A PhD Examined: Mental Health

Dealing with Grad School Stress

9 min readSep 15, 2024

A s I have outlined in a previous article, learning about mental health in general and my own issues in particular has been a valuable part of my PhD journey. I believe that grad school, due to its stressful nature will bring any underlying mental health issues to the surface and force you to deal with them. In this article, I want to go more into the details of my journey and share some of the insights and tools I learned along the way.

An Uneasy Start

Some time early in my program, I started noticing unpleasant patterns in my thoughts and emotional states and eventually realized they might be signs of underlying issues that need to be addressed. At that point, the best course of action was to arrange for counseling so I could get professional help. At the time, however, I had never gone to any kind of psychological therapy before. My impression of therapy from popular culture was that it’s a raw and painful experience. So I did what any scared child does when faced with the prospect of going to the doctor: I made a lot of excuses why I didn’t need to:

My problems weren’t that bad
I could deal with my issues on my own
I can’t talk about such personal things with a stranger
Talking about my problems would be more painful than living with them

Satisfied with my rationalization, I made the natural choice for an academic-minded person: I bought several books on psychology and started reading them, hoping to help myself that way.

While I had fun reading these books and got some insights out of them, the issues of course still lingered. I have since come to see that all my arguments against counseling were no better than the reasons my six-year old self came up with to avoid or postpone going to the doctor for a shot. The moment of truth came a few years later when a friend of mine was talking to me about her positive experience with therapy. I think I kind of voiced my concerns to her and asked her if it was indeed painful and she mentioned how it was a little at first but it made her feel much better. This was the final deciding factor for me. It gave me a better perspective. Going to see a therapist was like going to see a dentist: you might get poked and prodded, it might hurt, and you may even bleed a little but you’ll leave much healthier. I booked my first counseling appointment a few days after that conversation.

Art by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke on Pixabay

Insights

I have seen a few different therapists since that time and from each one of them, I got some valuable insights and helpful tools that I use to this day. My reading phase was not a complete waste either and I came across a few helpful concepts there as well. Here are some of the best things I learned.

The Rumpelsiltskin Effect

You lie back on a couch, talk to a therapist about your issues and then suddenly, while you’re talking, you come to a deep realization about yourself and you break down crying. You have figured out your issue, now you are cured and can go back home feeling like a new person. This was my impression of therapy from all the popular media I consumed. Much like the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, being able to name your problem gives you power over it and lets you outsmart it. The first valuable insight I got is that this is as much as a fairy tale as the Rumpelstiltskin story. There are no magic solutions in therapy. It’s a long process that usually lasts a lifetime. You gain more awareness of your issues, you find ways of dealing with them and you practice dealing with them for the rest of your life.

Journaling

Over the years I made many attempts at keeping a diary or journal. I didn’t always manage to commit to it consistently, but I always enjoyed it. As I started going through therapy, I noticed that my journal entries became much more detailed and more self-aware. I started seeing the value in journaling to sift through my own thoughts and emotions regularly and spot patterns that needed correcting.

Another really helpful way of journaling that I found was to journal about things that were stressing me out or causing me anxiety. I found that writing these things on paper served to allay my fears and stress about them and helped improve my sleep and reduce my anxiety.

I don’t journal daily or always write deep entries, but I find that journaling regularly is a great tool for staying in good mental shape. Sometimes it’s enough to make a couple of entries about things I’m proud of or feel good about and that gives me a positive boost and a better outlook.

Stoic Philosophy

Stoicism is something I came across in my reading. There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in this Ancient Greek philosophy and there are tons of blogs, videos, and books discussing all the benefits of a stoic outlook on life. I don’t necessarily buy into all this hype, but the biggest aspect of stoic philosophy that helped me (and still does help me) is the idea that one should limit emotional reactions (negative and positive) to things that are out of one’s control. As you can imagine, grad school is chock full of factors beyond your control: the acceptance or rejection of your publications, your advisor’s career goals being incompatible with your own, financial stress due to unexpected circumstances,… It is good to stop and recognize that worrying about these things and having negative emotional reactions to them is not helpful and can in fact be quite harmful. On the flip side, having too much attachment to random things you can’t control can also lead to a lot of disappointment when they disappear.

Growth Mindset

About halfway through my program, I went on an internship. I thought that this was an opportunity for me to showcase how much I had learned during my PhD program and was therefore constantly frustrated when met with new concepts or problems I couldn’t solve. When working through that experience, I came to learn about the value of having what is called a growth mindset: the openness to learn and acquire new experiences. The main idea is that while working on anything, you can be in doing mode or in learning mode. Being in doing mode means you rely on past experience and knowledge and simply execute in an efficient manner. Being in doing mode means you aim to minimize mistakes and maximize your output. Learning mode is the opposite: you aim to be slow, give yourself permission to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them in order to grow your skills.

Recognizing that you can’t always be in doing mode and that there are tasks that require you to grow into them let me made peace with my mistakes. I recognized that there are times and tasks where making mistakes is not only acceptable, but inevitable as a part of learning. This has been invaluable for my PhD program and for my career afterwards.

Imposter Syndrome

As I mentioned before, I learned about Imposter Syndrome from a conversation with a friend of mine who had come across literature on the topic. I remember when he described it to me, I felt like he was describing my exact feelings and thoughts. In a nutshell, this is the feeling that you’re an imposter. You got to where you are in life solely on luck and not on merit and it’s only a matter of time before people find you out for the fraud you are and you will lose everything.

I was deeply intrigued by how accurately this described my feelings and I did some reading on it. This kind of feeling is unfortunately common, especially in competitive environments. In a competitive workplace (like grad school), people have an incentive to amplify their successes and downplay or hide their failures. This can result in the impression that you are the only one facing obstacles and failure. The key thing that helped me deal with this is the realization that almost everybody goes through these feelings at some point. It also helped that I had a group of close friends who weren’t afraid to open up about their struggles.

Being Prepared

The most important point I want to emphasize in this article is that awareness of these issues and the resources available to combat them is half the battle in maintaining good mental health. One of the easiest things that helped me was to take an occasional day to myself. This is one of the perks that came with having an advisor who didn’t micro-manage me. Occasionally, if I woke up feeling depressed or de-motivated, I could decide to take a day off and work on things that made me feel better. I learned that it’s important to cultivate activities that boost my self-esteem and that have nothing to do with work and I had to give some of my time to these activities as well. More importantly, I learned to not feel guilty about taking time off for myself: part of being productive is knowing when I need downtime so I can get back to work in a healthier state of mind.

Another resource that really helped me was that my program’s health insurance plan included visits to the university’s psychological help program. It is nearly a certainty that your university will have similar resources. It’s definitely worth acquainting yourself with them as soon as possible and taking advantage of them when you need some help.

Finally, in the spirit of journaling about stressful things, it might also be helpful to think about potentially stressful or catastrophic events that might impact your mental health and have a battle plan for facing them. Here are some examples from my own experience and that of my friend group:

The death of a loved one
Serious illness affecting a loved one (including yourself)
Financial problems due to unforeseen expenses
Loneliness
Feeling of failure (imposter syndrome, for example)
Feeling like you’re staying in place while you’re friends are achieving career and family goals.
Being in a toxic grad lab (overly competitive lab mates, lack of
recognition, verbally or physically abusive advisor,…)

Note that I’m not advocating that you dwell on stressful things and events all the time. It’s just that in grad school, you’ll already be overwhelmed with difficult academic and intellectual challenges. Having one of the events above (or similar) happen to you during that time can blindside you and have devastating effects on your mental health. It’s good to be prepared with a cool head first and to know your resources and options.

Concluding Thoughts

My journey to better mental health is one of the many things I cherish about my grad program. I don’t seek out regular therapy anymore but I know to keep tabs on my mental health and speak to a professional when I need to. To this day, when I’m faced with a big life change that I can anticipate being stressful, I preemptively schedule some counseling sessions to talk about it with an impartial third party. Not only is this helpful for my mental health, I have gotten multiple compliments on my increased self-awareness as well. It’s a good feeling when you know a lot about yourself and what motivates you or depresses you. It can help with emotional regulation and resilience. I know it has helped me.