Social media, porn, eating sugary things, shopping, alcohol, or spending our days anxiously reading the news… Most of us have behaviors or substances we do compulsively, to the point that it damages our relationships and our ability to achieve important goals (including, of course, finishing our PhD thesis). Dopamine is at the heart of these addictions. In this post, I distill lessons learned from reading Anna Lembke’s book “Dopamine Nation”1 about how dopamine works, how to face our addictions, and do more of what we think is important.

As our time at home increases due to quarantines and lockdowns, so does our opportunity to endlessly gossip, procrastinate or bitch about the global situation, our leaders and celebrities, or the people we happen to live with. Or, we could choose to be productive. We could choose to develop a new skill. Being mindful allows us to notice, in a non-judgmental way, the richness of life in and around us (yes, even when you’re locked down at home day after day). In this new kind of post (the “quickie”), I give you in brief a few reasons to develop such mindfulness, and three ways to start learning that skill, today.

No matter how meaningful your research feels to you, no matter how engaged you are when doing it, sometimes things just don’t work out as you expected. Papers get rejected, proposals are not funded, data gets mangled and needs to be collected again… plus all the non-research-related stumbling blocks that life throws at us, from sickness to accidents or family tragedies. How fast and how well can we recover from those setbacks that throw us off balance? This fourth post in the series goes over the concept of resilience as an important pillar for staying happy and fulfilled while working in research. Read below for instruments you can use to gauge it, and practices to help you stay resilient in the face of difficulties.