We spend a lot of our time trying to avoid pain, effort, and discomfort. In the PhD, this can take a myriad shapes: reading too much literature (rather than writing our own ideas), not reading a competitor researcher’s latest paper (it may render our work unoriginal), doing email first (vs. that hard, laborious qualitative data analysis), making a research plan with concrete deadlines (accountability, yikes!), asking questions at a research seminar (will we look dumb?), delaying reaching out to potential participants in our research (cold-contacting strangers is awkward, right?), meeting our supervisors… Then, one day, we realize that avoiding discomfort is exactly the opposite of what makes the PhD a meaningful endeavor. This post delves deeper into that realization, deriving a “mantra” to support us during hard times in the doctoral journey.

We spend our days trying to avoid pain, uncertainty, and effort. We go around by car when we could perfectly go by bike or walking; we try to painstakingly draft and redraft and redraft the latest research report for our supervisors when faster feedback would be more beneficial; we delay the visit to the dentist until it is way too late for the damaged tooth to be salvaged; we take out our smartphone and scroll mindlessly at the slightest sign of boredom. The list is endless…

If I stop and think about it, when I was doing my PhD I spent most of my days working to avoid one kind of discomfort or another, from uncertainty about my skills and fear of failure, to hunger or boredom (and currently it is pretty much the same!). There are even psychological theories that contend that a lot of (human or animal) actions are, in one way or another, a flight from pain or discomfort (or fear of death). Yet, if I look back to moments in my life that I consider meaningful, and in which I had an active part (i.e., they were not just random events that later turned out to be meaningful), I think all of them required me to face and overcome some form of discomfort, be it boredom, uncertainty, pain, or effort.

Just a few examples:

1. Deciding to quit a well-paying, stable industry job to pursue my PhD full-time, even if I had no funding to do. This was a hard decision with uncertain outcomes at the time, but in retrospect it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
2. Taking the time and effort to painstakingly revise (for a second time!) my first journal paper submission (it ended up being accepted, and being on a good journal in my field, it set me up for a good publishing record later on).
3. Reaching out to seven big names in my field, offering my services as a postdoc, six months before defense. This felt super-awkward at the time (who am I to bother these undoubtedly super-busy luminaries?), but turned out to land me a job in Switzerland a couple of years later.
4. Coming back together with my now-wife, after an initial break-up. Again, a decision riddled with uncertainty and fear (and which required lots of effort down the road). Yet, another of the greatest right decisions I can recall.

This idea that pain and effort are not an obstacle to be avoided, but rather the most distinctive marker of meaningful endeavors, is not new. From the Buddhist idea that suffering is in the nature of life and needs to be embraced or understood; to Stoics like Marcus Aurelius saying that “what stands in the way becomes the way”¹, thinkers have seen this connection between discomfort and meaning. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy built upon his experience at Nazi concentration camps during WWII to suggest that the search for meaning is the most fundamental drive of humans, even in the face of strong suffering. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it is recognized that discomfort is most often associated with the things we value most (i.e., our most important values), and a willingness to withstand it is key for a values-aligned life. And, more recently, authors like Michael Easter have argued that modern humans’ search to eradicate discomfort (be it hunger, effort, boredom or the inevitability of death) is making us more unhappy than ever before².

This search for comfort (or avoidance of discomfort) and how it affects what we consider meaningful can also be seen in the world of technology. If you are old enough, think about life before Google made the search for information trivially easy: going to the public library or to a friend’s house (yes, the one with the big encyclopaedia) in search for the information for a school report. Think of the effort not just the physical/psychological effort of the search, but also withstanding the feelings of impatience until we got the answers we sought. Do you think the current effortlessness in finding an answer to our questions has anything to do with how much we value not just the search for knowledge, but also an expert’s opinion, or knowledge itself? Will the recent rise of seemingly-all-knowing generative AI chatbots save us from having to read (and write!) difficult texts, creating a sort of “inverse Fahrenheit 451”³ scenario, in which reading and writing will become meaningless and nobody will have the courage to spend time reading the classics or writing a complex series of thoughts?

The corollary to these ideas is obvious: we need to befriend discomfort. Not just sitting with it, as we have proposed in the blog, in the context of difficult academic writing. Taking that idea one step further: seeing the discomfort, the effort of reading an abstruse but important text on our topic, or doing a hard data analysis, as a marker of meaning. Of great things to come.

To be clear, with this I’m not advocating some sort of sado-masochism in which we just read difficult texts for the sake of difficulty. Neither I’m suggesting that we should not plan our research, as this is typically done to diminish the (uncomfortable) uncertainty of failed experiments and other bad outcomes. Meaningless difficulty is still meaningless. But, if we find ourselves flinching at discomfort (be it boredom, uncertainty, or plain effort) we can quickly double check: is this discomfort taking us closer to what we consider important? Can we find a connection between this suffering and one of our values? If the answer is yes, then this tiny but powerful idea applies.

Taking a page from logotherapy’s techniques, there’s a few concrete things we can do when (not if) we are struggling with (or finding ourselves avoiding) PhD research tasks like writing a scary first paper draft or doing a difficult data analysis:

1. Connect with our source of meaning in the PhD (see our classic post about purpose in the PhD). Why is the PhD important to us? Because it is our thing? because it will help support our family? Because it contributes to human knowledge and to a certain research community? Especially useful in this regard is logotherapy’s “dereflection”: focusing on values outside of ourselves. Is there any way in which this hard task, this pain, will be helpful for others? Is the contribution we are making something worthy in and of itself? We can remind ourselves about this value, write it on a post-it and keep it visible during our struggle.
2. Connect mindfully with the discomfort. When emotional pain, uncertainty, or effort appear, sit with it, going over the four phases of a classic mindfulness technique (Recognize, Acknowledge, Investigate, and Nurture – or RAIN). In the final phase, we can add to usual the nurturing gesture suggested in the exercise, the realization that, by doing that difficult research activity, we are also nurturing one of our key values (see the previous point). We can thus befriend this difficulty as a marker of great things to come: an increased resilience, better skills, and the development of our identity as researchers.
3. Try “paradoxical intention”. If we tried the previous two points and still cannot seem to unblock ourselves from the focus on how difficult or painful the research task is (or, more commonly, we anticipate it will be), we can try a classic logotherapy technique. The idea is to flip our intention: to try to do our worst for some time (on an ironic or humorous tone). If we fear that our paper draft will not be worthy of our (or our supervisor’s) expectations, we can set a timer for, say, 15 minutes, and try to write a draft that is so incoherent and mediocre that it is laughable. If we catch ourselves trying to write a perfect sentence, the idea is to remind ourselves that that is not today’s job. Chances are we will feel freer, unblock ourselves, and maybe some of the prose may even be usable.
4. Become comfortable with discomfort in general. One of The Comfort Crisis’s central ideas is that, in order to regain satisfaction with our lives, we just need to be OK with being uncomfortable, making effort, and being bored, on a regular basis. So, just take the stairs (he often cites a survey in which they found that only 2% of Americans take the stairs when there is an elevator), be OK waiting in line for the cashier without looking at the phone, write your paper without ChatGPT kickstarting it, … any effortful or boring alternative to a more comfortable/smooth experience (that does not have dire consequences) is probably worth trying from time to time, just to be OK with not being totally OK.
5. Have a mantra card handy. Once we have done the points above a few times the exercises themselves may not be needed, as we will have internalized the idea that discomfort and meaning are deeply connected. By keeping a visual reminder of this idea (like the mantra card below) we may be able to immediately tap into these inner resources we have developed. Just notice the difficulty, look at the card, remember our source of meaning, and continue walking towards that important value with our friend (the discomfort) as a travel companion.

Hope this helps you navigate the difficulties and struggles that appear in all doctoral processes. It certainly is helping me to this day, way beyond my PhD defense.

May your PhD be meaningful, and only moderately uncomfortable! :)

What is your source of meaning in doing your PhD? Can you formulate it in writing? Share it in the comments below – it may help other doctoral students understand their own purpose!

Header image by ChatGPT⁴.

• Focus
• Productivity
• Wellbeing
• Mantra
• Purpose
• Happiness
• Values