During the doctorate (and in our later lives as researchers) we have to deal with a wide variety of situations and tasks, some stressful, some requiring focus or calmness. Going to therapy, doing therapy-inspired reflection exercises, journaling, and other practices are all very useful, but they require us to step away from the difficult situation. If only there was a simple, free, portable tool to help us in such situations, something we could do in any occasion and which is evidence-based… Wait, there is! This post is about breathwork, an array of tools with an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating its effectiveness. The post describes how we should breathe for better health and cognitive performance, and how different kinds of breathing patterns can help us cope with common challenging situations throughout the PhD.

Doctoral well-being is one of the central topics in this blog (indeed, it was the one that started it all, more than three years ago). While I have tried to base my writings in the peer-reviewed research of this area, so far my reading of it has been rather unsystematic. How do doctoral well-being researchers summarize this body of knowledge? In this post, I distill from the findings of a systematic literature review on doctoral well-being, teasing out topics and factors that we already knew about from previous posts as well as novel ones that we can try to act upon.

Does the thesis bring you a sense of anxiety, fear or discomfort? As we saw in a previous post, that is not an uncommon experience at certain points during the PhD. At the heart of many of our unsuccessful strategies to deal with these symptoms (including distraction and addiction) is the notion of avoidance. In this post, we’ll explain what avoidance is, its key role in many mental health afflictions, and suggest exercises and strategies to help us overcome these challenges.

Are you spending more time on social media than you would like? Is your use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok… hampering progress on your doctoral research? You are not alone: many doctoral students report in our workshops that spending too much time scrolling compulsively on social media is one of their biggest productivity challenges. Building upon the insights about dopamine and addiction from our previous post, here I go over eight concrete steps we can take to break this compulsion and do more of the things we think are really important (like finishing that thesis).

One of the catalysts that kickstarted this blog was the realization that PhD students are at a higher risk of mental health problems than other students and professionals. Yet, how bad is the problem really? Exactly how many PhD students are suffering from depression or severe anxiety right now? How many will drop out? In this quickie post, I pull from the data of a few recent studies to give a concrete, numeric answer guesstimate to these questions.

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!

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.