Mental health in academia: The PhD.

It’s World Mental Health Day today. This week, it’s a year since I handed in my PhD. The two things feel strangely connected, partly because, since handing in my PhD, I’ve gained new perspectives on the issues of mental health in universities. And while the massive subject and problem of mental health goes way beyond the walls of the university classroom, the problem of mental health in academia feels like one that I might actually be able to impact in some small way. I want to discuss mental health from three perspectives that are relatively new to my own experience: mental health as a PhD student, as a lecturer guiding students through their studies, and as a newly-qualified PhD out on the job market for the first time.

I’m going to start with my own experience as a PhD student, and will write about the other two issues in due course. Of course, this perspective is exclusive to me, and may not address the needs of any other PhD student out there. I have no miracle cure for the difficulty of the PhD and the emotional/mental burden that it brings. I also believe that the issues I relate to below are relevant to everyone, within and outside of academia: we all have too much to do, and we all need to look after ourselves better. Plenty of my friends outside academia were learning the same lessons as me as I went through my PhD; we were all trying to do our best and we’ve all been taught the same (incorrect) way to go about it. I recently finished reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, and one point that stuck with me is that there will always be more to do, and it is our task as an individual to set our own limits and priorities. Here’s how I set mine.

Let’s be clear: I had a really positive PhD experience. I can say for sure that it was the best experience of my life so far. Am I qualified to even discuss mental health and the PhD in that case? I think so, because despite the fact that those three years were really wonderful, still I dealt with a whole range of negative emotions, some of which had me out of action for short periods of time. I was lucky, I know, and from the outside I may have appeared to find the process relatively easy. But the truth is that I battled hard with myself to maintain a healthy state of mind in the final year, and for the most part, I won. But it was tricky.

For my own reasons, I worked from home for the majority of my time as a PhD student, and I wasn’t far in to my work when things started to get a little out of hand. Having no set routine and no one presiding over my schedule in any formal way, I started working increasingly long hours. I felt that everyone was working more than me, and that I needed to catch up. I compared myself to everyone else, and I was constantly consumed by guilt. This picture will be nothing out of the ordinary to any PhD student. But the problem with long hours is that it causes stress, and how did I deal with that stress? By burying my head in work, of course. I had a lot to do, was under a lot of pressure as a result of taking on millions (ok, a few) of extra commitments, and so there was always more to do. So I worked and worked and worked. My home life melted into my work life, and things started to get tricky. I’ve had flu three times in my entire life, all within the last two years of my PhD. It got difficult to do simple tasks like respond to emails and take easy data measurements — I was working harder, but my productivity was diminishing.

So, I took a break and formulated an action plan to help me deal with both my stress and the large number of targets that I’d set myself. I set some ground rules. First, I restricted my working hours to a target of between 7 and 8 hours a day; this seemed reasonable in relation to my own personal daily working capacity, i.e., the amount of time I could work in a day naturally, without pushing too hard. It was task-dependent, too: during intensive data analysis I might have worked 5–6 hours, since that was so much harder to sustain for a full day. I found an online timer, and set the timer at the start of the day. I paused it for breaks and even to check Facebook — this motivated me to stay on course for as much of the day as I could. The next rule was lunchtime: no more working lunches. Moreover, no more at-desk lunches browsing Facebook. So, Monday to Friday I was confident that I was getting in a 37-hour working week, the same hours as my husband, and the same as was recommended in my ESRC student handbook. I could finally justify not working weekends with myself — observing other people’s work habits had previously brought a whole pile of guilt that I really didn’t need —and could return to my desk on Monday morning feeling refreshed. Having that suggestion from my funding body (as well as a suggested number of annual holidays) was very helpful when setting expectations for myself; I am grateful to the ESRC for a whole host of things, but their guidelines turned out to be incredibly helpful in allowing me to rid myself of some of the abundant guilt and self-doubt during my PhD.

I then started to think more about what I’ll term ‘self-care’. There is no glamorous word for it — call it self-kidness, self-compassion or anything else you may choose; the simple task of caring for ourselves and showing sensitivity towards our own needs does not yet have the requisite vocabulary. For me, self-care started in the mornings, when I’d go for a 30-minute walk after breakfast. Not only did this provide some much-needed head-space and fresh air, but quite simply, it forced me to get dressed. Once again, I was using a very simple rule to separate the boundaries of work and home life, and it came with the other benefits that I mention. No one can argue with the helpfulness of fresh air.

Another crucial factor in self-care: sleep. When I’m in a cycle of ‘hyper-productivity’ (and just about to topple over into low productivity), I naturally wake up in the mornings around 4–5am, ready to go. This is a normal response to stress, as is difficulty falling asleep. But sleep is absolutely necessary for long-term mental agility and overall mental health. And unlike taking a morning walk every day, we have much less control over how well we sleep. I’m sure I’m not the only one to find that the more I need sleep, the less easily it comes. But I started to facilitate sleep as much as possible. Again, I set some ground rules, this time with the help of my husband. We switched our phones off at 8pm and read for an hour or so before bed. We started buying loose leaf chamomile tea and treated ourselves to a pot as we were reading. We went to bed earlier than we needed to, and listened to the radio for half an hour. Not very rock ‘n roll, but maintaining good mental health tends to be quite straight edge. And of course, it didn’t always work out — some nights we got back late from various activities, and some nights it’s just impossible to sleep for any number of reasons. But I’m a sucker for routine, and it helped set my system back into place.

Finally, I started to think about serotonin. I came across this article, which in very simple terms told me that I might be able to cope with stress better if I found a way to boost my serotonin levels every day. So, in addition to my five portions of fruit and veg, my 30 minutes of exercise, my vitamin tablet and my eight hours of sleep, I added an RDA of serotonin to my schedule. This included but was not limited to: cuddling my cat, sitting in the sunshine, treating myself to a pot of loose-leaf tea, watching GBBO with my husband, pilates, baking bread, going for a run. I no longer thought of these activities as ‘things I like to do’, and instead considered them to be an important contribution to my PhD. I thanked my cat in my acknowledgements for this very reason.

I acknowledge that my approach isn’t going to save the world from its mental health problem. I acknowledge that issues run much deeper than simply sitting in the sunshine for half an hour or drinking chamomile tea — I speak from experience when I say that all of the most careful self-care in the world does not guarantee a stable state of mind. For me, it helped manage the demands of doing my PhD, and helped me maintain a healthy balance between my work and my real life. Of course, there were days and weeks when I felt terrible and was sure I was failing, consumed by guilt and fear of all of the things I felt I was supposed to achieve. But more often than not I got by ok, and was able to endure the various demands of researching and writing my thesis without too many setbacks.

If we can set a mentality of self-care within the walls of our academic institutions, then perhaps fewer people will be driven into the destructive spirals of anxiety and depression, and other mental health disorders that may rise up as a result. I wish that my PhD experience were a normal one — that more people agreed with me when I exclaim how much I enjoyed my PhD. Surely, that is the feedback that all PhD supervisors would want to hear? In an ideal world, the PhD would be a mentally nourishing, fulfilling experience. We should be graduating with our pride on display, and not bent and exhausted from the after-shock of our PhD experience. And while it’s a privilege to work a schedule that isn’t fixed, and to be free of the 9–5 stereotypes, normalizing long hours, weekend working and lack of time off is not the only alternative. Funding bodies need to make clear their expectations of their students; the contract is signed just as it would be in any business recruitment, and in the business world we would expect to know our weekly working hours and holiday allowance as a matter of priority. Getting PhD funding is an amazing thing, but just because funding is hard to secure, it doesn’t mean we owe all of our energy to some unspecified expectation as a means of gratitude.

I’ve used the word ‘stress’ throughout this article, simply because I didn’t want to generalize to any specific issue in my writing. Stress is of course totally normal, but when ignored it quickly turns into anxiety and depression. So stress is an important factor to consider anyway. And for me, it was mainly about stress — the sort that can be fixed with some time off or a run in the autumn sunshine. But there were long weeks of anxiety, too, where I couldn’t breathe without thinking about it, and where my head would be filled with angry voices shouting at one another so loud that I couldn’t focus on my own life. Less often there were some dips into depression, where I had to depart fully from my work for a while. There was also exhilaration, joy, pride, and many other wonderfully positive things.

Finally, I know that taking care of myself was at the heart of my positive PhD experience, but so was having excellent supervisors, adequate financial means, a supportive husband and good physical health. The university was also able to offer me free and quick mental health support when I needed it through their excellent Open Door facility. The number of people I awkwardly bumped into while waiting for appointments is evidence in itself that we need more support available for graduate students navigating the lonely postgraduate world with limited guidance and support. What I’d like to see first and foremost is support within our own networks, opening up to friends and being honest with ourselves about how we’re feeling before our feelings get too big to control. If you’re struggling, please find someone to talk to — my GP was amazing, but so are my friends and my family. I never discussed personal issues with my supervisors, but I’m sure if I had they would have been supportive. However lonely the PhD journey feels, we are not alone.