Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
[AHappyPhD] Restarting your PhD habit after a slump, and other avoidances
Hi Reader!We are still trying to come back to some sort of blogging and newsletter regularity over here. This week(s), we bring you two very related posts: a new one about restarting a long-term project (especially, thesis work) after a long stretch of not working on it. We also bring you a classic post that explains a lot of the underlying psychology of how these thesis productivity slumps appear and are perpetuated (or not): the role of avoidance in much of our self-sabotaging during the PhD. New blog post: How to restart our PhD habit after a productivity slumpA family member dies, or their health fails catastrophically, requiring intense caregiving. A workload spike at our thesis-unrelated job becomes an ongoing plateau. Life’s logistics somehow align to get in the way, again and again. The experience of a “hair on fire” emergency morphing into a prolonged thesis progress slump is more common than we think. My recent hiatus from blogging/newslettering has helped me see this common problem of doctoral students in a new light (and to experience it viscerally). This post explores mindsets and strategies that can help us return to making regular progress on our non-urgent but important projects (a.k.a. the thesis). Flashback: Avoiding avoidance and other mental self-sabotage in the PhD(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) Very related to the new post above, we wrote some years ago about the psychological phenomenon that is at the heart of these thesis productivity slumps: experiential avoidance. We also suggested several (one-shot or regular) science-backed actions that can help motivate us into action.
Getting into a rut of NOT working in your dissertation? Avoidance may be at the heart of those unhelpful cycles. Learn about it and strategies to fight it and do more of what's important at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/avoidance/ May your slumps be just bumps on the road to the doctorate! Did this content help you? Hit reply and send us feedback (I cannot reply to all the emails we get, but I do read all of them), buy us a coffee, or help us spread the word! Forward this email to a friend you think may find this kind of advice useful. If you are reading this and you have not joined the newsletter yet, you can subscribe and get exclusive access to a worksheet to make the strategic plan towards your next dissertation goal, in the button below:
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A Happy PhD
Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
Hi Reader! Whoa, it's been a while! After almost six months of not being able to write for the blog or this newsletter (more on that in the next post), you may have forgotten about A Happy PhD. To kickstart my own newsletter habit (and hopefully, your habit of reading it), here is a short one: a little nugget about how you can use AI to "talk to the blog" (or listen to it) about a certain topic... and a flashback to our classic end-of-year post. Do a yearly review, I'm doing one myself and...
Hi Reader! The summer has come in full force (heatwaves, I'm looking at you!) here in the Northern hemisphere. Maybe now the teaching and other obligations are slowly receding, and many of you are rushing to finish research studies and papers before a much-needed holiday/break. This week's newsletter brings two simple but powerful tips that may be relevant in such a season: a new post about managing feedback in multi-author paper writing; and a flashback to a post where I describe a pet...
Hi Reader! After a long hiatus, made of colliding deadlines and a general "falling off the productivity wagon", we're back on track! This week, we ramp up our newsletter activity with a flashback to a post on how to face an addiction to social media, and a new tiny practice that helped me get through some of the difficult episodes in this intervening time without newsletters. Flashback: Facing addiction to social media in the PhD (Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to...