As a follow-up to the first post in this blog, I dig a little deeper in some of the research on anxiety and depression during doctoral studies, to find “risk factors” and “correlates” that seem to often come along these depressive symptoms. I hope that the awareness of these factors (from gender to other things you can actually change in your everyday life) will help you understand why some people struggle doing a PhD, while for others it seems a piece of cake. Change what you do and put the odds on your side!

Initially, I thought that I was doing this to help the PhD students around me (and others like them elsewhere) to pass through the dissertation process more effectively, with less stress. But at some point, I realized that other, more selfish, reasons were playing out as well. In this personal account I reflect on a chronic problem of academics and Ph.D. students alike, and how I face it through this blog.

This is one of the most basic, flexible and effective productivity techniques, which I’ve been using for many years. I know many PhD students and academics that swear by it, but I am still surprised by others who do not know about it. In this post I come back to its origins, how to do it, and how I have combined it with other routines to keep me on track. Essential in this age of smartphones, social media and other constant distractions!

By far, this is the tool (as in, “thinking tool”) which I recommend most often to PhD students. This diagram summarizes your main research questions, thesis contributions and evidence of their usefulness. While painful to make, this brutal synthesis exercise is also a powerful communication tool. In this post, I explain how it works, its origins, and how making 18+ versions of it helped me through my PhD. Copy the provided template and use it in your PhD supervision meetings or even in the PhD defense!

There is a growing body of research that indicates that doing a doctoral dissertation can be taxing on the mental health of PhD students, with depression, anxiety, or burnout as potential pitfalls. Is this problem real and, if so, how bad is it? In this post, I review several recent studies, some of which also offer insights about potential risk factors. This also kickstarts the whole idea of this blog, as a way to increase awareness about these difficulties, and offer practical tips and tricks to survive such a difficult period.