Why did my PhD make me so depressed?...
I am sitting here now, post-PhD, in a dressing gown, in a
bed, in a room, on a Saturday morning, applying for a job. It’s my holidays, so
no job to go to, nowhere to be at any particular time. This day is all mine. It’s
a lovely feeling to have this expanse of time stretching out ahead of me. And
while I can’t fill it all as I please – because there is work to do – the way
in which I get to do that work is lovely: dressing gown, coffee, snacks in the
fridge, my laptop, and me. Heaven.
This is exactly what it was like writing the PhD. These are
all the components of those few PhD years: comfort, time, spaciousness, and
just me and my thoughts and whatever I feel like doing that day.
So what went wrong?...
I wonder this because I did enjoy a lot of the PhD time.
Especially in the first year, I was radiantly happy. I took walks around my
sunny neighbourhood in the middle of the day. I enjoyed coffees with friends,
and talked to them about my PhD. I got up in the morning and read books and
worked. I had lots of dinners with friends, involving wine and good food and
music. I went running round a local park. These are all the things that you are
supposed to be doing, according to the Procrastination Bible, to have a healthy
and productive working life: look after yourself, spend plenty of time with
friends, earmark time for exercise. All this makes you more productive when you
do sit down to do some work.
Something, somewhere, went wrong. Something must have gone
wrong, because I didn’t stay happy, and my days didn’t stay as nice.
Some things which went wrong, I think, include some of
these:
-
I had a progress review looming in the summer of
my first year. This put a kind of pressure on me: the piece of writing which I
produce for this progress review has to be ‘really good’, because academics
will read it and will decide on the basis of it whether I should be allowed to
continue or not. Instead of thinking ‘it only needs to e good enough’, ‘it’s
only my first year’, I began to think ‘It needs to be better than it is; I
should have worked harder’. Somehow, I allowed myself to feel guilty about all
the time I had spent enjoying myself alongside the PhD. I remember, on the
morning when I sent off the progress review piece, feeling rotten because a
colleague was sending along an entire PhD bibliography with her piece, and I
didn’t have one, because I just hadn’t bothered to do that kind of extra work.
Somehow, this made me feel bad.
-
After the progress review – for which I worked
quite hard – I should have celebrated by going on holiday. Instead, I found
myself thinking: There’s only more work after this. I have just got over this
big hurdle, and, as far as I can see, there’s no rest for me; the next hurdle
(Chapter 2) is looming, and, according to my schedule, I should be getting on
with it. I never really stopped to celebrate that first success, and never gave
myself any time off as a reward. (In retrospect, I now see: I would have done
better to have taken a month off and gone off travelling.)
-
I started teaching classes in my second year of
PhD. Suddenly, there was extra work to do (preparation, marking, meetings, talking to students). Instead of
seeing this as part of my job, and cutting myself a little slack (‘I have
worked today already – I prepared for my classes and I taught – I can have a
break’) I found myself thinking: ‘I haven’t done enough work today/ I haven’t
done any PhD today/ I have nothing to show for today’. A beating-myself-up
attitude.
-
I started saying these negative things to myself
more and more. ‘I haven’t done enough today’; ‘What is wrong with me?’ and ‘I
just don’t know what I am going to write in this chapter.’ I can see now that,
as I wasn’t having enough holidays and weekends off and generally not enough
free time, my brain never really had the chance to lie fallow anymore. I found
out much later that, if you have frequent breaks and rests and go off on long
walks, or swim - in short, if you clock off once in a while - your brain has a chance to relax, and while it relaxes, ideas
which seemed confused and knotty suddenly somehow unravel and start sorting
themselves out.
-
In conclusion: take breaks, and watch what you say.
‘Language
is powerful. There is a direct correlation between the words that you use and
the life that you have.’ (Barbara Stanny)
