions

Anything other than an outright rejection means that you have some room for negotiation with the journal editor, so take revisions – whether major or minor – as a positive. Before publishing I thought that it was normal to get a few minor revisions and then the paper would go ahead to publication. That was not the case for me. I went through 2 major revisions, and then 2 minor revisions before the paper was published. At first I found this quite upsetting, but my supervisor encouraged me to continue working on the article, and ensured I didn’t feel like I’d failed either. One thing that really important to remember when you get peer review comments back, is that you are much closer to your researcher than your reviewers are. Don’t be afraid to defend the decisions you’ve made and explain why you shouldn’t make all of the changes they have suggested. Ultimately, the journal editor has the final say and if you can demonstrate why you’ve conducted your study the way you have, then you should be fine.

Work as a team

Working as part of a team is an integral part of being involved in research; you cannot publish alone. Firstly, you don’t have the expertise to critique your own search strategy, statistical analysis and research methods to a high level. You are not an information specialist, a statistician, and a methodologist. Get other people involved and work together to make your paper the best it can be. Teams are also really helpful when you get comments back from peer reviewers; don’t just respond yourself, ask for input from other people and ensure each comment is addressed by the experts you’re working with.

Get involved with other projects

Offering to lend a hand with other projects is a brilliant way to network and build your reputation, and to get an extra publication or two as well. Just as you require a team to strengthen your work, at times others will ask you to be part of their teams. If you have time for additional projects, they are linked to your PhD work, and you like the people you’ll be working with; say yes. It might mean doing a few extra late nights in the office every now and again, but you need to demonstrate that you can be a reliable and effective collaborator – that’s what research and publishing is all about.

Publishing is a long process, and one that can require a thick-skin at times. Take your time, ask for help, and try your hardest not to feel disheartened when you get asked to change something for a third time. Once you’ve gone from initial submission to final publication, the feelings of frustration soon fade away to be replaced with pride and a real sense of satisfaction. If you publish PhD-related work, then you can always use bits of text in your thesis too – just make sure to reference the publication so that you’re not self-plagiarising. I’m really glad that I’ve had the opportunity to publish so early on in my research career, and even though peer review comments can sometimes be really (REALLY) annoying, in the end this level of professional critique means you come out with a paper you can be proud of.  

Take Yourself Out of the Impostor Box

Photograph: Connor Brook 

Kirsten Stoddart is an Australian-born writer, production manager and PhD candidate at the University of Salford. She completed an MA in Scriptwriting at Bath Spa University in 2013, and has worked in film and television production since 2004. Kirsten's PhD research focus is the effect of the rising industry of Subscription Video on Demand original series on the employment of women writers for television. Her broader research interests include women's employment in creative media, gender, scriptwriting and media production. 

Web: www.kirstenstoddart.com 

Twitter: @KirstenStoddart 

Winning the coffee mug prize for best paper of my session at my university’s recent postgraduate conference was not only nice, it also marked a big transition in my transformation from industry to academia.

There is a lot these days written about industry-academy interchange. It leads government policy and dominates the thoughts of university administrators as a result.

But sometimes it seems there is not as much thought given to what that really means, especially at postgraduate level.

My field, for example, is broadly film studies and specifically screenwriting in which I have an MA. In addition though, I have over a dozen years experience in film and television, mostly in production.

The PhD came about because as an aspiring scriptwriter, I would look at the workplaces I was in and notice that not only were there always more men than women, there was also a significantly gendered assumption that the men were better and more valuable than the women. So here I am, one and a half years into my PhD, researching women writers for scripted television and the effects of S.V.o.D. (Subscription Video on Demand) on their employment.

Coming from an industry background can be an incredible boost for your research, because it means you really, really care about the outcomes. I care about what happens to women writers because I identify with them.

But coming from an industry background also provides a huge challenge, in my specific case, when it comes to writing “the academic paper”.

My first submissions to supervisors took achingly long, and nearly drove me to the edge. I didn’t know how to structure these factual sentences. My innate desire and training was to entertain my reader- “show, don’t tell”. That is what every scriptwriter is told. But in this new world the APA was foreign, and, sometimes, I did not understand what journal articles were saying to me because of their formulaic structures and, often, their use of jargon and specialist language. Sometimes, they seemed to obscure as much as they revealed. This was the reverse of “show, don’t tell”.

I printed off piles of articles, borrowed twenty-three books from the library. I read books about feminism, post-feminism, third-wave feminism, intersectional feminism. I discovered entire new areas of study I’d had no idea even existed (hello, Organization Studies). I became increasingly overwhelmed and wondered what I had got myself into. I spent nights reading, highlighting, writing, panicking, crying, caffeinating. When I submitted my work, I felt it was all artificial.

There were times when I thought I would not make it through my first year. I had to resubmit my assessment paper because it wasn’t academically structured. And I knew that. But somehow, I kept pushing. I kept going.

In March, I re-submitted my paper and it passed. That deserved a holiday so I took a break – and promptly forgot how to write again. Cue a repeat of the whole experience.

But this time, it lasted a shorter time. I took a couple of weeks off, and then I came back. I set my alarm every morning. I got a Nespresso machine (yes, it was an important part of this story). I wrote down my writing goals for the day, week, month. It was a work plan for the year. And then something happened: the words began to come. Slowly at first, and then, suddenly, I realised I could meet these writing goals if I just told myself I could. Instead of panicking, I celebrated small victories. Five hundred words – go for lunch. A thousand words – take the evening off. I sit down at my desk at about 8.30am, and, if I don’t meet my daily or weekly goal, I don’t beat myself up, because I know I can get caught up if I just keep going.

Something wonderful happens when you allow yourself to be flexible. Sometimes two hundred good words is better than a thousand manic ones. You can get it done. You can share your work.

Even so, I couldn’t believe it when I won that prize. Simply, that was because I was still putting myself into the Imposter Box. I’m not an imposter, though. I’m just a different kind of PhD student, coming from a different background and environment. And I represent the challenge of integrating industry and academy, but I also represent that it can be done. I had to re-train my brain, and my brain and I are getting on just fine now. Yes, I still get anxious when I feel like I’m behind. But I also know that I can pull this off because I care. And you can, too. 

Lessons learnt from the first year of my PhD

Mike Ryder is a PhD student at Lancaster University. His research interests include biopolitics, sovereignty, science fiction and war. He is particularly interested in the intersection between literature and philosophy, and the works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. In today's blog post, Mike reflects on the first year of his PhD. Go and have a look at his (fab) personal website: www.mjryder.net and check out his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MJRyder.net

So it’s been a year already and I’m now looking forward to the next phase in my PhD journey. It’s been an interesting year to say the least, and I’ve done a lot of different things. But it’s not always been easy...

Settling in

My first six months at Lancaster certainly involved a lot of ‘settling in’. One of the big issues for me was that I came into my PhD as a slightly older student. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I did feel a  bit of an outsider at first compared to many of the other first years who already knew each other from Lancaster during their undergrad and/or Masters.

The other thing that really took a lot of getting used to was the routine of not having much human contact. Sure, most of us have Facebook, and there are online forums such as this, but there really can be no substitute for a good old-fashioned face-to-face chat.

Thankfully, after a few months I met the (#legend) Josh Hughes at a conference, and we have since set up a reading group together, and regularly meet to chat about war and robots, alongside our PhD woes.

Another big source of encouragement has been semi-frequent coffee breaks with my new ‘besties’ Claire and Danielle, who between them manage to keep me sane with stories of disastrous train journeys, plumbing mishaps, and the odd trip to the cinema.

I should also mention the sci-fi reading group here at Lancaster, which has also been great, and another source of much-needed human contact. Special mention to Kerry, Dec (when he can be bothered to read the book), Charlotte, Stuart and Chuckie. Our group returns with the new academic year and I’m already looking forward to getting started on the new book!

Finding work

In previous blogs I’ve written about taking on work as a PhD student, and how paid employment has helped me stay human. Though I thought I was fully prepared for the transition from full-time work to full-time PhD, I don’t think I quite understood exactly what that would mean.

So on the one hand I had a professional job where I knew people and would chat to them on a daily basis, to then suddenly moving to the other side of the country where I knew no one, and my ‘work’ was of a very different nature.

To help me get over this I decided to apply for some part-time work, which I have to admit has been really enjoyable. Not only am I responsible for the University’s weekly student newsletter, but it’s also allowed me to get involved with a host of other projects such as writing a guide for the AUA, and upgrading the Graduate College’s website. I even won an award for all my hard work!

Of course work as a PhD student isn’t for everyone, but it certainly is an option, and something I’d encourage you to look at, even if it’s just a few hours a week in the local bar. All of these things are good life experience, and can potentially make a difference to your employability once you’ve completed your PhD.

The turning point

For me, the turning point in my PhD really came in January of this year, when I started writing up my notes and putting together my first draft chapters. I was starting to settle in academically, and had found a good work-life balance and I was starting to get comfortable in my new role.

I also found that the time afforded me by my PhD* has allowed me to get back into blogging, both on MJRyder.net, as well as here on this very site. I originally set up my blog many years ago as a diary for my freelance writing activities, but it then turned into an English / Digital Marketing blog as my career shifted and I moved into different circles. Well, now it’s back, and I’m pleased to say it has given me a whole load of inspiration. It’s also been a great place for me to think through some of my ideas and engage with people on subjects that are quite important to me.

If you’ve not thought about blogging before, I do recommend it, though it is not for the faint hearted. As Emily will attest, blogging is not an easy task, and a blog requires a great deal of time and dedication to keep it going over time. If you have any questions about blogging / digital media for academics, do post them below as I’ll be happy to answer (it used to be my job you know!)

Lessons learnt

So by now you will have a pretty good idea of the sorts of things I’ve been up to this year – and this is only just the start. I’ve provided a more comprehensive list over on my website if you are interested in finding out more.

So anyway, what lessons (if any) have I learnt?

1.    Don’t stress. Seriously: don’t do it. Some people seem to dedicate more of their time to stressing out, and telling other people just how stressed they are than actually sitting down and doing some work. Not only is it counter-productive, but it’s also a complete waste of time. Stressing won’t make you complete your thesis any quicker; nor will it help any of those around you.

2.    Take time off. Again, this is a really important point, and one far too few people seem to understand. I currently have multiple jobs on top of my PhD work, but I still insist on not doing any work at all on a Sunday. Why? Because it’s important to switch off. Not only will you feel better, but you’ll also be more productive when you do return to work.

3.    Find a routine that works for you. I get up at 6am most days and work until about lunchtime. I get all my ‘thinking’ work done in the morning when I am fresh as this is what works best for me. I strongly advise you don’t let others dictate your work habits but rather find what works best for you. And don’t let yourself get distracted!

4.    Don’t work hard: work smart. Remember, it’s not about how hard you work, but what you do when you are working. Look at your work habits and consider ways that might make the process more efficient. For example, do you write your notes by hand, or straight onto a computer? How do you organise your notes once you’ve typed them up? Do you do all your notes from one book first, or do you keep flitting back to it?  Addressing simple issues such as these can make your academic life x10 easier and far more productive.

5.    Don’t stress. Really: don’t do it. 

And finally the most important piece of advice is this: your PhD is what you make of it. Seize the moment; make the most of the many opportunities University life has to offer. After all, you only get one chance at this, and it would be a shame to waste it all hiding away at home or sitting in your room.

Until next time,

Mike

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Footnotes:

* I know, I know, some of you will be saying ‘what time?’ but really there are far more stressful, far worse ‘jobs’ out there.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been through a lot these past few years, but to me at least, the PhD experience shouldn’t be something to stress about, but rather enjoy. How many people can say they’ve been given three years (seven years total for some of you!) or more to sit and do something they enjoy without any worries greater than reading a few books and writing some essays?!

I don’t mean to sound flippant or dismissive – that’s really not my intention – but sometimes it can be good to take a step back and consider just what else you could be doing with your life. Trust me: there are a lot worse things you could be doing right now!