4.27 How to stop thinking about your academic work

It’s easy to feel like our academic work has taken up permanent residence in our brains! Recently a member told me they woke up thinking about their PhD, went to bed thinking about it, and were fed up of not thinking about anything else. In the episode, I help you work out whether it’s a problem that you’re thinking about your work and, if you think it is, you’ll get some concrete advice about how to nudge your brain away from the topic. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to use role-based time-blocking.

****
I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and the episode this week is inspired by another one of the questions that my members asked in their own private podcast. As I think I've mentioned before in the PhD life Coach membership, the students are able to submit questions, that they have that are specific to their challenges at the moment, and I record them a little mini podcast voice note answer for them. And there's been so many really good questions come up that I'm gonna try and feature them in the podcast from time to time and give a more extended answer. So this question was around how do I stop thinking about my PhD? And they recognized that this might sound like a strange question, but they felt like they were waking up in the morning thinking about their work. They were thinking about it. No matter what they were doing, they were thinking about it when they were trying to get to sleep. If they woke up in the night, they were thinking about their PhD. They were generally finding this exhausting and [00:01:00] really wanted to identify how they could think about it. less.

Now the downside with these voice notes is that I don't get to ask lots of questions. So when I'm coaching, so the students also have access to live coaching, when I'm coaching, I will very much start from seeking to understand, really trying to better figure out why is this a problem? How is it impacting you? And all of those things in these voice notes, When I just get a simple question like this, I'm not able to probe into it in so much detail, and so what I try and do is give some reflective questions for people to think about, and that's what we're going to do today.

I'm gonna give you some reflective questions to think about, and then depending on what your answers to those are, I'll give you some different hints and suggestions about how you could manage this.

That way, it's really tailored to your challenges and your difficulties rather than just being generic advice. So my first reflective question for you [00:02:00] is, why is it a problem that you are thinking about it a lot. Because the answer to that will be different depending on how you are thinking about it. So what sorts of thoughts you are thinking and also what impact that's having on you or the rest of your life. So take a few moments to think, why is it problematic for me that I'm thinking about my PhD a lot? Is it because I feel like I shouldn't be, that this is wrong in some way and that it shouldn't be like this. Is that the main issue? Is the issue that because you are thinking about your PhD all the time, you are struggling to be present in other situations. Is it because you're thinking about your PhD all the time, you are getting bored and tired of your PhD? Is it because the thoughts that you are having are not [00:03:00] really about the content of your PhD, but are more anxious thoughts about what if I can't do it? What if I'm not good enough? What if my supervisor thinks I'm not good enough, and things like that. So the problem is not so much thinking about the academic questions in your PhD, but more your thoughts and feelings about doing the PhD. Take a few moments to think, which, if any, it may be other ones, it may be more than one. Which of those resonates most with you?

Now, let's start out with a relatively easy one. If the only issue is that you feel like you shouldn't be thinking about it as much as you are, but you enjoy thinking about it, you're not having any adverse consequences at the moment from thinking about it this much, and you don't anticipate having adverse consequences from thinking about it this much. It's just a sense that you feel like you shouldn't, then I'd encourage you to ponder a little bit about where that I shouldn't [00:04:00] be comes from in case it is sort of flagging some other issue but if it genuinely is just, uh, I feel like I shouldn't be, then, you can just decide it's okay. I know that sounds really basic advice, but often when we are telling ourselves that we should or shouldn't do something, we forget that we can decide that we are gonna do that thing or we're not gonna do that thing regardless of the shoulds. So if you are having no adverse consequences from thinking about it this much, you just have a vague feeling you shouldn't be. We could go towards a kind of acceptance where it's like, you know what? I'm really into my PhD. I think about it a lot. I enjoy it. It's not adversely affecting me at the moment. And actually focus instead on not judging ourselves for thinking about it as much as we do.

A tip here, and this is true for any of these things where you have a feeling you shouldn't do it, [00:05:00] is also put in place some sort of warning system whereby you'll notice if it's starting to become a problem, okay? Because sometimes an underlying sense that you shouldn't be could be because you're kind of getting this little gut feeling that this might not be good for you in the long run. And in that case, it's really useful to put in place just a little bit of a kind of protective mechanism where it's like at the moment I'm going for acceptance, but if I notice that I am turning down all social engagements in order to think about this, or if I notice that it's starting to affect my sleep or it's starting to affect my family life, or whatever it might be. And this is how I'll know, you know, you decide for you, what's the little kind of trigger that will help you spot that. Then you can feel safer in the acceptance because you also know that you have a little plan for spotting if it starts to go too far.

[00:06:00] Now if you are finding No, no, it's not that. I don't wanna just accept this. It is actually having some negative effects on me, and it's mostly because I'm thinking about the discipline itself, kind of wrestling with the intellectual challenges that I'm doing, trying to decide how to fix that analysis, trying to figure out what my materials mean. Then we have a few different tools and I'm not gonna have time to go into all of them today. I will send you out to some various podcast episodes where I've talked about some of these before. My members, if you are listening, we are working this through in this quarter anyway. The first is this notion of role-based time blocking, which is where we allocate blocks of time for particular types of activities, not for a single task. Traditional time time blocking is usually saying, I'll do this in this time block and this in that time block, and there are lots of challenges with that, but role base is thinking about, I'll do this type of work in this time block and this type of thing in that time block. And one of the things that we've been talking [00:07:00] about a lot in the membership recently is if you're doing role-based time blocking well, in fact any sort of time blocking to be fair, if you are doing it well, then that should include putting lots of fun stuff in there too. We should be time blocking that this block of time is for time on my own to spend on my hobbies. This block of time is time to spend with my friends. This block of time is time to spend with my family. The reason that's so important is 'cause we tend to only time block the productive stuff, and then when we don't get it done, we've got these kind of empty spaces that we flop into with our work without really recognizing what we are therefore choosing not to do.

It's also important, because I know lots of you struggle with feelings of guilt that you should be doing more than you are, and that can really overtake so-called fun activities because if you are trying to do a a CrossFit class. I just started CrossFit. My legs still hurt. If you are trying to do a CrossFit class, but your brain's going, oh, I [00:08:00] really should be finishing that chapter, then you're not finishing the chapter, but you're also probably not enjoying the CrossFit class either.

So when we're able to time block the fun stuff and the stuff that's good for us as well as the work stuff, then it can be a little bit easier to be intentional in that moment. Now, you might say, yeah, Vic, but the thoughts still come up, right? And I'm like, yes, of course. The thoughts absolutely still come up. But when we've got intention about what role we are in at the moment, we can decide what we do with those thoughts that come up. Because if you are still at a stage where thoughts come up and you are just sort of held hostage by those thoughts that, oh, they're here now. I'll have to think about them, then we need to talk.

Because that's exhausting to just go with whatever thoughts come up in your head is absolutely exhausting. So if we can be more intentional about whether we're in a block where thinking about this stuff is appropriate or whether we're in a block where we wanna be spending time with our [00:09:00] kids or whatever, then we can choose what we do when these thoughts come up. So if we're in a block where we are meant to be spending time with family or doing hobbies or whatever, and these thoughts are coming up, I'm gonna give you two suggestions.

The first suggestion is having some sort of dumping ground with you at all times. Now, for most of us, the thing that we have with us at all times is our phone. If you are a bit more of an analog person, having a notebook with you also works too. But having somewhere that instead of just going, no, no, you shouldn't be thinking about that, vic shouldn't be thinking about that. Focus in you're meant to be thinking about your family. Don't think about that. Don't think about that. But then our brain's going, yeah, but you're gonna forget it. All these, we need somewhere to put it. Okay. So create something, a dumping ground of some description where if these thoughts come up, you can dump them down quickly. And then when your thought brain is trying to still work on them, that's where we get to do gentle nudging. So this is not judgmental. Oh, you are always thinking about work. Stop thinking about work brain. What are you doing? This is [00:10:00] going Uhuh. I know we wrote that down. Yep. Nope. Got it. Nice. Yes, great idea. Thank you, brain. Appreciate you offering it. But we've noted it down, but we're doing this right now and we nudge ourselves back to focus.

I can't remember whether I said this in a podcast recently or whether I said it in a class, so if I'm repeating myself, just go with me. But it's a bit, a little bit like I used to, individually exams as part of my job and. Just giving people a little bit of a look and then sort of use your fingers like two eyes to point down at the page. Just sort of going, uhuh, focus back on your page, back on your, when you see their eyes wandering around the room. Right. Just like. Point your little fingers, point down at your page. Just remind them, no, no, back to their paper. Back to the paper. That's the kind of gentle, non-judgmental nudging we want to do.

We're not making it a big deal. We're not telling ourselves off for having got distracted, but we are gently nudging ourselves back to, no, no, this was time you put aside for your hobby or whatever.

So we're gonna be intentional with how we plan our time. Um. [00:11:00] Okay. That's a big thing to say in a sentence, isn't it? We're gonna be intentional. We're going to try to be more intentional than we are at the moment about how we're deciding what we're doing in any one block, and then when we notice our brain wander, we are jotting it down in some sort of dumping ground, and then we are nudging ourselves back to the thing that we said we were gonna do. Now some of you, are not necessarily very good at resting or not very good at fitting in things that are not the shoulds in your life. I have an awful lot of members who have stopped doing things that they enjoy because they feel like they've got so much to do on their PhD, so much to do in their academic life that they don't have time for those other things.

The problem with that, I kind of, you know. Okay. I, I understand the, the intention here. You're trying to simplify your life. You're trying to make space for the things you need to do. I kind of, [00:12:00] I understand all of that stuff and I, to some extent agree with it, but when we take out all the stuff that's interesting or engaging or just for us, then our brains don't have much to think about other than what we need to do for other people and what we need to do for our PhD or our work. And so sometimes by clearing more time to be able to do all this huge to-do list that you've got, what we actually do is starve our brain of interesting things. So if you are finding that it's not so much that thinking of your PhD is interrupting other stuff, but more that it's just getting really boring or tiring thinking about your academic work all the time, we need to think of other things to think about. Sometimes time spent doing hobbies, doing interesting things is actually time that feeds [00:13:00] your academic work because it gives your brain something else interesting to think about, which gives it that proper respite from work. So I feel for you, right? If you are somebody who has felt so overloaded that you feel like you have put all of your own interests to one side, I, I absolutely send you my love 'cause that is a really, really challenging position to be in, and I know it's particularly true for those of you who are doing full-time academic jobs and trying to do research on the side or trying to do your PhDs on the side, or you've got some other work, or you're holding down a family. I've got a lot of single parents in the membership, things like that. I feel for you that is a lot to be carrying, but even in those situations that I'm gonna even go so far as to, particularly in those situations, it is absolutely crucial to have things that feed you as a person, not stuff you should be doing, not four more steps in your skincare routine, if you [00:14:00] don't enjoy doing skincare, not three morning pages if you don't enjoy journaling, not this stuff we're told we should be doing something that's just fun for you. One of my members just took me off. I'm a hobby girl. Okay. I have too many hobbies. I am the other extreme. To any of you who feel like you don't have any hobbies at the moment. I have too many, but I love it. One of the ones that I've talked about that I do when I'm feeling particularly brain dead is, um, well posh people call collage, but that I call cutting and sticking. And one of my members started doing this and was like, I absolutely loved it. I got so engaged. I, you know, I really enjoyed what I was doing. I wasn't thinking about other things. Finding things like that, they don't have to be worthy, they don't have to be exercise, they don't have to be a side hustle. They don't have to have any other purpose other than it's quite fun to do it.

Whilst it might feel like one more thing you're trying to fit in, giving your brain something else to be thinking about can be a really [00:15:00] useful way to not only be thinking about academia all the time. On that if you do, and I know this can be a harder ask, depending on your responsibilities, if there are things you can do with other people who have nothing to do with academia, that can help massively as well. One of the things I think that kept me most sane through my academic career, that whilst I have glorious best friends who work in academia, I also have glorious best friends who have nothing to do with academia at all and with whom I just don't really have those conversations, either besties or even just kind of my, my good friends that I met through my various hobbies and things like that. Having people who don't really understand what you're doing and you can talk about other things too, super, super useful. Back in the day, there was nothing more useful than finishing a day of academia, going to my aerial silks class and discussing a routine or a move and not talking about students or research at all. 

Now, the one thing I would add to this [00:16:00] though is if you want to be not thinking about your work while you are doing other things, you need to give yourself time to think about your work. And again, it's one of these things that doesn't feel quite productive necessarily. It doesn't feel like something that we can put on our to do list. Oh, think about this. That's tricky to put in. But when we fill our brains, we've gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta to do this. And we plan our time like that. And then we say, and then I mustn't think about it when I'm with my family or when I'm doing my hobbies or whatever, our brains are a little bit like, yeah, but when do we think about it?

So also think to yourself, how can I give myself time- if I want to not be thinking about it at times when I'm doing other things? How do I give myself some time where I can think about it? I find it useful to structure that in some way. I can't really imagine what just sitting thinking about something would be. Some of you might, I don't know, not the way I [00:17:00] work. Um, for me, I love going for a walk or doing something like that where it's sort of physical enough to be engaging, but where I haven't got a podcast, I haven't got headphones or any of those things, and I like to actually set myself something specific to think about.

Okay. So I sort of set myself some kind of reflective question or plan that I want to think about, and then I send myself somewhere where I can't distract myself. I actually did my whole strategic plan for the year in a spa doing this exact thing. I had a notebook in the changing rooms, and so I would set myself some questions. I'd go and sit in the different spa bits, because I have no attention span. I went to one of these spas that's got like 50 different rooms. It was amazing. Anyway, then when I ran, I had so many ideas in my head. I'd go to the change room, get or go to the little chill out zone scribble in my notebook, and then I would set myself another question and go back to the hot tub this time, or whatever it was wonderful. Highly recommend.

Anyway, so setting yourself time where you can actually think, where you are, [00:18:00] not gonna fill your brain with other things, where you're not gonna require productivity of yourself. Sometimes that can be being alone in a room with big bits of paper and color pencils or whatever. Okay. Lots and lots of different things that you can, do to give yourself space for that thinking.

So that's some tips for if these thoughts are mostly about the kinda intellectual wrestling with your academic content. So they're not inherently negative, there's just too many of them, or they're coming up when you don't want them to. Some strategies around that.

Now in a second I'm gonna talk about what if the thoughts are much more anxiety type thoughts. So much more thoughts about what if I'm not good enough? What if this doesn't work? What if it gets rejected? What if my supervisor hates me? What if my boss thinks I'm an idiot? All those sorts of thoughts. Okay. But before I talk about that, I wanna talk about one principle, which I think actually crosses both, and this is the idea of [00:19:00] uncertainty tolerance.

So one of the things that I've noticed with people just generally, but I think particularly with clever people like you lot, is that we really don't like being unsure about something. I think one of the ups and downsides of being quite clever is that often we are quite sure of things. We understand stuff. We know stuff. We are not used to not being clear on things, and then all of a sudden we get hit with a bunch of uncertainty. And the reason I'm talking about this kind of in the middle is because I think that uncertainty can be uncertainty on an intellectual side. I'm not sure how to analyze this data. I'm not sure exactly what argument to make based on these documents, that sort of uncertainty. Or it can be the uncertainty of not knowing whether your work is good enough, not knowing what you'll do next, not knowing whether you'll get promoted, all those things.

But thinking about how can I feel safe while uncertain is a really useful [00:20:00] exercise because often the reason we keep thinking about something is because we believe that if we'll resolve it, if we can just be less uncertain, then we'll feel better and we can stop thinking about it. The problem is, as we all know, that once, one thing that wasn't certain becomes more certain, we think of other things too. This is the downside of a clever brain, right? There's a lot of good things, but this is the downside of a clever brain. So trying to fix the uncomfortableness of feeling uncertain by making yourself certain is a really understandable but really shortsighted strategy. I still do it. I still have to talk myself down from this. I find uncertainty tolerance quite challenging in a bunch of situations. What I want you to therefore think about is how can I feel [00:21:00] safe while being uncertain? What can I say to myself that reassures me within that uncertainty? I like things around. I trust that I'll figure it out. Some of you might go for the kind of what will be, will be type strategy, anything that helps you feel as though it's okay that you don't yet know. And that you will figure it out and that the time will come and you'll make a decision, and then we will know, and then we'll make it work from there. That kind of pragmatic vibe is what we are going for.

Sometimes it's about reminding ourselves of what things it is not our business to know. So our supervisor's, true perception of us is probably not quite our business to know really or it might be things that we will know at some point, but that we [00:22:00] can't know now. So whether this grant's gonna get accepted, whether we're gonna get promoted, whether we're gonna get our PhD or these sorts of things. And our brain desperately wants to be sure that it's true, but at the moment it can't be because we're not there yet. Whichever it is we get to help ourselves feel safe in this uncertainty and to decide what the next steps that we want to take are. We ask ourselves, how do I want to show up in the face of this uncertainty? Rather than, how can I be more certain? How can I decide what the argument I'm going to make is? What options have I got? How will I choose between them? How will I decide what analysis to use, what options are there? How will I choose between them? So rather than trying to be certain right now and feeling uncomfortable, we're not certain right now. We get to figure out what's the route towards making these decisions. What's the route towards supporting ourselves during this period of time where we don't actually know the [00:23:00] answer 

and then finally for some of you, the thoughts will be more these things that you can't stop thinking about your PhD, about your academic life. They will be more to do with, I'm not sure I'm good enough. I dunno whether this is the right thing to do, and so on. So those more anxious thoughts.

Now, as you all know, this podcast is definitely not a replacement for appropriate psychological care if you struggle with anxious thoughts, but at an kind of non-clinical level, have a few suggestions. The first is remembering that feeling anxious thought is not necessarily something that has to be terrifying. That has to be this awful thing that we have to make go away. There are many things in our lives where we are doing things that feel quite high stakes, that we've never done before, that we're not certain how they'll go. It's quite appropriate to feel a bit anxious about it.

What we get to do is we get to double check a couple of things. We get to double check are we looking after our bodies? So this can be in terms of are we feeding ourselves, are we giving ourselves water? Are [00:24:00] we allowing ourselves to sleep? All of those sorts of things. But it can also be in terms of when we're in the midst of feeling a bit anxious, a bit panicky, and things like that.

Are we giving ourselves the things that we need right then? The sort of slow breathing, grounding exercises, all those sorts of things. So are we looking after the physical sensations that we are getting because of our anxious thoughts? And then the other side of it is just double checking that we are not feeding ourselves thoughts that are making the anxiety worse. Because there are some bits of it. I'm not sure how this goes, and I'm worried about that. Okay, fine. Fair enough. That seems reasonable. Okay. Those anxious thoughts are kind of encouraging you to take action, to be more ready, to figure out whether there's anything you wanna change in your life. All of these sorts of things. But if those thoughts are also spiraling to, and I don't deserve to be here, and everyone will think I'm an idiot, and these sorts of thoughts, then we get to remind ourselves [00:25:00] that we don't have to repeatedly tell ourselves those thoughts.

Now we can't stop them coming up. They're probably gonna come up, but we can choose how we respond to them and we can choose how much we reinforce them to ourselves.

And one really useful way to do this, I find, is instead of telling ourselves I need to stop doing that, is tell ourselves I want to do this more often. So choosing intentional thoughts, choosing things that feel true to you, I can figure out how to do this. Whatever happens, I will be okay and I'll figure out a plan. Thoughts like that. So not just telling yourself it's gonna be fine, but telling yourself that if it is not fine, then we'll figure that bit out too. 

So choosing those intentional thoughts, choosing intentional activities, so when you feel these sorts of anxious thoughts, having things that you know, always help you in trying to encourage yourself to do those too. So those can be things that you can do during the day, whether music helps you, whether walking helps you, whether splashing your [00:26:00] face with water helps you, any of those sorts of things. But also if you are somebody who has these thoughts a lot at night thinking, what are the actions I can take at night? What are the activities I can do in my head that will centre me and ground me again, what are the breathing activities that I can do if I'm thinking a lot in the night. Do I want to have a notebook where I can always jot things down if they come up during the night?

So thinking through what are the intentional thoughts that I want to kind of preload remind myself to think in the moment? What are the intentional activities that always help me?

So those are my tips for today. The question started out as, how do I stop thinking about my PhD? I think by the end, the kind of take home here is not so much how to stop thinking about it, but how to have more control over when you think about it, the ways you think about it and what you tell yourself.

Because actually if we can be intentional about that, it gives us the opportunity to kind of [00:27:00] ponder our academic work in that sort of intellectual way that lots of us will have dreamed about being part of being an academic. We get to ponder these topics that we care about, that we are interested in and so on. But we also create space to be thinking about the other things in our lives because we are human beings as well as academics, and that is just as important. We create space to be thinking about all of those things as well, and we learn and develop strategies to manage the thoughts that feel more uncomfortable.

I hope that helps. Do let me know what you think, whether this is something that you struggle with, whether any of these tips particularly resonate with you. If you're not on my newsletter, make sure you sign up. Go to my website, the PhD life ph.com. You can sign up right on the front page there. Let me know what you think. Thank you all for listening, and I'll see you next week.