phd without stress

The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

PhDs are renowned for being stressful and when you add a global pandemic into the mix it’s no surprise that many students are struggling with their mental health. Unfortunately this can often lead to PhD fatigue which may eventually lead to burnout.

In this post we’ll explore what academic burnout is and how it comes about, then discuss some tips I picked up for managing mental health during my own PhD.

Please note that I am by no means an expert in this area. I’ve worked in seven different labs before, during and after my PhD so I have a fair idea of research stress but even so, I don’t have all the answers.

If you’re feeling burnt out or depressed and finding the pressure too much, please reach out to friends and family or give the Samaritans a call to talk things through.

Note – This post, and its follow on about maintaining PhD motivation were inspired by a reader who asked for recommendations on dealing with PhD fatigue. I love hearing from all of you, so if you have any ideas for topics which you, or others, could find useful please do let me know either in the comments section below or by getting in contact . Or just pop me a message to say hi. 🙂

This post is part of my PhD mindset series, you can check out the full series below:

• PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health (this part!)
• PhD Motivation: How to Stay Driven From Cover Letter to Completion
• How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Studying

What is PhD Burnout?

Whenever I’ve gone anywhere near social media relating to PhDs I see overwhelmed PhD students who are some combination of overwhelmed, de-energised or depressed.

Specifically I often see Americans talking about the importance of talking through their PhD difficulties with a therapist, which I find a little alarming. It’s great to seek help but even better to avoid the need in the first place.

Sadly, none of this is unusual. As this survey shows, depression is common for PhD students and of note: at higher levels than for working professionals.

All of these feelings can be connected to academic burnout.

The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of:

– Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; – Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; – Reduced professional efficacy. Symptoms of burnout as classified by the WHO. Source .

This often leads to students falling completely out of love with the topic they decided to spend years of their life researching!

The pandemic has added extra pressures and constraints which can make it even more difficult to have a well balanced and positive PhD experience. Therefore it is more important than ever to take care of yourself, so that not only can you continue to make progress in your project but also ensure you stay healthy.

What are the Stages of Burnout?

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North developed a 12 stage model of burnout. The following graphic by The Present Psychologist does a great job at conveying each of these.

I don’t know about you, but I can personally identify with several of the stages and it’s scary to see how they can potentially lead down a path to complete mental and physical burnout. I also think it’s interesting that neglecting needs (stage 3) happens so early on. If you check in with yourself regularly you can hopefully halt your burnout journey at that point.

PhDs can be tough but burnout isn’t an inevitability. Here are a few suggestions for how you can look after your mental health and avoid academic burnout.

Overcoming PhD Burnout

Manage your energy levels, maintaining energy levels day to day.

• Eat well and eat regularly. Try to avoid nutritionless high sugar foods which can play havoc with your energy levels. Instead aim for low GI food . Maybe I’m just getting old but I really do recommend eating some fruit and veg. My favourite book of 2021, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reduce Disease , is well worth a read. Not a fan of veggies? Either disguise them or at least eat some fruit such as apples and bananas. Sliced apple with some peanut butter is a delicious and nutritious low GI snack. Check out my series of posts on cooking nutritious meals on a budget.
• Get enough sleep. It doesn’t take PhD-level research to realise that you need to rest properly if you want to avoid becoming exhausted! How much sleep someone needs to feel well-rested varies person to person, so I won’t prescribe that you get a specific amount, but 6-9 hours is the range typically recommended. Personally, I take getting enough sleep very seriously and try to get a minimum of 8 hours.

A side note on caffeine consumption: Do PhD students need caffeine to survive?

In a word, no!

Although a culture of caffeine consumption goes hand in hand with intense work, PhD students certainly don’t need caffeine to survive. How do I know? I didn’t have any at all during my own PhD. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it .

By all means consume as much caffeine as you want, just know that it doesn’t have to be a prerequisite for successfully completing a PhD.

Maintaining energy throughout your whole PhD

• Pace yourself. As I mention later in the post I strongly recommend treating your PhD like a normal full-time job. This means only working 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday. Doing so could help realign your stress, anxiety and depression levels with comparatively less-depressed professional workers . There will of course be times when this isn’t possible and you’ll need to work longer hours to make a certain deadline. But working long hours should not be the norm. It’s good to try and balance the workload as best you can across the whole of your PhD. For instance, I often encourage people to start writing papers earlier than they think as these can later become chapters in your thesis. It’s things like this that can help you avoid excess stress in your final year.
• Take time off to recharge. All work and no play makes for an exhausted PhD student! Make the most of opportunities to get involved with extracurricular activities (often at a discount!). I wrote a whole post about making the most of opportunities during your PhD . PhD students should have time for a social life, again I’ve written about that . Also give yourself permission to take time-off day to day for self care, whether that’s to go for a walk in nature, meet friends or binge-watch a show on Netflix. Even within a single working day I often find I’m far more efficient when I break up my work into chunks and allow myself to take time off in-between. This is also a good way to avoid procrastination!

Reduce Stress and Anxiety

During your PhD there will inevitably be times of stress. Your experiments may not be going as planned, deadlines may be coming up fast or you may find yourself pushed too far outside of your comfort zone. But if you manage your response well you’ll hopefully be able to avoid PhD burnout. I’ll say it again: stress does not need to lead to burnout!

Everyone is unique in terms of what works for them so I’d recommend writing down a list of what you find helpful when you feel stressed, anxious or sad and then you can refer to it when you next experience that feeling.

I’ve created a mental health reminders print-out to refer to when times get tough. It’s available now in the resources library (subscribe for free to get the password!).

Below are a few general suggestions to avoid PhD burnout which work for me and you may find helpful.

• Exercise. When you’re feeling down it can be tough to motivate yourself to go and exercise but I always feel much better for it afterwards. When we exercise it helps our body to adapt at dealing with stress, so getting into a good habit can work wonders for both your mental and physical health. Why not see if your uni has any unusual sports or activities you could try? I tried scuba diving and surfing while at Imperial! But remember, exercise doesn’t need to be difficult. It could just involve going for a walk around the block at lunch or taking the stairs rather than the lift.
• Cook / Bake. I appreciate that for many people cooking can be anything but relaxing, so if you don’t enjoy the pressure of cooking an actual meal perhaps give baking a go. Personally I really enjoy putting a podcast on and making food. Pinterest and Youtube can be great visual places to find new recipes.
• Let your mind relax. Switching off is a skill and I’ve found meditation a great way to help clear my mind. It’s amazing how noticeably different I can feel afterwards, having not previously been aware of how many thoughts were buzzing around! Yoga can also be another good way to relax and be present in the moment. My partner and I have been working our way through 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene on Youtube and I’d recommend it as a good way to ease yourself in. As well as being great for your mind, yoga also ticks the box for exercise!
• Read a book. I’ve previously written about the benefits of reading fiction * and I still believe it’s one of the best ways to relax. Reading allows you to immerse yourself in a different world and it’s a great way to entertain yourself during a commute.

* Wondering how I got something published in Science ? Read my guide here .

Talk It Through

• Meet with your supervisor. Don’t suffer in silence, if you’re finding yourself struggling or burned out raise this with your supervisor and they should be able to work with you to find ways to reduce the pressure. This may involve you taking some time off, delegating some of your workload, suggesting an alternative course of action or signposting you to services your university offers.

Also remember that facing PhD-related challenges can be common. I wrote a whole post about mine in case you want to cheer yourself up! We can’t control everything we encounter, but we can control our response.

A free self-care checklist is also now available in the resources library , providing ideas to stay healthy and avoid PhD burnout.

Top Tips for Avoiding PhD Burnout

On top of everything we’ve covered in the sections above, here are a few overarching tips which I think could help you to avoid PhD burnout:

• Work sensible hours . You shouldn’t feel under pressure from your supervisor or anyone else to be pulling crazy hours on a regular basis. Even if you adore your project it isn’t healthy to be forfeiting other aspects of your life such as food, sleep and friends. As a starting point I suggest treating your PhD as a 9-5 job. About a year into my PhD I shared how many hours I was working .
• Reduce your use of social media. If you feel like social media could be having a negative impact on your mental health, why not try having a break from it?
• Do things outside of your PhD . Bonus points if this includes spending time outdoors, getting exercise or spending time with friends. Basically, make sure the PhD isn’t the only thing occupying both your mental and physical ife.
• Regularly check in on how you’re feeling. If you wait until you’re truly burnt out before seeking help, it is likely to take you a long time to recover and you may even feel that dropping out is your only option. While that can be a completely valid choice I would strongly suggest to check in with yourself on a regular basis and speak to someone early on (be that your supervisor, or a friend or family member) if you find yourself struggling.

I really hope that this post has been useful for you. Nothing is more important than your mental health and PhD burnout can really disrupt that. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions which you think other PhD scholars could find useful please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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5 Ways to Combat PhD Stress

• By Nicholas R.
• January 8, 2024

When you’re starting your research career as an academic researcher, there will be many things that overwhelm you when you start out. As someone who has been through this myself, I have put together 5 ways of dealing with overwhelming feelings during your PhD journey.

These strategies may not work every time, but they’ve helped me get through my own struggles so far and hopefully can help you too!

1. Know What’s Going On

Before you dive into trying to solve any problem or figure anything out, take care of yourself mentally by knowing what exactly overwhelms you at the moment. One way to do this is to journal about what stresses you right now. When you feel more able to cope, try exploring solutions for those issues.

For example, if you find yourself struggling with managing workload, then it might be helpful to know that this type of stress often occurs at the very beginning and very end of a PhD, at least for myself and others I’ve spoken to.

Knowing the sources of your stress is the first step to addressing it.

2. Take Care of Yourself

Once you understand why you’re feeling overwhelmed, the next thing to consider is taking care of yourself physically. Stress from work, school, relationships etc., all contribute to poor health decisions such as skipping meals, engaging in unhealthy eating habits, drinking or smoking excessively, reducing sleep and exercise etc. All of which impact negatively on our physical and mental well-being.

In addition, one study showed that people under extreme levels of pressure (such as doctoral candidates) were more prone to developing heart problems compared to other groups. So while taking care of yourself should always be a priority, it’s especially important to prioritise it even further when we’re stressed.

It can seem difficult to balance personal needs and researcher responsibilities, but doing so requires prioritising self-care over everything else. In order to achieve this, set aside dedicated blocks of time each day where you avoid distractions, focus solely on activities related to your wellbeing, and allow yourself to fully engage in whatever activity brings peace to your mind and body.

3. Talk About It With Friends and Family

One thing that you learn early in a PhD is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. While the rewards of doing your PhD are many, there is a significant cost, and it comes in the form of stress.

You’ve probably heard the expression “ PhD students are walking time bombs ” – which is basically just a polite way of saying that PhD students are walking around with a serious short-fuse, and it’s only a matter of time before that fuse goes off.

Seek support from others before that happens…

Talking to close friends and family members helps us to process emotions better. Research shows that talking to others provides relief by releasing negative thoughts and worries, so we don’t need to carry them around inside ourselves throughout the rest of the day. Having supportive individuals in our lives makes it easier to handle both small tasks and large ones.

If you live alone, however, having someone available to discuss your concerns with can provide valuable insight into whether or not you’re handling stressful events properly. A friend or family member can offer perspective and guidance without judging you for your current situation.

4. Make Time For Fun Activities

We’ve all heard that it takes 10 years to make a really brilliant scientist. You might have trouble proving this, but it is a very long time, and many people struggle with sticking to a research plan that is longer than 3 months.

We also know that there are many distractions available in the ‘real world’, that are not available to researchers. A few months ago, for example, I went to a pub quiz night. While this may sound like a total waste of time, in fact it has become a huge amount of fun for me, and has helped me to get my research into the right place.

I also find that regular, non-research-related social events help keep things fresh and remind me that there are more important things than my research at the moment.

5. Accept That This Is Just Part Of The Process

The hardest part about completing a PhD program is simply surviving it. Many of the lessons learned along the way will come from overcoming obstacles and failures. Learning from setbacks and mistakes prepares us for future success. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we just won’t be successful at accomplishing certain milestones or reaching our desired outcome.

That doesn’t mean giving up though. Instead, accept that failure can happen and move onto bigger opportunities. Sometimes we learn more from our successes and achievements rather than focusing on our failures and shortcomings. Also, remember that setbacks aren’t permanent. Often, after a short period of mourning, we bounce back stronger than ever.

We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over failing. Rather, let it inspire us to become wiser and smarter for next time. After all, it takes countless attempts to master the skills required to succeed.

Regardless of how you’re feeling, remember that you are not alone. You are not alone on your PhD journey. You are not alone in your feelings. And you are not alone in your desire to succeed.

Impostor Syndrome is a common phenomenon amongst PhD students, leading to self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. How can we overcome these feelings?

A well written figure legend will explain exactly what a figure means without having to refer to the main text. Our guide explains how to write one.

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Join thousands of other students and stay up to date with the latest PhD programmes, funding opportunities and advice.

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Dr Day gained her PhD Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham in 2000. She is now a Science & Fiction writer, an Associate Editor at PseudoPod.org and runs the blog ‘The Chronicle Flask’ about all things chemistry.

Prof Raghupathi gained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1991. He is now a professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy at Drexel University College of Medicine.

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Experienced PhD stress in the world of academia

The academic world has changed a lot over the passed decade which has resulted in the deteriorating status of the researchers [2], a lot of work-related stress ( PhD stress ), and mental health issues for people working in academia [1],[3]. According to study [3], 47% of the PhD students in Berkeley reached the threshold for being depressed, and according to study [1], 40.81% of the PhD students in Flanders, Belgium felt under constant strain. Compared to highly educated professionals or students, people with a PhD or PhD students report much more mental health issues [1],[2]. Feelings of being powerless, helpless, stressed, depressed, unhappiness, and being unable to enjoy every day activities are common among people working in the academic field. On top of that, low self-esteem and perfectionism are common among academics [19]. Job insecurity, temporary contracts, too many PhD students and too little faculty positions, and changes in the funding policies are some of the contributing factors to more PhD stress [1],[2]. The biggest problem for most people working in the academic world is that they can’t do anything about these contributing factors: you join the rat race or you’re out!

Fortunately, PhD stress and the chance of developing mental health issues can be reduced to a minimum with the tips on this page. This article focuses on PhD stress , its causes and ways to reduce the experienced stress levels.    

PhD stress – Why do PhD students experience so much stress these days?

There are several contributing factors that add to the stress PhD students experience:

• Future perspective : poor promotion/job prospects; temporary contracts [1],[2].
• Personal life : work-family conflict & family-work conflict [1],[4],[5].
• Work context : supervisor’s leadership style; job demands; job control [1],[6],[7],[9],[10],[11].
• Personality and mental health [8].

Future perspective

PhD stress – Ratio between PhD students and faculty positions

Due to the economical crisis worldwide, many universities and research institutes are experiencing financial problems, because governments have been cutting in the funds for education for years now. Less funding leads to fewer (permanent) job positions or promotions, less money for research, and an increase in job insecurity and short-term contracts [1],[2]. Most research institutes and universities are forced to apply stricter criteria in the allocation of research funds. In some countries, research funds can only be obtained by universities and research institutes if research proposals are accepted by international funding commissions [2]. The cuts in funding can also be seen in the reducing amount of available job positions or promotions; people with a permanent job prefer the security the job gives them over the new challenges they face with a new (temporary) job. On top of that, the amount of PhD students has increased significantly over the past decade, whereas the amount of faculty positions has only slightly increased (see image) over the past decade [1]. More PhD students for few positions leads to more competition and PhD stress . The increasing amount of PhD students in combination with the poor job/promotion prospects has created a huge pool of unemployed people with a PhD. In short : less money for research and education has lead to more short term contracts , poor promotion/job prospects, more unemployment, more competition, and too many highly educated people (PhD students or higher) compared to the amount of positions available. Consequently, this leads to a lot of PhD stress .    

Personal life

Family to work: work to family by gender

A lot of PhD students or people with a PhD work in the evenings and weekends due to the high workload, which negatively affects their social life (missing out on family time, parties, and date nights with partner). This is a clear example of work-to-family interference. Both work-to-family and family-to-work conflicts are associated with psychological distress [1], job dissatisfaction, and burnout among employees in a range of occupations [5]. A possible reason could be the negative sanctions (at both personal and institutional levels) academic scientists face when family interferes with work [4]. Unsurprisingly, if the departmental climate becomes more competitive and stressful, the probability of work-to-family conflict increases significantly [4]. These circumstances will add to the PhD stress most academics experience, especially if nothing changes.    

Work context

8 bad leadership traits

Stress has a negative impact on leadership styles. When a supervisor experiences a lot of PhD stress , their leadership qualities deteriorate, which leads to higher levels of stress and burnout in their subordinates [6]. Also, destructive leadership is associated with counterproductive work behaviour and a negative attitude towards the organization in subordinates [7].

In other words: reducing PhD stress by applying changes on an organisational level can be effective if organisations focus on leadership styles and job demands and job control.  

Job demands and job control

There is a strong relationship between high job demands and emotional exhaustion and depressive feelings. Job demands are those physical, social or organizational aspects of the job that require sustained physical or mental effort [10]. High job demand and low job control is associated with increased PhD stress . Job control refers to control one experiences regarding the timing of breaks, usage of skills, and working pace [1]. High job demands, low job control, and certain leadership styles in combination with fewer (PhD/permanent) positions in academia creates a PhD stress cocktail so lethal that it’s almost impossible to sustain a health work-to-family life where weekends and evenings can be spend with family.    

Personality and mental health

Some people are more sensitive to stress than others. Certain personality traits such as neuroticism, disagreeableness, and tendency to perceive hostility can all lead individuals to be more reactive to stress as well as to perceive the behaviors of others in a hostile manner [8]. Also, suffering from PTSD, anxiety disorders or mood disorders can increase stress levels, because these mental disorders negatively affect daily life and work performance.    

What can you do to reduce PhD stress?

There are several things someone can do to reduce PhD stress and to stay as productive as before. For some people, small changes and adjustments are sufficient, whereas for others, it means they need to develop a whole new way of living and working. In some cases, the stressor will disappear, in other cases, however, coping skills will be offered to deal with them, because it’s difficult to control them (think of leadership style). Let’s have a closer look:  

Adopt a healthy day and night rhythm

An unhealthy day/night rhythm can cause all kinds of changes in peoples’ behaviour and mood. In general, sleep disturbance impairs quality of life. Compared to good sleepers, people with chronic sleep problems experience more psychological distress and impairments in daytime functioning [13]. People who experience sleep disturbances (or nightmares or insomnia), for instance, have significantly more suicidal thoughts and behaviours [12]. And right before people experience a manic or depressive episode, they report sleeping problems [13]. Therefore, it’s important to keep a healthy day/night rhythm: use the bed(room) only for sleeping; sleep a minimum of 6,5 and a maximum of eight hours a night [13]; switch off electronic devices one hour before you go to bed; develop a bedtime routine (brushing teeth, taking a shower, read for 10 minutes, turn off light); immediately leave the bed when you wake up (no snoozing).  

Adopt a healthy lifestyle

A healthy lifestyle both prevents and reduces the amount of stress one experiences [14]. People who’ve adopted a healthy lifestyle, pay attention to their nutrition, are more in touch with nature, exercise and relax regularly, and possess stress management skills and/or meditate [14]. Exercise and meditation do not only reduce the amount of stress one experiences, they also help reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression [14]. At the same time, both meditation and exercise force you to take a mental break from work/study related activities, and give you time to recharge mentally again. Paying attention to good nutrition indirectly affects the stress levels one experiences, because it prevents people from eating too many calories, and to eat healthy and varied. Obese people are at higher risk of developing depression; the odds increase for severely obese people [15]. Herbal and nutritional supplements such as kava, passionflower, Lysine, and Magnesium help reduce symptoms of anxiety [16], and thus add to the reduction of PhD stress . NOTE: Next to taking in anxiolytic ingredients, users of passionflower and kava may also consume ineffective of possibly toxic substances [16]. Therefore, it’s important to discuss the intake of herbal medication with your General Practitioner. Avoid (too much) coffee and alcohol. Although coffee has a stimulating effect on people, on the long run people can get dependent on caffeine with means that they need more caffeine to experience the same stimulating effect as before. Unfortunately, regular caffeine and alcohol intake leads to feelings of fatigue and tiredness.  

Visit a specialist

Visiting a therapist or counselor when someone feels emotionally or physically exhausted, also known as burnout, or depressed, suffers from symptoms of anxiety or has self-esteem issues is highly recommended. Sometimes, people cannot get better on their own and need a professional to treat or guide them through this process. It is possible that work or study is so demanding that it exhausts you mentally or physically, which increases the chance of developing a mental disorder or symptoms of mental disorders. Sometimes, (old/childhood) traumatic experiences resurface or get triggered, which can lead to sleeping problems, irritability, flashbacks, numbness, and eventually reduce the productivity levels needed to perform at work or for study. For others, low self-esteem may cause a lot of PhD stress , because they constantly question their own academic (writing) skills and are afraid to make mistakes. This may result in perfectionism and perfectionism leads to more worry and rumination about work [19]. Worry and rumination add to stress levels.  

Use a family calendar

People working in academia may experience a lot of work-to-family and family-to-work stress [1] due to job demands and family obligations. A lot of the problems within families are caused by self-centeredness: the intense desire to achieve desired goals and little tendency to satisfy the others’ needs [18]. Although there is no relationship between communication skill level and marriage satisfaction [17], there is a relationship between marriage satisfaction and conflict resolution: a domineering, authoritarian or autocratic control of the conflict leads to less marital satisfaction and longer lasting conflicts [18]. Due to this approach, partners are less likely to adjust to their partner’s needs and competition and feelings of jealousy between them grows [17]. Knowing in advance what someone’s schedule is, prevents surprises, conflicts, and increases the likelihood that the partner will adjust their schedule a little. A family calendar is very helpful for those who have a busy schedule and have children. People can plan events and deadlines way in advance and it reduces the experienced PhD stress significantly.  

Schedule breaks

It is common for people in academia to work on articles for hours at once, because they need to get into a flow (increases their productivity). Unfortunately, writing/working for hours without a proper break is exhausting on the long run, and makes people less emotionally available (which leads to more conflicts at home). Consequently, people become less productive which will lead to longer writing shifts. Therefore, it is important to have regular breaks of 10 minutes, and to have one big break of one hour around lunch time. Exercise, relax or socialize with friends in the evening. This will help you recharge your battery for the next day.  

Have a support network

Having a support network moderates the effects stress has on psychological distress and significantly improves quality of life [20]. Also, a support network is a strong predictor of a person’s physical health and wellbeing, and helps people cope with phd stress. Intimate social relationships, rather than family relationships, is the strongest predictor of overall life satisfaction [20].  

Have a back-up plan

Temporary contracts, less funding for research, too many people with at least a PhD (compared to the amount of positions available), and a strong competitive field, significantly reduce the chance that one will finds a PhD position or job in their desired field. Add the fact that switching careers is considered a failure (because you were not good enough), and it becomes clear that this may be the most difficult piece of advice to follow-up on. Unfortunately, it’s a fact that most people who do their PhD will not end up working in academia, or will have to live from temporary contract to temporary contract. Especially the latter adds to the experienced PhD stress . Make sure you have a back-up plan. Discuss with family or friends how long you will try to get (a) a PhD position or a permanent position in your desired field, before switching to plan B. Discuss what plan B will be and make sure that you like plan B, and that finding a job is easier with plan B.  

Schedule regular meeting with your supervisor/boss

Communicate with your supervisor/boss to know what he/she expects of you and to keep them updated about your progress. Depending on your boss’s leadership style and personality, it is likely that you boss will not ask too much of you when he/she knows how much you have to do still.    

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Dealing with PhD research stress

• by James Hayton, PhD
• January 17th, 2011

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How i wrote a phd thesis in just 3 months.

September 2005:  While queuing to sign the paperwork to register for the third year of my PhD, I was talking to a student from astronomy who mentioned seeing one of his fellow students struggling to get his thesis finished before the final deadline. It wasn’t the usual case of being a bit stressed and tired in the run up to submission, desperate to do the final editing, or a last-minute crisis like trying to get it printed and bound. The poor guy had been awake for over 36 hours trying to write new material. It just wasn’t finished. The words that stuck in my head were, “his face has gone grey” .

I didn’t want to be  that guy , but it scared me that I could easily imagine myself in the same situation. I’d been there before. I could feel his pain; the racing heartbeat and the gut-wrenching self-recrimination, knowing that he was perfectly capable of doing it earlier.

I had always been a serial procrastinator. During my undergraduate degree, I constantly left work until the final possible moment (or later). There was a set pattern; after coursework was set, I never worried about it until the deadline was looming. Even by the time it became urgent, I’d still find myself doing other things;  anything  other than work. Still, I managed to get through on late nights and buckets of coffee.

When I reached the final year of my PhD, I had little in the way of results, no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and was wasting huge amounts of each day stuck on the internet. It felt like I was working – I was expending energy anyway – but without any forward momentum. It seemed I had no control over the outcome of the research. I’d put hours in; sometimes it’d work out, more often I’d get nothing, and sometimes I’d end up undoing work I’d already done. My default would be to go and waste half an hour on the internet when something went wrong, or when I just couldn’t find the motivation to do anything productive, so then I’d end up feeling guilty about not doing enough work.

In the summer of my final year, I was on the verge of a breakdown . I didn’t have enough results, time was running out, my personal life was a mess, and I absolutely believed that I was going to fail. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, and the whole thing seemed pointless. I had trouble sleeping, which in turn meant I couldn’t function during the day, and the whole cycle just continually reinforced itself.

I’d become extremely irritable, even shouting at a first-year student for doing nothing more than asking how it was going.

PhD’s are supposed to be difficult; at a basic level that’s the whole point of them. But when it affects your mental and physical well-being, something has to change.  In July 2006, two months before my funding was due to run out, I hit rock bottom. The mental defences I’d built up against my situation, which largely involved carrying on as normal, were blown apart.

I was depressed and desperate, but was forced to actually face up to reality rather than simply trudging on waiting for something to change. I realised that if I was stressed, miserable and getting nowhere, then I was doing something wrong.

Where do you go when things aren’t going to plan?

So what did I do? Work longer hours to try to make up for lost ground? No. I  relaxed . I started looking after the simple things, like my mental health, by taking a walk around the campus when things weren’t going right, rather than defaulting to checking email. I could think the problem over and go back to it when I was ready.

That one habit alone saved my PhD. Without spending any more time in the lab, and  far less  time at a computer, my productivity  rocketed . I started getting results, started to regain confidence, and started to think that I might actually pass my PhD.

Where you go, physically and psychologically, when things aren’t going exactly to plan can have a massive effect on how quickly you can get back on track. My old default habits of reverting to the internet to fill up time and avoid the problem whenever I lost momentum were destructive, but not in an obvious way. It took a bit of trauma to force me to actually asses them.

Often, physically stepping back from the source of stress can help gain a new perspective, but I think the key is not to let information in as a distraction, and let the brain engage with the problem in a relaxed way. In any kind of research, things will go wrong at some point and we can’t always control everything, but we can always choose how to respond. The point though is that it needs to be a  conscious choice , not just reverting to habit.

PhD stress: Don’t ignore the warning signs

The 3 habits that saved my PhD

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Joachem Hatizivi Nyamande says:

Quite helpful information, thanks

James C. Okware says:

Eye opener insights for any PhD student. Thanks a million, Doc. However, here in Africa (Uganda) one cannot bring any new knowledge as demanded by true PhD research because the candidate MUST either go with the dated knowledge/views of the advisor (they even call themselves supervisors down here – you get the point); or you won’t complete!

James Hayton, PhD says:

That can also happen in other countries! It often depends more on the individual supervisor than the country or field.

PhD: An uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life

By james hayton (2015).

PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.

Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.

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Why you shouldn't rely on AI for PhD research and writing

The false promise of AI for PhD research

Wisdom must be hurt: PhD students’ stress and dilemma from the perspective of self-efficacy

• Published: 28 May 2024
• Volume 43 , pages 24028–24040, ( 2024 )

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• Zhong Fangqi 1 &
• Li Pengpeng 2  

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An number of studies has shown that PhD students are experiencing dissatisfaction and stress. The high global percentage of PhD dropout rates has been regarded by higher education as an urgent issue. This study used the self-efficacy theory as an inquiry tool and in-depth interviews as a method to explore the current situation of Taiwanese PhD students and the stress and difficulties they face. The results of the study found that, although the dilemmas faced by Taiwanese PhD students has something in common with the self-efficacy theory, there are also special experiences in the context of Chinese culture which effect performance and accomplishment. Lack of affirmation prevents the PhD students from receiving positive evaluations and causes them to doubt their abilities. At the same time, PhD students have long suffered from parental mandatory expectation education, believing that they must be excellent and maintain family pride, thus putting them under considerable psychological stress.

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Fangqi, Z., Pengpeng, L. Wisdom must be hurt: PhD students’ stress and dilemma from the perspective of self-efficacy. Curr Psychol 43 , 24028–24040 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06078-2

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• Dealing With PhD Stress The Right Way: Advice From 3 PhD Graduates

Do you know who gets the PhD? The person who perseveres. And dealing with the stress is one key factor that you must overcome in order to successfully graduate. You may experience one (or a combination) of the following during your PhD and at different stages of your graduate career ( and are signs to look for and not ignore ):

• Constantly feeling you can’t work hard enough
• Feeling overwhelmed by the workload
• Feeling like you are not working to your true ability
• Inability to focus
• Feeling like nothing you do has any impact, and that you have no control
• Feeling that even easy things have become difficult
• Constant fear of failure
• Feeling like you don’t belong in a PhD program, and that you will be “found out”
• Physical or mental exhaustion

Whatever you have experienced up until this point whether you are in your first, second, third, fourth of fifth years and beyond-You know what’s crazy? In many ways, these feelings are “normal .” If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be much of a PhD. Or at least you’re not taking it “serious” enough (at least from what I was told and programmed to believe as a graduate student).

The point is that many PhDs may experience similar pain points and stress, but many will handle it in different ways-as the reason to start, endure, and finish a PhD is entirely individualistic. But this certainly does not mean you should ignore the warning signs  if the stress becomes overwhelming, as graduate school depression and anxiety is very serious.  You’re not alone , so don’t be afraid to seek help from a counselor, family, or friends.

What you have to keep in mind is that once you defend, these feelings that you are experiencing now will fade into the background . They become a thing of the past. Yes, it is hard to get through but remember it is only temporary .

If you do an informational interview with a PhD 10 or 20 years out, they will carry nostalgic memories and certain stories with them like how they used to be in lab till 2 in the morning. But the fact of the matter is, they have moved on (they have a job, a family, and aren’t eating out of a soup can everyday). They don’t want to remember the feelings of doubt, stress, and pressure (although when you spend 5+ years of your life in grad school there are just some things you will never forget). But, that’s why when you tell them the stress you are going through in your PhD program, you will still get a reaction out of them because you are taking them back to their old grad school days and they have shared those same struggles/feelings at one point in time.

So, in order to capture these “feelings” in their right moment, I asked two of my UW-Madison friends who just recently received their PhDs to write some tips on how they kept their stress levels low and successfully defended their PhD.

If you haven’t already, check out my previous article on 10 Ways to Successfully Defend Your PhD . Due to overwhelming requests and emails asking for my defense video and for additional tips on how to keep stress levels low, I decided to write an additional article focusing just on the stress issue. And I have posted the link to my defense video below.

Some emails I have gotten recently are (they will remain anonymous):

I am approaching the end of my PhD cycle and becoming increasingly nervous and anxious about the public discussion of my thesis! It has been a very lonely and long walk! Would it be possible to watch the video of your PhD defense? Just read your “10 Ways To Successfully Defend Your PhD,” which I found both enjoyable and stimulating. You mention a video of your own defense. I’d love to see it, if you’re still happy to share it. If you’ve seen other good defenses on youtube or elsewhere and have any additional links, those too would be much appreciated. I read your blog in the title of “10 Ways to successfully defend your PhD”. I think it is very useful for me; however, I want to request an example video of a defense talk that you suggest in your blog. I have a plan to defend my thesis on next Thursday. I feel very nervous, and I think my presentation is too long (80 slides). Do you agree with me ?

**My PhD defense video can be viewed here:

Http://bit.ly/1sait7o.

For a quick recap, the top 10 highlights were as follows:

• Do not underestimate how long it takes to prepare your slides/talk and make sure you give multiple practice talks (and in terms of how many slides or how long your talk should be-you should have this figured out by giving your practice talks and getting feedback from others)
• Listen to other thesis defense talks
• Have your friends, labmates, and others drill you with questions
• Re-read over your entire thesis and write out your own list of questions
• Don’t let distractions get to you
• Get plenty of sleep, keep your diet in check, and take care of yourself
• Keep your cool and relax**
• Don’t focus on the after-party until you have actually reached the after-party
• Have a good structure
• Visualize yourself giving your defense each day and think about how good it will feel when it’s over

What I want to focus and expand on here in this article is #7: Keep your cool and relax . Your nerves are going to be running high and it may be hard to sleep at night. But the goal of this article is to help put your mind at ease. There may be some overlap here (with #1-10 above), but since PhD “stress” is deeply-rooted-it is important to look at the overall big picture and have multiple solutions/approaches.

Advice From PhD Graduate #1

Dr. Jamie Hadac had these words to say before we cut to the chase:

First, let me start off by saying congratulations! You have made it this far, now it’s time for the final push. Hopefully your thesis is in good working order and now you just need to prepare for the big day. I recently defended and I have some tips. In general, do whatever it takes to keep your confidence high and your stress low. I have divided these tips into two sections (8 Tips total), Professional and Personal.

Professional

• Practice, practice, practice ! Your talk will probably be a big source of stress. Try and practice in any way you can. I gave two talks to public audiences, (set up by a partnership through my university), two job talks, posters, and practice talks to lab mates. Of course you won’t always be giving the same talk as your defense talk, but you can gain a lot of insight for your Big Presentation. Things like timing, clarity, and other people’s critiques can be carried over from other talks. It will be a major confidence booster . The last thing you want to do at your defense is read word for word off your slides.
• Communicate with your thesis committee . Your defense should not be the first time you’ve talked to them since your last committee meeting. If you have committee members in close proximity, take some time to chat about your progress. They can provide a different perspective that you might not receive from your PI alone. Also, you can address their questions or concerns in a much more low-key environment. Be sure to ask how they want your thesis delivered: some prefer paper, others electronic.
• Think ‘Big Picture’. You now have to take your research in one little area and weave it into a greater body of knowledge. You will also be transitioning in to a new career or position. If anyone asks “so what?” you should have a solid and accessible answer. Your committee will see that you have thought about future directions for the lab, for your career, and for society. Show off the independence, perspective, and creativity you have cultivated.
• Be organized with dates and times . Chances are your graduate school has specific timelines for things like paperwork. Make sure you have done everything that needs to get done and clue your PI into these deadlines. Plug them into your phone if necessary. You don’t want to be messed up by an administrative technicality or forgetting to get a form.
• Make your healthcare a priority. I have some medical conditions that were exacerbated by stress. You are making major life changes, and it’s totally normal that they affect you on a physical level! I met with my primary care physician and we developed a strategy to make sure my health did not fall to the wayside during this time. Even if your health is fine, your insurance may cover things like massages or dental cleanings that will boost your confidence and reduce your stress.
• Clear your mind by moving your body . Your brain is probably doing a million things at once. Try and find an activity that lets you focus on one thing, like running, paddleboarding, or yoga. You may say you don’t have the time, but make the time . It will have profound affects on you physically and mentally .
• Banish negativity . You spend so much time thinking critically about experiments, data, and other people’s papers. Don’t let that carry over into being critical about yourself! Now is not the time to doubt or beat yourself up . Any time you have critical, confidence-ruining thoughts about yourself, write it down. Then write next to it why you are wrong or exaggerating. Then, if necessary, create solutions. If your mind says, “I’m terrible at public speaking, I can’t do it” remember you have spoken in public before, you aren’t terrible, and you have improved greatly in the last few years. Then, make some steps to get in some practice.
• You’ve done a lot of work, keep your energy high and stress low by getting a good night of sleep . Perhaps try going to bed 10 minutes earlier every night. By the end of the week you can get an extra hour in. Your brain needs it!

Advice From PhD Graduate #2

Dr. Nate Wlodarchak had these tips to share, focusing more on the earlier/during thesis writing stages:

The last two months before the defense were a challenge but they went fairly smooth despite many small road bumps. First, a little background: my PI is a new PI, so not very experienced in the process of matriculating students. That being the case, I didn’t have my PI to rely on to know what to do so I had to figure a lot of things out for myself. Having to talk to a lot of different people to figure this out was crucial, and communication was absolutely vital.

Sitting down to write the first time was a really daunting task . I looked at other people’s theses and thought how am I ever going to get to 200 pages ? I started by looking at my outline (from the 6 month meeting) and went from there. First, I had to find a place to write. Every time I went into lab I was asked so many questions and everyone needed so much help, I couldn’t get any work done. I also had to make a lot of figures, and making them on a laptop was just annoying, so the library wasn’t the best option for me either. I ended up doing most of my writing at home. It wasn’t as ideal but it worked pretty well.

The biggest problem was getting stressed whenever I wasn’t productive . I had to let that go and realize that some days are going to be more productive than others. I had mornings where I did a little bit, then goofed off all afternoon, but then was super-productive in the evening…even missing dinner. Forcing myself to stick to some arbitrary 9-5 schedule was stressful because if I wasn’t productive, my “relax time” wasn’t really relaxing. I had to sort of let the writing dictate the schedule. Obviously there were deadlines to meet, so sometimes I couldn’t afford that luxury, but when possible, it was a great stress reducer.

Of course during two months of writing, life happens too . I had weddings and family functions to attend as well as some other extracurricular activities. I found that these things reduced the stress level quite a bit, but needed to be planned for well so I didn’t have the writing monster always looming behind me. I also kept the important “life things” scheduled but made sure not to accept any extra responsibilities that would just add stress. Most importantly, if I didn’t keep some time for friends and socializing, I wouldn’t have been able to keep the stress down.

Sometimes stress is just out of your control though . Like when your PI gets you all of your corrections back three days after it was due to the committee and they blame you for it (despite the aforementioned PI having ample time to work on it). I was lucky enough to have a good support structure for those times, and don’t know what I would have done without them.

When all else failed, I took lots of walks, lots of bike rides, and sometimes just sat on the porch with a beer and watched the world pass by, remembering that in the big scheme of things life is just too short to waste time worrying .

Advice From PhD Graduate #3

Now I am going to add to the advice listed above. Based on the emails/requests that I have received on how to deal with the stress during a PhD (especially during those final weeks), my short answer (as cliche as it sounds) is that you must take each day at a time, but by all means- DO WHATEVER WORKS FOR YOU . That is why you have 3 different people who have successfully defended their PhDs (included myself) providing you with advice and what worked for them. From this, I hope you can find your ‘personalized solution’ . Find out what that is and stick to it . I hope the advice so far has been useful. I will just add 3 additional tips:

2) If you are just a stressed out person by nature no matter what you do, and you are doing a combo of many of the things listed above (i.e. practicing your talk, getting sleep, getting exercise, eating right, keeping caffeine low, taking breaks, etc.), try a combo of magnesium and valerian root to calm your mood and help with night anxiety/insomnia.

3) Boost your confidence ! You’ve heard this before: Doing practice talks and getting feedback is the easiest way to feel like you are in control. The people who are the most nervous/anxious may also be the ones who haven’t spent enough time practicing/preparing.

I thought I would also add to this ‘theme’ of stress since there seems to be a link between stress and demotivation (becoming paralyzed, overwhelmed, fearful, feel like you’re going to have a nervous breakdown, too much to handle, etc.). Not only does stress weigh you down, but it can affect how you perform those final weeks leading up to your defense-the weeks that really count. Just to put it in perspective, here are the top 10 things that may be causing your demotivation :

• You’re demotivated by fear *
• You’re demotivated by setting the wrong goals
• You’re demotivated by lack of clarity about what you want
• You’re demotivated by a values-conflict
• You’re demotivated by lack of autonomy
• You’re demotivated by lack of a challenge  (or being “over-challenged”)
• You’re demotivated by grief
• You’re demotivated by loneliness *
• You’re demotivated by burn-out *
• You’re demotivated by what to do next (or you are distracted.. planning the PhD ‘after party’.. daydreaming)

The full context of these ’10 demotivators’ and how to keep the motivation is outside the scope of this article. But you can read some tips for how to get motivated again here . Additionally, some previous articles, such as 10 Ways to Be A Successful PhD Student and How To Win/Graduate Faster touch on motivation and how to graduate in a timely manner.

What I want to hit on is #1, #8, and #9, since they are the most relevant to PhD students. That isn’t to say that the other 7 points aren’t relevant or have some affect on you, but for the purposes of this article I have picked the tops ones.

Now you may be someone who is very motivated, but is just really stressed out. Or you may be someone who is lacking motivation and is stressed out. Or you may be someone who is highly motivated and has low stress (best-case scenario):

A) If you are very motivated and really stressed out, then you need to find ways to deal with your stress until you defend (see above).

B) If you are someone who is lacking motivation and is stressed out, you will benefit from the additional #1, #8, #9 tips.

C) If you are someone who is highly motivated and has low stress all the way up until your defense, then you’re lucky.

#1) If you are demotivated by fear find out what it is that is haunting you. Write it down. Go through each fear individually. Ask yourself where this thought or fear comes from . Fear can slow you down. It can make you feel lethargic.

If the fear you have is something like “I’m going give a poor thesis defense talk” why are you thinking this? Overcoming a certain fear isn’t exactly easy if it is something that has stuck with you for a long time. Do you know what my fear was? That I wouldn’t be able to answer the questions the audience or my thesis committee members were going to ask me. My fear was that I would embarrass myself and I would bomb a question .

Here is the bottom line: You know more about your project than anyone . This is 5-7 years of your life so you are the expert. If you have a fear then come up with a plan, break it into chunks, and come up with ways to boost your confidence.

When it comes to #8/#9 and dealing with PhD loneliness and burn-out..

If you are lonely/struggling with lack of social life, please read this article about Dealing with the Lack of Social Life in Graduate School , or Maintaining Relationships During Graduate School . Don’t be afraid to take breaks and get out there and be social to keep your sanity ! As Dr. Wlodarchak stated, during those two months of writing, life happens too. And you should let it happen. You will feel like someone locked you in a cave and you haven’t seen daylight for weeks. Once your thesis is handed in, that is a huge milestone but remember-it’s not over. But do whatever it takes to unwind, and keep the stress low-even if that means you go out for a night with your friends. Don’t feel guilty for doing this. Many PhD students shut out their social life/friends during those final weeks and months.

Remember at the beginning of this article I said, “What you have to keep in mind is that once you defend, these feelings that you are experiencing now will fade into the background . They become a thing of the past. Yes, it is hard to get through but remember it is only temporary? ” Therefore feeling burned out or lonely is also temporary . At least once you graduate, you’ll have more free time (hopefully) to make changes in your life and recoop certain ‘losses’ or put your time towards things you always wish you had (but couldn’t).. I can tell you for those who skip the post-doc and go directly into industry working a fulfilling job, this is the case (this will be a future post on the Post-PhD Life).

I myself experienced signs of burnout. But you have to learn to recognize it and fight it. And I pushed through. In fact, I was working a 20+ hour a week internship in industry while writing a thesis, doing paper revisions and experiments, and maintaining tissue culture. And that was for 7 months with 80+ hour weeks.  To this day, these are still the Top 10 Things that got me through and what helped me keep my motivation.

Overall- if you follow some of these tips to keep motivation levels high and your stress levels low, you will increase your chances of successfully defending your PhD and moving on to the next chapter of your life . And yes, the grass is greener on the other side. You will just have to find your own personalized solution to get you there.

 Further Reading:

An Anxious Mind

Tell the Negative Committee to Shut Up

Search The Grad Student Way

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 24 October 2022

Stress and uncertainty drag down graduate students’ satisfaction

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Faced with financial hardships, multiple demands on their time and uncertain career prospects, some graduate students are losing faith in their chosen career path. In Nature ’s 2022 global survey of graduate students — its sixth such survey since 2011 and the first to include master’s students — just 62% of respondents say they are satisfied with their current programme, a notable drop from 71% in 2019, the last time we surveyed PhD students . Half of respondents in the current survey say that their satisfaction has declined since starting their programme.

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May 21st, 2023

Managing your phd without burning out.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Working towards earning your PhD is an engaging venture albeit your progress can be riddled with challenges along the way. Some of these challenges have less to do with answering your research questions and more to do with managing stress, maintaining energy levels, overcoming anxiety, working around constraints, and finding the balance that helps your progress and takes care of your mental health.

The PhD burnout is a very real and yet less talked about phenomenon which can make the experience all the more tough to deal with. The WHO defines burnout as a syndrome that results from excessive stress and is characterised by the following dimensions:

• Reduced energy or exhaustion
• Negative feelings towards your work
• Lowered efficacy.

As a PhD student, you’re essentially working a full-time job and may experience these symptoms. And so, all the concepts we talk about with regards to a healthy work-life balance, maintaining productivity over time, and delivering quality work apply to your PhD life. No doubt PhDs are tough; however, you can overcome burnout by managing the symptoms. Here are some tips:

Improve energy levels

This is a no-brainer and yet can’t be stressed enough – eating well, following good sleep hygiene, and exercising regularly are your three best strategies at enhancing energy levels. Ensure that you eat a healthy diet and at regular intervals. Getting enough sleep is key to feeling well-rested and productive. Regular exercise can improve multiple health-related parameters and also boost your mood and sleep quality.

Maintain energy levels

Establishing a routine provides a better structure to your work and helps you manage your time and workload better without necessarily having to work long hours. There is evidence to support that routines improve creativity and focus. Ensure that you regularly take time off to improve your performance at work. This applies to within a work day where you take regular short breaks and even during the academic year, where you give yourself an extended well-deserved break. Taking walks, watching a show, catching up with a friend are good ideas for short breaks.

Reduce stress and anxiety

It is inevitable that your PhD will be stressful at times but the stress doesn’t have to lead to burnout. For this, the stress needs to be managed well. Journalling, meditation, reading (other than PhD work), listening to music, using laughter are all proven strategies to alleviate stress. Actively taking the time to switch-off from work and invest some time on these activities can go a long way towards managing stress and other negative emotional states and caring for your mental health.

Boost self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is your set of beliefs and personal confidence in your own ability to accomplish goals and is very important for your performance. Improving self-efficacy is not only necessary for avoiding burnout but is also key for good mental health, and personal and professional development. Developing a good support network of friends and peers, building resilience to bounce back from set-backs, reframing your outlook to a more optimistic style of thinking can help enhance your self-efficacy .

The PhD burnout is certainly avoidable and can be overcome with a few lifestyle improvements and mindset training. Your PhD is a project that you’ll be invested in for three to four years. Burning out early on in the journey can affect both your personal and professional life. This can be avoided by simply taking charge of your work life and taking care of yourself. You may want to consider talking to a professional if you need help. LSE has a number of support and well-being resources for PhD students that provide the necessary guidance or point you in the direction of other resources that may be available to you.

Your PhD can be rewarding experience if you take the initiative to shape your own journey.

About the author

I’m Aish, an MPhil/PhD student at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. I study the impact that personality characteristics can have on performance at the workplace. When I’m not actively PhD-ing, I spend my time cooking, writing, and hula-hooping.

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Speaking of Psychology: Waiting, worrying, and dealing with uncertainty, with Kate Sweeny, PhD

Encore: episode 163.

Is there anything more agonizing than being in limbo? Time may seem to slow to a crawl when you’re waiting for high-stakes news like a hiring decision, a biopsy result—or the end of a pandemic. Kate Sweeny, PhD, of the University of California, Riverside, discusses what makes waiting so stressful, how the stress of waiting differs from other types of stress, the relationship between waiting and worrying, and strategies people can use to lessen anxiety and make waiting easier.

About the expert: Kate Sweeny, PhD

Kim Mills: Speaking of Psychology is taking a summer break, so we’re rerunning one of our favorite episodes from the past. In 2021, I talked to psychologist Kate Sweeny about the particular stress of waiting, and living with uncertainty. We hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. Speaking of Psychology will be back with new episodes on August 23rd. Thank you for listening.

Is there anything more agonizing than having to wait for something important? You know, that feeling of hoping for good news while bracing for the worst? Time seems to crawl in periods of high-stakes uncertainty, such as for a job applicant waiting to find out whether they got their dream job or a high school senior waiting for word from colleges, or a patient awaiting biopsy results. And since COVID-19 entered our lives, the whole world has gotten a crash course in waiting and worrying as we've all hoped for the end of this agonizing pandemic.

What makes waiting so stressful? How does the stress of waiting differ from other types of stress? What kinds of waiting periods are the most difficult? Do some people have an easier time waiting than others? And what’s the relationship between waiting and worrying? Is worrying always bad? And if you’re in a period of anxious waiting, are there strategies you can use to lessen your anxiety and make the time pass more easily?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology , the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Sweeny researches on how people cope with acute uncertainty. Her lab has studied people experiencing tense times in their lives, including law school graduates awaiting news about the bar exam, patients awaiting biopsy results, and voters awaiting the outcome of a presidential election.

In recent years, she’s become interested in exploring how getting into a state of flow can help people cope with this type of uncertainty. She also studies how doctors can talk to their patients to lessen the patient’s anxiety. She has published dozens of peer-reviewed research studies and received APA’s 2016 Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. 

Thank you for joining us, Dr. Sweeny.

Kate Sweeny, PhD: Thanks so much for having me.

Mills: Let’s talk about how the stress of waiting differs from other types of stress. For example, you might think that receiving a bad medical diagnosis would be more stressful than waiting for the diagnosis, but that’s not necessarily what you’ve found. So what makes the experience of waiting particularly stressful?

Sweeny: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So just as an example, studies find that if you ask women who have gone through, for example, treatment for breast cancer what was the hardest part of that experience? Many of them will say it was the period of uncertainty that preceded the diagnosis, not the diagnosis, not the treatment, which can be very unpleasant. So there’s definitely truth to what you said. What we think—and we have some data now to support this—is that waiting combines two challenging states of mind: Not knowing what’s coming, uncertainty, and not being able to do much or anything about it. So, a lack of control. And, neither of those are comfortable states for humans to be in. And, when you combine them into these waiting periods, it really kind of boosts waiting into this extra suffering kind of state compared to other kinds of stress, which may be difficult in other ways. But waiting does seem to kind of tap into some existential challenges for humans in that it combines those two really challenging states.

Mills: And, you also study worrying, which is obviously related to stress, uncertainty, and waiting. You published a paper a few years ago called “The Surprising Upsides of Worry” that got some media attention. What are the surprising upsides of worrying?

Sweeny: So, worry is actually super helpful. That might be hard to imagine if someone is feeling worried, it’s not very pleasant. And that’s exactly how it’s helpful, in fact, is that it draws our attention to something that might befall us in the future. It motivates us through its very unpleasantness to prevent in some way that future bad event. Now, the trouble is when we’re waiting, we often can’t do anything about the future event. So, if you’ve taken an exam, you’ve undergone a medical test, there’s really nothing you can do while you’re waiting for that news to change your fate. Your fate is sealed. You just don’t know it yet.

And so worry, in that case, can get a little stuck. It kind of doesn’t help us in the same ways that it does when say we’re worried about a car accident and so we put on our seatbelt, or we’re worried about breast cancer so we get a mammogram. Those are very useful moments of worry. During waiting periods, it doesn't quite have that same useful function, and that is, I think, one of the other things that makes waiting so hard.

Mills: So, it’s almost a kind of controlled worry, a worry under circumstances that is going to protect you?

Sweeny: That’s right. And it’s not to say that worry has no function in, for example, waiting periods. One of the things that worry can prompt you to do is to, for example, plan out maybe worst case scenarios and make sure we’re ready for them. So, it’s not exactly prevention. It’s not quite the job worry wants to do for us, but it still can be useful to kind of get your ducks in a row, make sure that you’re prepared for the worst case. And, that can be a little bit comforting. It feels like grabbing back some control from the universe in these moments where we have so little control.

Mills: Now, you’ve talked before about how some of your research started as “me-search,” which is a great term we’ve heard other guests use on this podcast. What were the situations in your own life that inspired your interest in this topic?

Sweeny: I am certainly a worrier by nature. So many people are. I get it from my mom. So, we share that in common. So, that’s been kind of a lifelong reality. I think to some extent everyone has their moments of worry, but mine might be a little more profound than others. There have been, though, also some very specific experiences that I think informed my work on waiting and worry.

One that came kind of right around the time that I started to think about these issues was being on the academic job market, which is a long and tedious and stressful process that begins somewhere around August of the year before you want the job. And in my case, went through about January, and it was one of the most difficult kind of uncertain periods of my life. I feared often that I would be unemployed with a PhD. Of course, thankfully, it worked out and here I am. But that experience was one that I came back to often as I was thinking about how we cope with these experiences of uncertainty and what just makes them so difficult.

Mills: Were you looking at worrying during your graduate studies as well, or was it really just the experience of waiting for the first job?

Sweeny: Yeah, so certainly my research has been in some ways consistent from the early days of graduate school. I came there to work with a professor who was studying, at the time, one piece of the waiting experience, and that is bracing for the worst, which is a kind of like nitpicky phenomenon that happens while we’re waiting, where your expectations tend to go from very optimistic at the start or before a waiting period, and then plunge into pessimism at the moment of truth when we’re convinced we failed the exam or we have cancer or whatever the fear might be.

And so, I studied that phenomenon, as small as it may be, for quite a long time with a lot of focus. And then, as I came into this job at UC Riverside, and again, having had that experience of uncertainty during the job market, I started to kind of broaden out the view and start to think about, “Yes, we brace for the worst while we’re waiting, but what else are we doing?” And, what else is going on during those experiences that makes it so difficult? So, that was kind of the evolution of my research program.

Mills: There's a stereotype that women are bigger worriers than men. Is there any truth to that? Is waiting for uncertain news more difficult for some people than for others and how does personality or other demographic factors figure into worrying?

Sweeny: So, we actually did publish a paper just a few years ago with some pretty convincing evidence that women report more worry than men. I think that’s a pretty important distinction. It may be that, for various reasons, be they evolutionary or socialization—kind of how we’re raised—that women may, on average, perhaps experience a bit more of that particular kind of negative emotional experience. But, it’s a little bit hard to parse that out because it is also the case that women learn from an early age—very, very early age, in fact—research shows that it’s kind of okay to cry and it’s okay to be worried and it’s okay to be anxious, and little boys maybe less so. Certainly that was true historically. I would like to think maybe that’s changing, but it’s a pretty pervasive gender difference in how we raise kids. So I think that, yes, there is quite a bit of evidence, again, that women are at least willing to report more worry than men.

It’s also the case that personality matters. So people who have an overall tendency towards what psychologists call “neuroticism,” which is essentially emotional instability combined with a negative emotional kind of tendency. Unsurprisingly, those folks tend to deal with more worry than folks who are less neurotic or less lower neuroticism. There are other kinds of individual differences, we would refer to them as, that matter. One big one is what we call “dispositional optimism.” And that just means kind of an overall tendency to be bright and cheery, and kind of expect the best. And even if it doesn’t work out the way you want, it’s going to be okay anyway. Those annoyingly happy folks that we all know.

The higher you are in that tendency, that dispositional optimism, the easier time you have in the face of uncertainty. Now, having said all of that, no one finds all uncertainty to be comfortable. As I said earlier about worry, it’s useful. And so we really can’t escape it entirely. And I anecdotally have yet to find a person who hears about my research and says, “I don't know why you'd even study that. It's not that hard for me.” So, I think it’s a fairly universal experience at some level.

Mills: Does being an optimist, I mean, having a positive outlook on the world protect you from worrying? Do optimists worry less than pessimists or do we all just worry?

Sweeny: Yeah. Optimists do worry less than pessimists on average. Again, there are exceptional moments where the situation is so extreme that everyone worries. But on average, yeah, optimism, being an optimist in that way, that kind of cheery dispositional way, is protective. In fact, it’s one of the rare areas in psychology where it’s pretty hard to find a downside to that particular kind of personality trait. You might gamble more aggressively, but that’s the one finding about dispositional optimism that’s negative, pretty much everything else about it is protective.

Now, I want to make a really important distinction, and that is being that type of person doesn’t mean that you always think things will go well for you. That’s what we call “unrealistic optimism.” And, that is more of a kind of situational tendency to just expect the best when it’s not really something you should be expecting. And, that has all kinds of downsides, but that more kind of general disposition towards optimism and cheerfulness seems to be a pretty good thing if you can have it.

Mills: Does worrying kind of level off with age? I mean, there are a lot of negative characteristics that many people have that as you get older—and we always talk about how the baby boomers, the older folks, they feel more comfortable in their skin basically. I mean, does that happen with worrying as well where it just sort of, “Okay, I got this. I’ve been here before”?

Sweeny: Yeah. I don't know actually of any really good data on that question, but you might assume so from other research on aging. One of the things, one of my favorite, I guess, findings in psychology, though it’s not my area really, is that we do generally tend to get happier as we get older—at least from sort of the point of middle age on to later adulthood and older old age. It’s maybe counterintuitive, but the evidence is pretty compelling, and there are lots of good reasons why as you said, you kind of get better perspective. You’re a little bit less concerned about kind of achievements and making your mark on the world and kind of settling in more to a comfortable place in life.

That’s not entirely a faithful interpretation of the very complicated research on that topic, but it’s very reassuring for me to know that, likely, I will get happier as I get older. It’s one thing to look forward to. And again, I think worry likely goes along with that. Now, of course, there's huge variability. We probably all know older people who are beset by a lot of anxiety and worry, and that’s a tough place to be at that age. But on average, it does seem like people tend to, as you said, mellow out kind of as we get older.

Mills: There’s a really old adage—probably a lot of our listeners have never heard it—but it's the kind of thing my grandmother used to say, “A watched pot never boils.” So, does time slow down for everybody who’s worrying? I mean, that is kind of what that describes—that if you watch the water, it’s never going to boil. If you walk away, it will boil.

Sweeny: Yep, that’s exactly right. Yeah. So, in general, we’ve all, I'm sure, had the experience and lots of context where, if you're having a good time, time flies. And, if you’re experiencing something frustrating or boring or tedious or unpleasant, time seems to crawl along. A minute, it can feel like an hour. And that’s the case with waiting and worry as well. So, we have found that when people are suffering during a waiting period, they’re worried, they’re having a difficult time coping, that it feels like the end of that waiting period will never come.

Now, unfortunately, there’s a bit of a downward spiral that can occur because it’s also the case that when you feel like this waiting period will never end, it can heighten that distress that you’re experiencing. So, we’ve worked pretty hard to find good ways to kind of break that cycle, but it’s somewhat inevitable, I think, in those moments where you are feeling particularly worried.

Mills: So, I think that segues us into the concept of flow, right? That’s something that you have named and have been looking at. Can you explain what flow is and how it can help people who worry?

Sweeny: Yeah. So, flow is a concept that’s been around in the research literature for, gosh, I forget how old I am, but it’s probably more than 50 years at this point—a very long time; longer than I’m alive. And Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi is the kind of father of that concept of flow. He did study some really interesting in-depth studies many, many, many decades ago about creative types and the folks who can sit and paint and forego food and never get up to go to the bathroom. And, they’ll cramp up and they barely notice it because they’re so in the zone in the activity they’re doing. And so, he really identified that kind of absorbed flow state that many of us experience in our everyday lives as well, not just the artists among us.

And so, we have picked up that concept and really applied it to this idea of waiting. As we just talked about, one of the difficult things about waiting is the persistence of time passing slowly and not passing as quickly as we would like it to when we are eager to find out some information. And so, what better to do than to do something that will make time feel like it’s flying by? And there are lots of things we can do that might be a little bit distracting that get us away from watching that pot as the saying goes. But, it is especially useful if you can get into that kind of exquisitely distracting state of flow where you lose self-consciousness, you are completely out of your head, you are completely in the activity.

And in fact, we know that time seems to really just pass by in a moment when we’re in that state. In fact, when people ask like, “How do I know what my own flow activities might be?” I say, think about the thing you can’t do if you need to leave the house anytime soon because you’ll lose track of time and end up being late wherever you’re going. And that’s a pretty good indicator that that’s a flow activity, which is different for everyone. So yeah, that’s a good test and really points to that time perception aspect of flow experiences.

Mills: It sounds like it almost relates to a meditative state. I mean, is that part of what you advise people who are worriers—that if you can focus in the way that you might mindfully meditate that, that will help?

Sweeny: We have studied mindfulness meditation as well in this concept or in this context, excuse me. And it’s interesting. Flow and mindfulness are cousins, I would say. They certainly share a lot in common. They are both a form of focused attention, which might not, again, intuitively seem like something that would be helpful, but it turns out that attention is a really powerful force. And if we’re letting it kind of carry away to worries and ruminations and unpleasant thoughts, that’s going to hurt us. Whereas, if we can focus it towards something productive and pleasant, that’s probably going to help us in those moments.

So, they’re similar in that sense. They’re also similar in the sense that they are beneficial in lots of ways for reducing stress, for improving our emotional state. How they are different, I think, importantly, is that mindfulness is really about total awareness of your experience in a given moment. And that’s really the focus of most meditations is maybe focus on the breath, but also kind of notice your thoughts passing by, notice feelings that arise, notice sounds in your environment.

Whereas, flow is really the opposite in that particular way, where you are so absorbed in an activity. One term that comes up in the flow research is action awareness merging, which just means you and the activity are essentially one. There is like no kind of mental space between you and what you’re doing. And, that’s really different. You won’t notice anything going on around you if you're really in a flow state. And so, the way I think about it is, I think mindfulness is a really important practice for kind of getting good at managing worry, reacting to worry in a way that doesn’t kind of carry you away and, and take you down with it. And, that’s something that’s very useful for sure, in lots of parts of life.

Flow, I think of as more of like an in the moment solution. So, I’m having a bad worry day. Today is a good day to get into that flow state. It might not help five minutes after you’re finished with the activity, but it will be very helpful as you’re in that moment and your worries shut down for a period of time.

Mills: What about turning to friends or family for support? Is there any research on whether that’s helpful during periods of acute uncertainty?

Sweeny: It is. As it is during most times of life, social support is crucially helpful for our well-being and also our health. It’s having people who can support you in difficult times predicts longevity, for example, like how long you will live at the same level as something like smoking. So, it’s hugely important in general. Therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also helpful during the stress of waiting and uncertainty. Maybe the more kind of interesting aspect of that social support during waiting though is that I think it’s really hard to provide it well.

So, we need it when we’re waiting. It can be really lonely sometimes, especially if you’re waiting for something very personal. But people aren’t always great at providing social support in those moments where nothing is really happening, like you’re waiting for that test result to come back. People might feel like, “I don't know, just wait. Like it's coming. You’ll know in a day or two how this is going to turn out. Why are you thinking about it right now?” Well, we’ve all been there. We know you can’t not think about it. But as a social support provider, those moments can be really challenging.

And we have found, in fact that in a prolonged waiting period—specifically, where law school graduates were waiting for their bar exam results for 4 long, torturous months—their romantic partners did a pretty good job of supporting them shortly after the exam when there was stuff to talk about essentially, and then right before they got their results. In the middle of that 4 months, they still needed the support. They weren’t always well and their romantic partners weren’t showing up for them quite as much as they wanted them to in those moments.

Mills: Well, that makes sense. So, you choose carefully who you’re going to confide in and who’s going to be your support. Spread them out. So, this year has been marked by intense uncertainty and stress for many of us. At one point, we thought the pandemic might be over, but then the Delta variant showed up and breakthrough infections. Is it more stressful to wait through a period of uncertainty without knowing the end date, like the pandemic, as opposed to something like the bar exam results where there's a date that you’re going to get an answer on a certain date?

Sweeny: Yeah, that’s right. So, it’s been interesting, actually, for me just personally as a researcher, to think about how my work on waiting applies to this global and very open-ended kind of uncertainty that we’re experiencing. And, as you pointed out, not just open-ended, but kind of almost cyclical, where we have these periods where things seem to be going well and we think we might be out of it. And then, we’re plunged back into uncertainty again.

I think there is a similarity in many ways, across different kinds of uncertainty, whether they are those structured sorts of waiting periods that I typically study where the end is known, or at least the end date is known if not the result. Versus this kind of situation with COVID and so many other things, where it’s kind of open-ended. We’ve, for example, looked at cancer survivors’ experiences as well, which is a different kind of open-ended uncertainty where it might come back or not, but you really don’t know when that might happen.

Whether it’s harder or easier is a little tricky, I think, to be sure about. When we know that a waiting period will end, those last moments, hours, days, weeks—however it falls within your particular waiting period—can be pretty torturous. Those final moments of truth; we all have a tendency to plunge into pessimism, plunge into worst case scenario thinking to kind of have a difficult time coping. When there’s no clear end, you don’t kind of have that ramp up of distress in that same way. But, you also don’t get that kind of relief in maybe the middle of the waiting period, which is typically an easier time.

We have found that waiting has a shape such that the beginning and end is the hardest and the middle tends to be easier. When you’re in one of these, like, endless waiting periods like we’re all in now for the end of a global pandemic. I don't even know what that will look like. It’s really hard to kind of know at what point you should be gearing up for the moment of truth. Like, there just is no moment of truth at this point or there are many of them, I guess, maybe, but no one singular end to our uncertainty.

So, the way that I’ve at least observed it, again, somewhat anecdotally, not so much in data, is that I think that it creates a more of a good day/bad day situation, where rather than kind of settling into more of a pattern where it’s hard at the beginning, you calm down a bit and then it gets hard at the end. We just kind of do a bunch of little cycles of “Oh hey, this is where we are. I’m kind of used to it. I’ve got my situation settled in a way that’s comfortable.” And then a week of, “Oh no, this is awful and I can’t handle this. When will my kids get to go back to school or when will my job become in-person again, or when will I get my job back?” And so, I think it’s unfortunately hard to find real relief for any length of time when a situation is constantly evolving and there’s no clear end in sight.

Mills: So, what are you working on now and what are the next big questions that you want to answer?

Sweeny: Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been studying this very focused question about what is this thing that is waiting and how do we make it easier for about 10 years now. And, it’s felt like a big question at times, but I think after about a decade, we’ve answered a lot of the questions that I kind of had at the beginning. There’s more to do, but I think we know a lot now about waiting that we didn’t know a decade ago. And so, I’ve started to think about where to next.

And, there’s really three big areas that my lab is focusing on now. One is flow, which we’ve already talked about. And, it turns out that the world of flow research is huge and wild and wacky. That it’s very interdisciplinary, I guess, is kind of a nice word for it, which means people from lots of different fields—often not even scientific fields—are interested in it, but that means that it’s a mess. I mean, honestly, the research is kind of a mess and it’s really hard to know what we know about flow, and it is this very kind of powerful, compelling experience that we all have and, I think, we seek sometimes, but what it exactly it is, and what it looks like in the brain and the body, how exactly it benefits us, and when. We really don’t have a lot of good evidence on that.

So, I became interested in flow being because of waiting and because of its fit as a coping strategy during waiting periods. But now, I and my graduate students have fallen down the rabbit hole a little bit and are interested in getting a better handle on what that exactly is. So, that’s one area. I’m also taking a deeper dive into worry and what exactly it is about worry during waiting periods that is so difficult. And, that is work I’m doing with a collaborator at another University of California campus, at Merced, Jennifer Howell, who’s a long-time collaborator of mine. And, we have some money right now to try to figure out when is it that worry is helpful to us and not so disruptive to our lives? And, when is it that it really does become a problem for our health and well-being?

And, that turns out to be, as things tend to be in psychology, a more complicated question than might appear on the surface. And then, the third big question is one that’s a big, big collaboration that I’m really excited about thinking about patients, which in some ways, I’ve been studying all along, but more as a virtue. And, that’s an interesting way to kind of think about patients, not just as waiting calmly, but as something that we can kind of cultivate that does have connections to philosophy and theology.

And so, a researcher at Baylor University, Sarah Schnitker, is leading this big, big initiative to bring together researchers from across fields to kind of bring our perspectives on what the heck this thing is called “patience.” What it looks like, how to get it. And one of, to me, the most interesting questions about patience is why are we so quick to say we don’t have it? So, most of us wouldn’t quickly say that we are cowardly or unkind or ungenerous. But, lots of people, myself included, will happily say we’re impatient, which makes it kind of a funny virtue. So, those are just some of the things we’re digging into in the coming years.

Mills: Wow, that all sounds really fascinating. So, we'll have to stay in touch and keep an eye on your research so that we can talk again when you’ve got some big breakthrough, which I’m sure you’ll get to. So, thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Sweeny.

Sweeny: This was fun. Thanks so much for having me.

Mills: You can read more about Dr. Sweeny's work in the November 2021 issue of APA’s magazine Monitor on Psychology . You’ll find a link in the show notes on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org . You can also find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on Apple, Stitcher, Pandora, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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Episode 163:  Waiting, worrying, and dealing with uncertainty, with Kate Sweeny, PhD

Save the MP3 file linked above to listen to it on your computer or mobile device.

• The science of uncertainty ( Monitor on Psychology, November 2021)
• On the experience of awaiting uncertain news (PDF, 83KB) ( Current Directions in Psychological Science , 2019)
• Kate Sweeny’s Life Events Lab website

Speaking of Psychology

Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important, and relevant psychological research being conducted today.

Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.

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Your host: Kim I. Mills

Kim I. Mills is senior director of strategic external communications and public affairs for the American Psychological Association, where she has worked since 2007. Mills led APA’s foray into social media and envisioned and launched APA’s award-winning podcast series Speaking of Psychology  in 2013. A former reporter and editor for The Associated Press, Mills has also written for publications including The Washington Post , Fast Company , American Journalism Review , Dallas Morning News , MSNBC.com and Harvard Business Review .

In her 30+-year career in communications, Mills has extensive media experience, including being interviewed by The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , and other top-tier print media. She has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America , Hannity and Colmes , CSPAN, and the BBC, to name a few of her broadcast engagements. Mills holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Barnard College and a master’s in journalism from New York University.

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10 Effective Stress Management Tips for Ph.D. Students

Did you embark on a PhD with a preconceived notion that it’s going to be a stressful journey? If your answer to that was a resounding yes, then you are not alone and definitely not wrong about it either! Sailing through a PhD can be quite daunting. As revealed by a survey conducted by  Nature , over 36% of the total researchers seek help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD. Although these results come from a small sample of around 6300 PhD students worldwide, the results are significant enough to address the prevalence of mental health issues in academia. Stress management is imperative for a smoother and tension-free research outcome.

With passing years, the stress levels among PhD students is worsening. Much has been spoken and written about how to overhaul the system and help students in their battle of coping with stress. However, in reality, the advice to PhD students is just a concept that’s heard and read about.

This article will guide PhD students and will discuss various factors that trigger stress levels at different stages in the life of a researcher. The tips for new PhD students will help them to combat stress and preserve your mental health.

Factors Causing Stress and Depression in PhD Students

Stress management of next generation researchers needs a systematic approach . However, before finding solutions, knowing the root cause is necessary to avoid similar situations in the future.

1. Growing Competition in Your Field

Students often get intimidated by the ongoing research in their field and compare the progress and status of their work with other researchers’ work.

2. Work Overload

Excessive work pressure and relentless overtime working induces anxiety and increases stress levels amongst PhD students.

3. Role Ambiguity

It is often seen that a candidate is unaware about their role in the study and what the supervisor or the Principal Investigator (P.I.) expects out of them as a peer.

4. Physiological Factors

While embarking on a PhD., students often take time to adapt to the physiological changes that come along. Dealing with physical health issues diverts your mind from focusing on your research work.

5. Behavioral Approach

Researchers tend to follow a fixed framework to complete their experiments. When unexpected results are derived, finding an alternative solution to obtain conclusions and scheduling a proper action plan encroaches the minds of a PhD student.

6. Performance Pressure

Most Ph.D students also work while pursuing their research. Hence, maintaining regular attendance, achieving goals, keeping the grades high, and completing assignments while adhering to deadlines can take a toll on their mental health.

7. Relationship with Supervisor

Working in isolation will not take you a long way. Not maintaining a healthy work-relationship with your supervisor affects the research outcome and by extension affects your mental health.

Tips for PhD Students to Overcome Anxiety

The solution to the  rising stress levels and mental health issues  faced by PhD researchers does not solely lie in the institutions providing on-campus mental-health support. Furthermore, it also does not depend on the institutions providing training for supervisors to deal with their group of students in coping with the stress. It also lies in understanding that stress is a consequence of an excessive focus on measuring performance. In addition, other entities such as the funders, academic institutions, journals, and publishers must also take responsibility of the mental health of researchers in a way that is feasible and within their limits.

The late nights and early mornings spent within four walls while completing your PhD, juggling between work and study, papers to publish, supervisors to please, and perhaps also living up to your family’s expectations takes a toll on you.These are some common instances where most Ph.D students are taken aback and left clueless.

The first step in fixing the problem is acknowledging it!

1. Finding an Credible Supervisor

As your supervisor is someone who will guide you throughout your program and help you face challenges, it is imperative to select your supervisor carefully. This process of identifying an incredible supervisor could get difficult and leave you confused. But a trick to deal with this is identifying a supervisor who is supportive, actively working in your field, has a strong publication record, and can give you sufficient time for mentoring.

2. Find the Right Research Funding Body

High rates of stress and depression arises at this stage of your PhD Strategizing your path into  choosing the right funding body for your research  is very important. Focus on maximizing the value of your research rather than just looking for monetary support.

3. Time Management

As a researcher, the key to a  stress-free research workflow is effective time management . Prioritize your tasks and plan your day based on the same. Set realistic and achievable goals. Do not overwhelm yourself with too many tasks to be done on a single day. Online project management tools such as Asana, Trello, ProofHub, etc. will help you to be on the top of your tasks.

4. Maintain a Healthy and Professional Supervisor‒Student Relationship

Finding yourself alone is quite normal for most people. Try building new connections with your colleagues and be affable to everyone. Maintaining a healthy and professional supervisor-student relationship is critical for the success of any research work.  Good communication will give you and the supervisor a clearer picture of your work. Share your honest concerns with your colleagues and supervisor in the most respectful way. If there is minimal response, reach out to the mental health team of your institution to resolve any conflicts amicably.

5. Presenting Negative or In-conclusive Results

There’s nothing to be ashamed of if your experiment does not deliver the expected results. Honest presentation of results is what makes you an ethical and respected researcher in the community,  irrespective of the results being positive, negative, or mixed . Compare your results and review them using tables or charts for effective presentation.

6. Writing Your Thesis

Here’s when you are one step closer to completing your PhD! The journey from here on is only uphill. So don’t push yourself back now. Start with planning your writing activities with a fresh mind. Furthermore, define sections of your thesis and focus on one section at a time. Don’t bother yourself with editing and formatting of the thesis. Complete the writing part first. Work on editing and finally  proofreading  your article to refurbish it in the next stage.

7. Select the Right Journal

Now that the writing process is completed, there’s no looking back from here. But the threat of falling prey to predatory journals cannot be unseen. Make this process easier by finding a journal that is related to your discipline. Consider the impact factor of the journal. Use journal finder tools such as  Enago’s Open Access Journal Finder , Elsevier Journal Finder , Springer Journal Suggester, Manuscript Matcher Tool in Web of Science Master List, etc. Once you have a list of journals, check their aims and scope to ensure your article fits their criteria.

Stress Management Tips for PhD Students and Early Career Researchers

Researchers must understand that completing their PhD is a part of their life and that it will come to an end someday. Whilst pursuing PhD  neglecting your mental health will eventually affect your research outcomes  in future. Therefore, stress management is very crucial to preserve your mental health and lead a peaceful life.

Follow these tips to maintain a work­‒life balance and preserve your mental health:

1. Acknowledging the Problem

We often deny that our mental health is affected by an external factor. It is important to understand what is bothering you and keeping you from achieving your goals. Therefore, once you are aware of the cause, accept it and work in a way to combat it.

2. Talk About the Problem

Being negligent and keeping those bothersome thoughts to yourself will only worsen the situation. Talk about your concerns with people who would care about it and help you deal with your anxiety.

3. Improve Your Organizational Skills

Your  key to successfully completing your PhD  is by managing your tasks efficiently without over-committing. Hence, maintaining a balance between professional and personal work is crucial.

4. Social Involvement

Engage yourself in social activities to keep your mind from spiraling in the pool of negative thoughts. Additionally, join groups that are not related to your domain. Learn to make connections with new people and get to know them better.

5. Rekindle Long Lost Hobbies

Get that old sketch book you left in the groove! Reembrace hobbies you haven’t been able to catch up with for a really long time. In addition, engage in fun activities or games that make you happy.

6. Practice Mindfulness

Try the 2-step exercise called “ The Mindful Pause ”. In this, you pause before or during a stressor and attentively breathe for 15 seconds, followed by one question for yourself — how might I use one of my character strengths right now? Take positive action with any character strength that pops up.

7. Meditate as a Relaxation Response

Spare 10-20 minutes a day, preferably in the morning to meditate. This involves silent repetition of a word, sound, or phrase while sitting quietly with a good posture and eyes closed.

8. Get Involved in Any Form of Physical Activity

Implement any form of physical activity in your daily routine to improve your cognitive and physical abilities. Consequently, the release of endorphins whilst exercising acts as a catalyst in keeping your spirits high.

9. Be Grateful

Acknowledge and appreciate the gift of life. Unleash your gratitude for being able to fulfil your dreams. Furthermore, remember every positive thing that has ever happened to you and express gratitude for having made things possible.

How often have you been stressed out while pursuing your PhD? Have you ever followed any stress management tricks? What are your thoughts on these advices to PhD students? What was your move in coping with stress associated to your research? Has maintaining proper work-life balance been easy for you? Let us know about your and your colleagues’ experiences in combating stress in the comments section below!

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Academic Stress and Mental Well-Being in College Students: Correlations, Affected Groups, and COVID-19

Georgia barbayannis.

1 Department of Neurology, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States

Mahindra Bandari

Xiang zheng.

2 Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States

Humberto Baquerizo

3 Office for Diversity and Community Engagement, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, United States

Keith W. Pecor

4 Department of Biology, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, United States

Associated Data

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Academic stress may be the single most dominant stress factor that affects the mental well-being of college students. Some groups of students may experience more stress than others, and the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic could further complicate the stress response. We surveyed 843 college students and evaluated whether academic stress levels affected their mental health, and if so, whether there were specific vulnerable groups by gender, race/ethnicity, year of study, and reaction to the pandemic. Using a combination of scores from the Perception of Academic Stress Scale (PAS) and the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (SWEMWBS), we found a significant correlation between worse academic stress and poor mental well-being in all the students, who also reported an exacerbation of stress in response to the pandemic. In addition, SWEMWBS scores revealed the lowest mental health and highest academic stress in non-binary individuals, and the opposite trend was observed for both the measures in men. Furthermore, women and non-binary students reported higher academic stress than men, as indicated by PAS scores. The same pattern held as a reaction to COVID-19-related stress. PAS scores and responses to the pandemic varied by the year of study, but no obvious patterns emerged. These results indicate that academic stress in college is significantly correlated to psychological well-being in the students who responded to this survey. In addition, some groups of college students are more affected by stress than others, and additional resources and support should be provided to them.

Introduction

Late adolescence and emerging adulthood are transitional periods marked by major physiological and psychological changes, including elevated stress (Hogan and Astone, 1986 ; Arnett, 2000 ; Shanahan, 2000 ; Spear, 2000 ; Scales et al., 2015 ; Romeo et al., 2016 ; Barbayannis et al., 2017 ; Chiang et al., 2019 ; Lally and Valentine-French, 2019 ; Matud et al., 2020 ). This pattern is particularly true for college students. According to a 2015 American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment survey, three in four college students self-reported feeling stressed, while one in five college students reported stress-related suicidal ideation (Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; American Psychological Association, 2020 ). Studies show that a stressor experienced in college may serve as a predictor of mental health diagnoses (Pedrelli et al., 2015 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Karyotaki et al., 2020 ). Indeed, many mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorder, begin during this period (Blanco et al., 2008 ; Pedrelli et al., 2015 ; Saleh et al., 2017 ; Reddy et al., 2018 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ).

Stress experienced by college students is multi-factorial and can be attributed to a variety of contributing factors (Reddy et al., 2018 ; Karyotaki et al., 2020 ). A growing body of evidence suggests that academic-related stress plays a significant role in college (Misra and McKean, 2000 ; Dusselier et al., 2005 ; Elias et al., 2011 ; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ; Hj Ramli et al., 2018 ; Reddy et al., 2018 ; Pascoe et al., 2020 ). For instance, as many as 87% of college students surveyed across the United States cited education as their primary source of stress (American Psychological Association, 2020 ). College students are exposed to novel academic stressors, such as an extensive academic course load, substantial studying, time management, classroom competition, financial concerns, familial pressures, and adapting to a new environment (Misra and Castillo, 2004 ; Byrd and McKinney, 2012 ; Ekpenyong et al., 2013 ; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ; Ketchen Lipson et al., 2015 ; Pedrelli et al., 2015 ; Reddy et al., 2018 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Freire et al., 2020 ; Karyotaki et al., 2020 ). Academic stress can reduce motivation, hinder academic achievement, and lead to increased college dropout rates (Pascoe et al., 2020 ).

Academic stress has also been shown to negatively impact mental health in students (Li and Lin, 2003 ; Eisenberg et al., 2009 ; Green et al., 2021 ). Mental, or psychological, well-being is one of the components of positive mental health, and it includes happiness, life satisfaction, stress management, and psychological functioning (Ryan and Deci, 2001 ; Tennant et al., 2007 ; Galderisi et al., 2015 ; Trout and Alsandor, 2020 ; Defeyter et al., 2021 ; Green et al., 2021 ). Positive mental health is an understudied but important area that helps paint a more comprehensive picture of overall mental health (Tennant et al., 2007 ; Margraf et al., 2020 ). Moreover, positive mental health has been shown to be predictive of both negative and positive mental health indicators over time (Margraf et al., 2020 ). Further exploring the relationship between academic stress and mental well-being is important because poor mental well-being has been shown to affect academic performance in college (Tennant et al., 2007 ; Eisenberg et al., 2009 ; Freire et al., 2016 ).

Perception of academic stress varies among different groups of college students (Lee et al., 2021 ). For instance, female college students report experiencing increased stress than their male counterparts (Misra et al., 2000 ; Eisenberg et al., 2007 ; Evans et al., 2018 ; Lee et al., 2021 ). Male and female students also respond differently to stressors (Misra et al., 2000 ; Verma et al., 2011 ). Moreover, compared to their cisgender peers, non-binary students report increased stressors and mental health issues (Budge et al., 2020 ). The academic year of study of the college students has also been shown to impact academic stress levels (Misra and McKean, 2000 ; Elias et al., 2011 ; Wyatt et al., 2017 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Defeyter et al., 2021 ). While several studies indicate that racial/ethnic minority groups of students, including Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian American students, are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and suicidality than their white peers (Lesure-Lester and King, 2004 ; Lipson et al., 2018 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Kodish et al., 2022 ), these studies are limited and often report mixed or inconclusive findings (Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Kodish et al., 2022 ). Therefore, more studies should be conducted to address this gap in research to help identify subgroups that may be disproportionately impacted by academic stress and lower well-being.

The coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic is a major stressor that has led to a mental health crisis (American Psychological Association, 2020 ; Dong and Bouey, 2020 ). For college students, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant changes and disruptions to daily life, elevated stress levels, and mental and physical health deterioration (American Psychological Association, 2020 ; Husky et al., 2020 ; Patsali et al., 2020 ; Son et al., 2020 ; Clabaugh et al., 2021 ; Lee et al., 2021 ; Lopes and Nihei, 2021 ; Yang et al., 2021 ). While any college student is vulnerable to these stressors, these concerns are amplified for members of minority groups (Salerno et al., 2020 ; Clabaugh et al., 2021 ; McQuaid et al., 2021 ; Prowse et al., 2021 ; Kodish et al., 2022 ). Identifying students at greatest risk provides opportunities to offer support, resources, and mental health services to specific subgroups.

The overall aim of this study was to assess academic stress and mental well-being in a sample of college students. Within this umbrella, we had several goals. First, to determine whether a relationship exists between the two constructs of perceived academic stress, measured by the Perception of Academic Stress Scale (PAS), and mental well-being, measured by the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (SWEMWBS), in college students. Second, to identify groups that could experience differential levels of academic stress and mental health. Third, to explore how the perception of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affected stress levels. We hypothesized that students who experienced more academic stress would have worse psychological well-being and that certain groups of students would be more impacted by academic- and COVID-19-related stress.

Materials and Methods

Survey instrument.

A survey was developed that included all questions from the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being (Tennant et al., 2007 ; Stewart-Brown and Janmohamed, 2008 ) and from the Perception of Academic Stress Scale (Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ). The Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale is a seven-item scale designed to measure mental well-being and positive mental health (Tennant et al., 2007 ; Fung, 2019 ; Shah et al., 2021 ). The Perception of Academic Stress Scale is an 18-item scale designed to assess sources of academic stress perceived by individuals and measures three main academic stressors: academic expectations, workload and examinations, and academic self-perceptions of students (Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ). These shorter scales were chosen to increase our response and study completion rates (Kost and de Rosa, 2018 ). Both tools have been shown to be valid and reliable in college students with Likert scale responses (Tennant et al., 2007 ; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ; Ringdal et al., 2018 ; Fung, 2019 ; Koushede et al., 2019 ). Both the SWEMWBS and PAS scores are a summation of responses to the individual questions in the instruments. For the SWEMWBS questions, a higher score indicates better mental health, and scores range from 7 to 35. Similarly, the PAS questions are phrased such that a higher score indicates lower levels of stress, and scores range from 18 to 90. We augmented the survey with demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, and race/ethnicity) at the beginning of the survey and two yes/no questions and one Likert scale question about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of our survey.

Participants for the study were self-reported college students between the ages of 18 and 30 years who resided in the United States, were fluent in English, and had Internet access. Participants were solicited through Prolific ( https://prolific.co ) in October 2021. A total of 1,023 individuals enrolled in the survey. Three individuals did not agree to participate after beginning the survey. Two were not fluent in English. Thirteen individuals indicated that they were not college students. Two were not in the 18–30 age range, and one was located outside of the United States. Of the remaining individuals, 906 were full-time students and 96 were part-time students. Given the skew of the data and potential differences in these populations, we removed the part-time students. Of the 906 full-time students, 58 indicated that they were in their fifth year of college or higher. We understand that not every student completes their undergraduate studies in 4 years, but we did not want to have a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students with no way to differentiate them. Finally, one individual reported their age as a non-number, and four individuals did not answer a question about their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This yielded a final sample of 843 college students.

Data Analyses

After reviewing the dataset, some variables were removed from consideration due to a lack of consistency (e.g., some students reported annual income for themselves and others reported family income) or heterogeneity that prevented easy categorization (e.g., field of study). We settled on four variables of interest: gender, race/ethnicity, year in school, and response to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Table 1 ). Gender was coded as female, male, or non-binary. Race/ethnicity was coded as white or Caucasian; Black or African American; East Asian; Hispanic, Latino, or of Spanish origin; or other. Other was used for groups that were not well-represented in the sample and included individuals who identified themselves as Middle Eastern, Native American or Alaskan Native, and South Asian, as well as individuals who chose “other” or “prefer not to answer” on the survey. The year of study was coded as one through four, and COVID-19 stress was coded as two groups, no change/neutral response/reduced stress or increased stress.

Characteristics of the participants in the study.

Our first goal was to determine whether there was a relationship between self-reported academic stress and mental health, and we found a significant correlation (see Results section). Given the positive correlation, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with a model testing the main effects of gender, race/ethnicity, and year of study was run in SPSS v 26.0. A factorial MANOVA would have been ideal, but our data were drawn from a convenience sample, which did not give equal representation to all groupings, and some combinations of gender, race/ethnicity, and year of study were poorly represented (e.g., a single individual). As such, we determined that it would be better to have a lack of interaction terms as a limitation to the study than to provide potentially spurious results. Finally, we used chi-square analyses to assess the effect of potential differences in the perception of the COVID-19 pandemic on stress levels in general among the groups in each category (gender, race/ethnicity, and year of study).

In terms of internal consistency, Cronbach's alpha was 0.82 for the SMEMWBS and 0.86 for the PAS. A variety of descriptors have been applied to Cronbach's alpha values. That said, 0.7 is often considered a threshold value in terms of acceptable internal consistency, and our values could be considered “high” or “good” (Taber, 2018 ).

The participants in our study were primarily women (78.5% of respondents; Table 1 ). Participants were not equally distributed among races/ethnicities, with the majority of students selecting white or Caucasian (66.4% of responders; Table 1 ), or years of study, with fewer first-year students than other groups ( Table 1 ).

Students who reported higher academic stress also reported worse mental well-being in general, irrespective of age, gender, race/ethnicity, or year of study. PAS and SWEMWBS scores were significantly correlated ( r = 0.53, p < 0.001; Figure 1 ), indicating that a higher level of perceived academic stress is associated with worse mental well-being in college students within the United States.

SWEMWBS and PAS scores for all participants.

Among the subgroups of students, women, non-binary students, and second-year students reported higher academic stress levels and worse mental well-being ( Table 2 ; Figures 2 – 4 ). In addition, the combined measures differed significantly between the groups in each category ( Table 2 ). However, as measured by partial eta squared, the effect sizes were relatively small, given the convention of 0.01 = small, 0.06 = medium, and 0.14 = large differences (Lakens, 2013 ). As such, there were only two instances in which Tukey's post-hoc tests revealed more than one statistical grouping ( Figures 2 – 4 ). For SWEMWBS score by gender, women were intermediate between men (high) and non-binary individuals (low) and not significantly different from either group ( Figure 2 ). Second-year students had the lowest PAS scores for the year of study, and first-year students had the highest scores. Third- and fourth-year students were intermediate and not statistically different from the other two groups ( Figure 4 ). There were no pairwise differences in academic stress levels or mental well-being among racial/ethnic groups.

Results of the MANOVA.

SWEMWBS and PAS scores according to gender (mean ± SEM). Different letters for SWEMWBS scores indicate different statistical groupings ( p < 0.05).

SWEMWBS and PAS scores according to year in college (mean ± SEM). Different letters for PAS scores indicate different statistical groupings ( p < 0.05).

SWEMWBS and PAS scores according to race/ethnicity (mean ± SEM).

The findings varied among categories in terms of stress responses due to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Table 3 ). For gender, men were less likely than women or non-binary individuals to report increased stress from COVID-19 (χ 2 = 27.98, df = 2, p < 0.001). All racial/ethnic groups responded similarly to the pandemic (χ 2 = 3.41, df = 4, p < 0.49). For the year of study, first-year students were less likely than other cohorts to report increased stress from COVID-19 (χ 2 = 9.38, df = 3, p < 0.03).

Impact of COVID-19 on stress level by gender, race/ethnicity, and year of study.

Our primary findings showed a positive correlation between perceived academic stress and mental well-being in United States college students, suggesting that academic stressors, including academic expectations, workload and grading, and students' academic self-perceptions, are equally important as psychological well-being. Overall, irrespective of gender, race/ethnicity, or year of study, students who reported higher academic stress levels experienced diminished mental well-being. The utilization of well-established scales and a large sample size are strengths of this study. Our results extend and contribute to the existing literature on stress by confirming findings from past studies that reported higher academic stress and lower psychological well-being in college students utilizing the same two scales (Green et al., 2021 ; Syed, 2021 ). To our knowledge, the majority of other prior studies with similar findings examined different components of stress, studied negative mental health indicators, used different scales or methods, employed smaller sample sizes, or were conducted in different countries (Li and Lin, 2003 ; American Psychological Association, 2020 ; Husky et al., 2020 ; Pascoe et al., 2020 ; Patsali et al., 2020 ; Clabaugh et al., 2021 ; Lee et al., 2021 ; Lopes and Nihei, 2021 ; Yang et al., 2021 ).

This study also demonstrated that college students are not uniformly impacted by academic stress or pandemic-related stress and that there are significant group-level differences in mental well-being. Specifically, non-binary individuals and second-year students were disproportionately impacted by academic stress. When considering the effects of gender, non-binary students, in comparison to gender-conforming students, reported the highest stress levels and worst psychological well-being. Although there is a paucity of research examining the impact of academic stress in non-binary college students, prior studies have indicated that non-binary adults face adverse mental health outcomes when compared to male and female-identifying individuals (Thorne et al., 2018 ; Jones et al., 2019 ; Budge et al., 2020 ). Alarmingly, Lipson et al. ( 2019 ) found that gender non-conforming college students were two to four times more likely to experience mental health struggles than cisgender students (Lipson et al., 2019 ). With a growing number of college students in the United States identifying as as non-binary, additional studies could offer invaluable insight into how academic stress affects this population (Budge et al., 2020 ).

In addition, we found that second-year students reported the most academic-related distress and lowest psychological well-being relative to students in other years of study. We surmise this may be due to this group taking advanced courses, managing heavier academic workloads, and exploring different majors. Other studies support our findings and suggest higher stress levels could be attributed to increased studying and difficulties with time management, as well as having less well-established social support networks and coping mechanisms compared to upperclassmen (Allen and Hiebert, 1991 ; Misra and McKean, 2000 ; Liu, X et al., 2019 ). Benefiting from their additional experience, upperclassmen may have developed more sophisticated studying skills, formed peer support groups, and identified approaches to better manage their academic stress (Allen and Hiebert, 1991 ; Misra and McKean, 2000 ). Our findings suggest that colleges should consider offering tailored mental health resources, such as time management and study skill workshops, based on the year of study to improve students' stress levels and psychological well-being (Liu, X et al., 2019 ).

Although this study reported no significant differences regarding race or ethnicity, this does not indicate that minority groups experienced less academic stress or better mental well-being (Lee et al., 2021 ). Instead, our results may reflect the low sample size of non-white races/ethnicities, which may not have given enough statistical power to corroborate. In addition, since coping and resilience are important mediators of subjective stress experiences (Freire et al., 2020 ), we speculate that the lower ratios of stress reported in non-white participants in our study (75 vs. 81) may be because they are more accustomed to adversity and thereby more resilient (Brown, 2008 ; Acheampong et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, ethnic minority students may face stigma when reporting mental health struggles (Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Lee et al., 2021 ). For instance, studies showed that Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian American students disclose fewer mental health issues than white students (Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ; Lee et al., 2021 ). Moreover, the ability to identify stressors and mental health problems may manifest differently culturally for some minority groups (Huang and Zane, 2016 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ). Contrary to our findings, other studies cited racial disparities in academic stress levels and mental well-being of students. More specifically, Negga et al. ( 2007 ) concluded that African American college students were more susceptible to higher academic stress levels than their white classmates (Negga et al., 2007 ). Another study reported that minority students experienced greater distress and worse mental health outcomes compared to non-minority students (Smith et al., 2014 ). Since there may be racial disparities in access to mental health services at the college level, universities, professors, and counselors should offer additional resources to support these students while closely monitoring their psychological well-being (Lipson et al., 2018 ; Liu, C. H., et al., 2019 ).

While the COVID-19 pandemic increased stress levels in all the students included in our study, women, non-binary students, and upperclassmen were disproportionately affected. An overwhelming body of evidence suggests that the majority of college students experienced increased stress levels and worsening mental health as a result of the pandemic (Allen and Hiebert, 1991 ; American Psychological Association, 2020 ; Husky et al., 2020 ; Patsali et al., 2020 ; Son et al., 2020 ; Clabaugh et al., 2021 ; Lee et al., 2021 ; Yang et al., 2021 ). Our results also align with prior studies that found similar subgroups of students experience disproportionate pandemic-related distress (Gao et al., 2020 ; Clabaugh et al., 2021 ; Hunt et al., 2021 ; Jarrett et al., 2021 ; Lee et al., 2021 ; Chen and Lucock, 2022 ). In particular, the differences between female students and their male peers may be the result of different psychological and physiological responses to stress reactivity, which in turn may contribute to different coping mechanisms to stress and the higher rates of stress-related disorders experienced by women (Misra et al., 2000 ; Kajantie and Phillips, 2006 ; Verma et al., 2011 ; Gao et al., 2020 ; Graves et al., 2021 ). COVID-19 was a secondary consideration in our study and survey design, so the conclusions drawn here are necessarily limited.

The implications of this study are that college students facing increased stress and struggling with mental health issues should receive personalized and specific mental health services, resources, and support. This is particularly true for groups that have been disproportionately impacted by academic stress and stress due to the pandemic. Many students who experience mental health struggles underutilize college services due to cost, stigma, or lack of information (Cage et al., 2020 ; Lee et al., 2021 ). To raise awareness and destigmatize mental health, colleges can consider distributing confidential validated assessments, such as the PAS and SWEMWBS, in class and teach students to self-score (Lee et al., 2021 ). These results can be used to understand how academic stress and mental well-being change over time and allow for specific and targeted interventions for vulnerable groups. In addition, teaching students healthy stress management techniques has been shown to improve psychological well-being (Alborzkouh et al., 2015 ). Moreover, adaptive coping strategies, including social and emotional support, have been found to improve the mental well-being of students, and stress-reduction peer support groups and workshops on campus could be beneficial in reducing stress and improving the self-efficacy of students (Ruthig et al., 2009 ; Baqutayan, 2011 ; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ; Freire et al., 2020 ; Green et al., 2021 ; Suresh et al., 2021 ). Other interventions that have been effective in improving the coping skills of college students include cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness mediation, and online coping tools (Kang et al., 2009 ; Regehr et al., 2013 ; Molla Jafar et al., 2015 ; Phang et al., 2015 ; Houston et al., 2017 ; Yusufov et al., 2019 ; Freire et al., 2020 ). Given that resilience has also been shown to help mediate stress and improve mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, interventions focusing on enhancing resilience should be considered (Surzykiewicz et al., 2021 ; Skalski et al., 2022 ). Telemental health resources across colleges can also be implemented to reduce stigma and improve at-risk students' access to care (Toscos et al., 2018 ; Hadler et al., 2021 ). University campuses, professors, and counselors should consider focusing on fostering a more equitable and inclusive environment to encourage marginalized students to seek mental health support (Budge et al., 2020 ).

Limitations

While our study has numerous strengths, including using standardized instruments and a large sample size, this study also has several limitations due to both the methodology and sample. First, the correlational study design precludes making any causal relationships (Misra and McKean, 2000 ). Thereby, our findings should be taken in the context of academic stress and mental well-being, and recognize that mental health could be caused by other non-academic factors. Second, the PAS comprised only the perception of responses to academic stress, but stress is a multi-factorial response that encompasses both perceptions and coping mechanisms to different stressors, and the magnitude of stress varies with the perception of the degree of uncontrollability, unpredictability, or threat to self (Miller, 1981 ; Hobfoll and Walfisch, 1984 ; Lazarus and Folkman, 1984 ; Wheaton, 1985 ; Perrewé and Zellars, 1999 ; Schneiderman et al., 2005 ; Bedewy and Gabriel, 2015 ; Schönfeld et al., 2016 ; Reddy et al., 2018 ; Freire et al., 2020 ; Karyotaki et al., 2020 ). Third, the SWEMSBS used in our study and the data only measured positive mental health. Mental health pathways are numerous and complex, and are composed of distinct and interdependent negative and positive indicators that should be considered together (Margraf et al., 2020 ). Fourth, due to the small effect sizes and unequal representation for different combinations of variables, our analysis for both the PAS and SWEMSBS included only summed-up scales and did not examine group differences in response to the type of academic stressors or individual mental health questions.

An additional limitation is that the participants in our study were a convenience sample. The testing service we used, prolific.co, self-reports a sample bias toward young women of high levels of education (i.e., WEIRD bias) (Team Prolific, 2018 ). The skew toward this population was observed in our data, as 80% of our participants were women. While we controlled for these factors, the possibility remains that the conclusions we draw for certain groups, such as nonbinary students, ethnic/racial minorities, and men, may not be as statistically powerful as they should be. Moreover, our pre-screening was designed to recruit undergraduate level, English-speaking, 18–30-year-olds who resided in the United States. This resulted in our participant demographics being skewed toward the WEIRD bias that was already inherent in the testing service we used. Future research will aim to be more inclusive of diverse races/ethnicities, sexual orientations, languages, educational backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, and first-generation college students.

Another limitation of our study is the nature of satisficing. Satisficing is a response strategy in which a participant answers a question to satisfy its condition with little regard to the quality or accuracy of the answer (Roberts et al., 2019 ). Anonymous participants are more likely to satisfice than respondents who answer the question face-to-face (Krosnick et al., 2002 ). We sought to mitigate satisficing by offering financial incentives to increase response rates and decrease straight-lining, item skipping, total missing items, and non-completion (Cole et al., 2015 ). Concerns of poor data quality due to surveys offering financial incentives found little evidence to support that claim and may do the opposite (Cole et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, social desirability bias may have influenced the participant's self-reported responses, although our anonymous survey design aimed to reduce this bias (Joinson, 1999 ; Kecojevic et al., 2020 ).

Future Studies

Future studies should replicate our study to validate our results, conduct longitudinal cohort studies to examine well-being and perceived academic stress over time, and aim for a more representative student sample that includes various groups, including diverse races/ethnicities, sexual orientations, socioeconomic backgrounds, languages, educational levels, and first-generation college students. Additionally, these studies should consider examining other non-academic stressors and students' coping mechanisms, both of which contribute to mental health and well-being (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984 ; Freire et al., 2020 ). Further explorations of negative and other positive indicators of mental health may offer a broader perspective (Margraf et al., 2020 ). Moreover, future research should consider extending our work by exploring group differences in relation to each factor in the PAS (i.e., academic expectations, workload and examinations, and self-perception of students) and SWEMBS to determine which aspects of academic stress and mental health were most affected and allow for the devising of targeted stress-reduction approaches. Ultimately, we hope our research spurs readers into advocating for greater academic support and access to group-specific mental health resources to reduce the stress levels of college students and improve their mental well-being.

Utilizing two well-established scales, our research found a statistically significant correlation between the perceived academic stress of university students and their mental well-being (i.e., the higher the stress, the worse the well-being). This relationship was most apparent among gender and grade levels. More specifically, non-binary and second-year students experienced greater academic burden and lower psychological well-being. Moreover, women, non-binary students, and upper-level students were disproportionately impacted by stress related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Studies regarding broad concepts of stress and well-being using a questionnaire are limited, but our study adds value to the understanding of academic stress as a contributor to the overall well-being of college students during this specific point in time (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic). Competition both for admission to college (Bound et al., 2009 ) and during college (Posselt and Lipson, 2016 ) has increased over time. Further, selective American colleges and universities draw applicants from a global pool. As such, it is important to document the dynamics of academic stress with renewed focus. We hope that our study sparks interest in both exploring and funding in-depth and well-designed psychological studies related to stress in colleges in the future.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Board at Rutgers University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

GB and MB contributed to conceptualization, study design, IRB application, manuscript drafting, and revision. XZ participated in the conceptualization and design of the questionnaires. HB participated in subject recruitment and questionnaire collection. KP contributed to data analysis, table and figure preparation, manuscript drafting, and revision. XM contributed to conceptualization, study design, IRB application, supervision of the project, manuscript drafting, and revision. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study was made possible by a generous donation from the Knights of Columbus East Hanover Chapter in New Jersey.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Shivani Mehta and Varsha Garla for their assistance with the study. We also thank all the participants for their efforts in the completion of the study.

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How to deal with PhD stress: new film offers some tips

The latest video in a series of short self-help programmes takes a sympathetic look at mental health issues.

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Source: Angel Productions

‘Real stress’: the video tries to address the kind of problems that PhD students can face

A new video has been launched to help students deal with the stress and mental health challenges they may face while doing a doctorate.

The PhD Survival Video tells the story of Simon, a new PhD student who begins his journey with enthusiasm, but finds that a lack of guidance from his supervisor and difficulties with his research methodology leave him despondent.

Viewers see how Simon’s studies have contributed to the breakdown of his relationship with his girlfriend, money troubles and housing problems. A fellow PhD student he meets in his department, Rachel, helps to track him down when his supervisor becomes concerned about missed deadlines, and shows him how to access help.

The soap opera-style segments of Simon’s story are interspersed with commentary from an academic, a counselling professional and two PhD students who tell their own real-life stories of developing mental health problems during their studies.

The 34-minute video covers issues such as procrastination, perfectionism, low self-efficacy and the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that are common among PhD students. It also offers tips on what students and institutions can do to help prevent such problems arising.

Sasha Roseneil, director of the Institute for Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London , contributed to the video and helped to decide which issues it should cover.

“The video tries to address the kind of problems that PhD students can face. The problems are inherent in doing a PhD and can cause real stress,” she told Times Higher Education .

“We talk about problems of isolation, competitiveness, the challenges to self-confidence that a PhD necessarily involves, and how, if you have particular vulnerabilities at the start, these can be accentuated during the PhD,” she added.

The video also touches on the difference between the PhD experience in the sciences and the arts, humanities and social sciences, she said. It is one of a series of eight created by Angel Productions in partnership with Birkbeck, the Royal Veterinary College and the Open University, aided by advice from John Wakeford, director of the Missenden Centre for the development of higher education.

The same actors are featured throughout the series, so that students can follow the different characters encountering different aspects of doing a PhD. Videos on vivas, supervision, presentations, upgrades and professional doctorates are featured in the series.

Professor Roseneil said that presenting the information audiovisually “brings it to life”.

“It is more of a three-dimensional and live way of thinking about the issues, rather than reading text. After all, PhD students can get very caught up in reading text,” she explained.

She added that the videos are particularly good for students who are isolated or who work in institutions that do not have a lot of PhD students.

Some 70 UK universities, and overseas institutions in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, now have some or all of the videos available in their libraries or online, according to Angel Productions.

Stephen Engelhard, founder of the company and producer and director of The PhD Survival Video , said that the series began by focusing on practical and academic issues, but the doctorate as an emotional experience has always featured in the background.

“With everything that we have been hearing about PhD student well-being in the past year, we felt the time had come to focus on mental health,” he added.

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Appointments

Chris Rudd has been appointed pro vice-chancellor and provost of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Professor Rudd, who has been pro vice-chancellor for external engagement at Nottingham since 2007, will take up his position in the summer.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education has announced the appointment of John Middleton as executive director of CASE Europe from 5 May. Mr Middleton is currently managing director of School-Home Support, a charity that provides support for vulnerable children and their families to overcome barriers to learning.

Stephen Caddick will join the Wellcome Trust in June as its new director of innovations. Professor Caddick is currently vice-provost (enterprise and London) at University College London.

London South Bank University has made Shân Wareing its new pro vice-chancellor with overall responsibility for student experience and education. She joins from Bucks New University, where she has served as pro vice-chancellor for learning and teaching since 2012.

Wendy Alexander has been named vice-principal (international) at the University of Dundee . Ms Alexander, the former leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, will join Dundee in April from London Business School , where she is currently associate dean for global business.

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1 in 5 PhD students could drop out. Here are some tips for how to keep going

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Doctoral students show high levels of stress in comparison to other students, and ongoing uncertainty in terms of graduate career outcomes can make matters worse.

Before the pandemic, one in five research students were expected to disengage from their PhD. Disengagement includes taking extended leave, suspending their studies or dropping out entirely.

COVID-19 has made those statistics far worse. In a recent study , 45% of PhD students surveyed reported they expected to be disengaged from their research within six months, due to the financial effects of the pandemic.

Many factors influence whether a student completes their doctorate. They include supervision support (intellectual and pastoral), peer support (colleagues, friends and family), financial stability and good mental health.

In our recently published book The Doctoral Experience Student Stories from the Creative Arts and Humanities – which we edited with contributions from PhD students – students outlined their experiences of doing a doctorate and shared some useful strategies for how to keep going, and ultimately succeed, in the doctoral journey.

A deeply personal journey

Completing a doctorate involves much more than generating knowledge in a specific discipline. It is a profoundly transformational process evolving over a period of at least four years — and often longer.

This entails personal questioning , development in many areas of life, and often a quite significant personal and intellectual reorientation. The PhD brings with it high expectations, which in turn creates high emotional stakes that can both inspire and derail students. This is coupled with coming to see and think about the world very differently — which for some can be a daunting prospect, as all previously held assumptions are thrown into disarray.

Such a profoundly existential process can itself engender anxiety, depression and trauma if students are not equipped with the self-care strategies that enable resilience.

Read more: PhD completion: an evidence-based guide for students, supervisors and universities

Every chapter in our book, written by a different student, emphasises the need to engage in deep thinking and planning regarding their personal goals, strengths and weaknesses, and ways of working before starting the PhD.

This is important preparatory work to ensure any challenges that arise are surmountable.

In her chapter, Making Time (and Space) for the Journey, AK Milroy writes she learnt to

[…] analyse and break down the complicated doctoral journey into a manageable, achievable process with clear tasks and an imaginable destination.

She writes this includes involving family and friends in the process because

[…] it is paramount to ensure these people understand the work that lies ahead, and also that they too are being respected by being included in the planning.

Relationships were, above all, a critical component of the experience for many of the student writers. The supervisory relationship is the most obvious one, which Margaret Cook describes as the student undertaking a form of academic apprenticeship.

Read more: Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships – which is yours?

The student authors also identify strategies for the “thinking” part of the research process once enrolled. These include acknowledging that the free and creative element of mind-wandering and downtime are as legitimate as the focused, task-oriented work of project management, such as preparing checklists and calendars.

AK Milroy calls these “strategic side-steps”.

Peter Mackenzie, who researched regional jazz musicians, went a step further to connect with his participants.

I felt like an outsider but once I started to play with the guys on the bandstand that night at the Casino, I sensed a different level of appreciation from them. After playing and taking on some improvisations, I could feel the group relax. I was no longer an outside musician. Even better, I wasn’t seen as an academic. I was one of them.

Struggling with self doubt

The task of writing, of course, cannot be ignored in the long doctoral journey.

Drafting and redrafting, jettisoning ideas and arguments along the way, is acknowledged as a core component of the doctoral learning process itself, and the many attempts are not proof of failure.

Gail Pittaway writes about extending networks beyond one’s supervisors and university to collaborate with those in the discipline nationally and internationally.

This can be productive and lead to co-written articles and editing special issues of journals, which can positively influence the PhD thesis.

[…] by developing confidence in sharing ideas, seeking peer review feedback and editorial advice from a wider range of readers as some of these sections are submitted for publication, the writing of the thesis is encouraged and energised.

Many of the student authors acknowledge questioning, self-doubt and fear of the unknown are central to creating and performing research. While this might be frightening, they say it should be embraced as this is where innovation and novelty can arise.

Charmaine O'Brien writes about how transformative learning is dependent on this period of complexity and not-knowing. While “failure to make experience conform to what we already know is threatening because it destabilises a sense of how we know the world, and ourselves in it, resulting in psychological ‘dis-ease’”, staying with it – and having supportive supervisors – ensures the student becomes a doctoral-level thinker.

Read more: Mindfulness can help PhD students shift from surviving to thriving

Lisa Brummel writes of extending requirements of occupational health and safety into her own life. This takes forms such as family, friends and exercise, assisting with work-life balance and good mental health.

After all, two of the most significant resources PhD students possess to do the work required are their physical and mental capacity.

Finally, students must love their topic. Without an innate fascination for the field in which they are researching, this often tumultuous intellectual, emotional and personal journey may derail.

In the four-plus years spent doing a doctoral degree, any range of major life events can occur. Births, deaths, marriages, separations and divorces, illnesses and recovery, are all possible. Being willing to seek help and knowing who to ask can be the difference between completing and collapsing.

There is no pleasure without pain in the doctoral journey, but with the right frame of mind and supportive supervisors, the joys certainly outweigh the suffering.

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The Mental Elf

Stress and mental wellbeing among phd students: what are the predictors and how can we help.

The mental health of university students in the United Kingdom is a topic that has drawn increasing attention in recent years. There have been influential thinktank reports , regular articles in the media , targeted Office for Students funding in 2018, and two national policy frameworks ( Universities UK’s stepchange framework in 2017 and Student Minds’ University Mental Health Charter in 2019 ). There has also been a corresponding increase in research in the area, with studies often focusing particularly on medical students (Stavrou, 2020) and risk of suicide (Smit, 2019).

However, despite this, at present there is still a paucity of data, making evidence-based intervention difficult (Barkham, M. et al., 2019). Additionally, much of the existing research focuses on undergraduate students or the student body as a whole, with doctoral students (and their unique experiences and needs) largely overlooked.

Doing a PhD is often incredibly challenging, combining the stresses of undertaking a difficult qualification with the cultural and structural pitfalls of academia. Students may face long working hours, financial strain, pressure to succeed, career uncertainty and working in isolation. Perhaps as a result, some initial studies have suggested that this group may have a high prevalence of mental distress (Evans, T. M. et al., 2018).

This recent study (Byrom, N. et al., 2020) comprises a literature review identifying factors that may influence the wellbeing of PhD students, and a quantitative analysis of which factors predict students’ stress and wellbeing.

Doing a PhD is often incredibly challenging, but at present there is still a paucity of data on PhD students’ mental health and wellbeing, making evidence-based intervention difficult.

Literature review

The literature review identified the following factors as possible predictors of PhD students’ stress and wellbeing:

• Social support: Socialising within the academic community was identified as an important element of success both professionally and personally, but it can be difficult for PhD students to build a network, partly as they are often working independently and may be unsure of their place in the community (Janta, H. et al., 2014).
• Finances: The cost of living can be a strain on PhD students who may be self-funded or supported by relatively small stipends. Financial strain is known to be associated with mental health outcomes in students (McCloud, T. & Bann, D., 2019).
• Housing quality: Linked with the issue of finances, students whose housing is of poor quality may experience worse mental health as a result (Pevalin, D. J. et al., 2008).
• Physical health and sleep: Busy PhD students may neglect their physical health and get insufficient sleep, both of which are important for wellbeing (Rizzolo, S. et al., 2016).
• Supervisory relationship: Supervisors are the primary source of support for PhD students, and the quality of this relationship is central to students’ experience and wellbeing (Metcalfe, J. et al., 2018).

This literature review found that factors such as the supervisory relationship may impact on PhD students’ wellbeing.

The researchers conducted an online survey with a convenience sample of PhD students from across the UK, recruited from social media and emails sent out at two universities. The survey took 25 minutes to complete and ran from August 2018 to March 2019. 431 students were recruited from 48 different universities and a range of subject areas (though the grouped area of ‘psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience’ was overrepresented).

The survey included validated measures on stress (the Perceived Stress Scale), mental wellbeing (the short version of the WEMWBS), social support, achievement orientation (motivation and readiness for academic work) and self-depreciation (also known as “imposter syndrome”). There were also questions on overall health, sleep and physical activity.

Additionally, the researchers worked with two panels of students to co-create 24 single items based on the factors identified in the literature review above and the students’ own experiences. These 24 items were statements such as “I am well-prepared for the work required to complete my program” and were measured on a 7-point Likert scale indicating level of agreement. Factor analysis was conducted to assess how these items clustered.

Multiple regression analysis was used to assess whether the various factors measured were associated with perceived stress and, separately, wellbeing. These analyses controlled first for the sociodemographic characteristics of the participants (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age and whether home, international or EU student), next for their subject of study, then for contextual factors (support, career confidence, living conditions, etc) and finally for individual factors (feeling confidently prepared, self-depreciation, sleep and health, etc).

Overall, the survey findings identified some areas of concern as well as some positive aspects of the PhD student experience. In particular, many students indicated that they had a positive relationship with their supervisor, felt on track and well prepared to complete, had a good academic support network, and felt safe where they lived. 54% indicated that they were exercising more than three times per week.

However, low levels of wellbeing were reported; the average score was lower than reports in existing age-matched data, and a quarter of participants had a score indicative of ‘probable depression or anxiety’. Less than 40% were confident about their career and career directions, 63% reported often feeling that they were ‘in over their heads’ and 75% often worried about failing. 59% also indicated that they had poor or very poor overall health.

In the factor analysis, the researchers found that a six-factor solution explained 53% of the variance, provided the simplest interpretable structure of factor groupings, and included 21 of the 24 items. These six factors were titled academic support network, financial confidence, living conditions, career confidence, supervisory relationship, and confidently prepared.

The regression analysis found:

• Better family support, sleep and overall health were associated with both lower stress and better wellbeing
• Higher self-depreciation was associated with lower wellbeing and increased stress
• Better support from supervisors and feeling confidently prepared were associated with lower stress (but not wellbeing)
• Achievement orientation and future career confidence were associated with better wellbeing (but not stress)

Better support from supervisors and feeling confidently prepared were associated with lower stress.

Conclusions

This study identified from the literature themes and factors which were then shown, in some cases, to be associated with wellbeing and stress in PhD students. Overall, the findings indicated that wellbeing was low in this population and some areas of real concern were identified. However, some other positive aspects of the PhD student experience were highlighted.

This study contributes data which helps to identify possible next steps for investigation and intervention in order to improve the mental health of PhD students in the UK: self-depreciation and imposter syndrome, career confidence and supervisory support, in particular.

The findings suggest a need to focus on imposter syndrome, career confidence and supervisory support in doctoral researchers.

Strengths and limitations

There is little existing data on the mental health of doctoral students and the factors that impact this and, writing as a PhD student, it is heartening to see more attention and research in this area. There are many ways in which PhD students could be better supported to succeed academically without sacrificing their mental health, and identifying potential avenues for this is extremely worthwhile. The fact that parts of this study were co-created with doctoral students is also cause for celebration.

A clear limitation is that this research was based on a convenience sample recruited primarily through social media. Considering the number of doctoral students in the UK, the sample size is small. The findings, and particularly the prevalence estimates, are therefore very vulnerable to bias. It is likely that students with bad doctoral experiences or mental health problems would be more likely to participate, potentially skewing the wellbeing data, for example.

The survey was also conducted cross-sectionally, so it is difficult to conclude that the relationships observed are causal, and also the direction of effect. For example, better wellbeing and less stress could cause better sleep and overall health, rather than the reverse.

The regression analyses also did not take into account socioeconomic status, which is likely to be an important factor in student mental health; for example, it may be a confounder in the relationship between future career confidence and wellbeing. Nevertheless, this paper provides a valuable contribution to the field and a starting point for future research to (hopefully) build upon.

This study is limited by its methodology (a cross-sectional survey recruited primarily through social media), but still provides a valuable starting point for future research to build upon.

Implications for practice

The researchers highlight the findings on self-depreciation in particular as being important, as this was found to be both negatively associated with wellbeing and positively associated with stress. They suggest that the so-called “imposter syndrome” may be influenced by contextual factors relating to the doctoral experience, and may therefore represent an avenue for improving students’ mental health.

In my experience of academia, imposter syndrome is often talked about as a common feature of academic life regardless of one’s position in the hierarchy, with structural barriers to addressing this such as competitive environments and job insecurity. Trying to temper this at the point of doctoral study could improve academics’ mental health throughout their career, and challenge the idea that this is an inevitable part of the job. For me, I feel that supportive, open environments and strong workplace support networks within universities, departments and lab groups are essential. I would not have got this far in my PhD without the support of the other PhD students in my Division. Additionally, as the researchers suggest, setting and clarifying realistic expectations and standards for work and achievement is important; it is difficult as a doctoral student (and beyond) to know when you have done ‘enough’ or ‘good enough’ work and receiving clear and encouraging feedback that that is the case can really help.

We should address imposter syndrome in PhD students (and academic staff) to support their mental health throughout their careers.

Statement of interests

Tayla McCloud is part of the Smarten student mental health research network , of which Nicola Byrom (the first author on this paper) is the leader. No other conflicts of interest.

Byrom, N. C., Dinu, L., Kirkman, A., & Hughes, G. (2020). Predicting stress and mental wellbeing among doctoral researchers .  Journal of Mental Health , 1-9.

Other references

Barkham, M., Broglia, E., Dufour, G., Fudge, M., Knowles, L., Percy, A., … & SCORE Consortium. (2019). Towards an evidence‐base for student wellbeing and mental health: Definitions, developmental transitions and data sets .  Counselling and Psychotherapy Research ,  19 (4), 351-357.

Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T., & Vanderford, N. L. (2018). Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education .  Nature biotechnology ,  36 (3), 282.

Janta, H., Lugosi, P., & Brown, L. (2014). Coping with loneliness: A netnographic study of doctoral students . Journal of Further and Higher Education, 38(4), 553–571.

McCloud, T., & Bann, D. (2019). Financial stress and mental health among higher education students in the UK up to 2018: rapid review of evidence .  J Epidemiol Community Health ,  73 (10), 977-984.

Metcalfe, J., Levecque, K., Wilson, S. (2018). Exploring wellbeing and mental health and associated support services for postgraduate researchers . Vitae.

Pevalin, D. J., Taylor, M. P., & Todd, J. (2008). The dynamics of unhealthy housing in the UK: A panel data analysis . Housing Studies, 23(5), 679–695.

Rizzolo, S., DeForest, A. R., DeCino, D. A., Strear, M., & Landram, S. (2016). Graduate student perceptions and experiences of professional development activities .  Journal of Career Development ,  43 (3), 195-210.

Smit, J. (2019). Suicide in university students in England and Wales . The Mental Elf, December 2019.

Stavrou, P.Z. (2020). Mental health services for medical students: are specialist university-based student mental health services the answer? The Mental Elf, September 2020.

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This piece is a good eye-opener for intending PhD students. Welldone Tayla.