Feelings of being stuck, of not knowing where we’re going, self-doubt, guilt… are not exclusive to the doctoral thesis journey. Despite their smaller scope, other long projects with little feedback or structure (like a master thesis) share the same motivational pitfalls and may induce the same kind of uncomfortable experience at times. In this two-part post series, we review key advice and simple practices which could also be useful to help us face these capstone projects. But these can also be very useful if you are a PhD student just starting out!

Very often, the myriad of obligations, additional tasks, jobs and activities in our daily lives block us from making progress in our most important goals (like finishing that doctoral thesis!). This is especially true of part-time doctoral students that have a day job to make ends meet, but even full-time students face this challenge. Our behavior needs to change, but we can’t find what to change (or the energy to do it).

Do you start your workday full of energy and eager to tackle your research but find yourself by mid-morning already spent and demoralized? Does this happen after a flurry of email interactions, social media scrolling, or passive meetings? You may be experiencing the differential effects of creative and consumptive work on your motivation and energy. This post will go over a (still half-baked) idea about how different kinds of work energize us, and simple rules that we can implement for a more sustained sense of progress and satisfaction with our (PhD or otherwise) work.

Is your PhD giving you beautiful dreams or horrible nightmares? In either case, you probably should be getting more of them. Sleep (or, rather, lack of sleep) is one of the best-known and most consistent risk factors related to depression, anxiety, and host of other mental and physical health issues. It is also one of the factors (mostly) under our control – even if it often gets the back seat with respect to other priorities like work, social life, family, or the latest season of our favorite TV show. In this post, I review some of the (very extense, and rather terrifying) research about the effects that lack of sleep has on humans in general, and PhD students in particular. The post also points you to practices and resources to help you in sleeping not only longer, but also better. Keep your delicate mind and body machinery in optimal working condition!

In a previous post, we have seen the crucial role that having a sense of progress plays, not only in the productivity, but also in the engagement and persistence of a PhD student towards the doctorate. While this recognition (and the practices to “make progress visible” we saw) put a big emphasis on the student as the main active agent, PhD students are not the only actors in this play. Is there anything that doctoral supervisors can do to help? In this post, I go over some of the same management research on progress and our own evidence from the field, looking at what supervisors can do to support their students in perceiving continuous progress that eventually leads to a finished doctoral thesis.

Have you ever felt like you are “stuck” in your PhD, making no progress, or going in circles? If so, you are in good company – most PhD students report such experience at one time or another during their doctoral process. The normalcy of this experience, however, should not make us dismiss it as unimportant. In this post I review research that speaks to the importance of this sense of progress (or the lack of it) to our engagement with work and the eventual completion (or dropping out) of the PhD. The post also reviews several everyday practices to cultivate your own sense of progress.

Have you ever found yourself avoiding your supervisor, or the thesis meetings, or just not wanting to open the manuscript file you have to finish? Then you might have some problems engaging with your research work. In this third post of the series on finding more happiness in your research, I look at how engagement at work is defined, how to assess your own levels of engagement, and some research-backed practices to help you engage better with your work and find your “flow”.