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Being Proactive About Mental Health During Your PHD - A Very Short Guide - Naturejobs Blog

Karra Harrington provides a guide for managing mental health during a PhD, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, support networks, and celebrating small milestones. She encourages staying involved in fulfilling activities outside of research and developing a system to track progress. Asking for help early and utilizing available resources are crucial steps to maintain motivation and navigate challenges effectively.

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10 views4 pages

Being Proactive About Mental Health During Your PHD - A Very Short Guide - Naturejobs Blog

Karra Harrington provides a guide for managing mental health during a PhD, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, support networks, and celebrating small milestones. She encourages staying involved in fulfilling activities outside of research and developing a system to track progress. Asking for help early and utilizing available resources are crucial steps to maintain motivation and navigate challenges effectively.

Uploaded by

mabru_black
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Being proactive about mental

health during your PhD: a very


short guide
08 May 2017 | 13:00 GMT

Psychologist Karra Harrington shares some


tips for Mental Health Awareness week.
When I started out in my PhD I was excited about the challenges I
would face. Two and a half years later I’m still excited about my
research, but, like most PhD projects, it‘s not all been smooth
sailing. Rather than let how I was feeling derail my progress, I
decided to use my training as a psychologist to develop ways to be
proactive about managing mental health during the course of a PhD.
Recognise how you’re feeling
Checking in with yourself regularly and being really honest about
where you’re at is an important first step. It’s unrealistic to expect
that you’re going to be feeling fantastic all of the time. A PhD is
hard: it is normal to feel stressed, worried, or overwhelmed
sometimes. The key is to recognise how you’re feeling early and
start taking active steps, before it progresses into something more
serious.

Invest in support networks


Be active in your social network and invest in your relationships. It
can be easy to lose touch with people when you’re busy focusing on
your research. Making a little effort when your work is going well
can pay off when challenges arise later. Friends and family are a
valuable resource for emotional support, down time from a PhD, and
providing a reality check when things go wrong.

Seek out peer and mentor relationships outside of your immediate


research group, or even outside of your field. Having a broad and
varied network to turn to is useful to gain practical guidance and
support when problems arise. It might seem difficult to establish
this type of network when starting out in your PhD, but there are
often so many opportunities to create connections once you start
looking for them.

Developing perspective
Celebrate the small milestones along the way. Learning a new
technique in the lab or developing a system for cleaning your data
can be just as important in your PhD journey as the papers you
publish. Even during those weeks where it seems like you can’t tick
much off your to-do list, you can usually still find something good
that happened. Take some time to reflect on and acknowledge
these.

Stay involved
There will be times when things don’t go well with your PhD. Staying
involved in other activities can keep you feeling fulfilled during the
tough times. Join a dance group, practice yoga or meditation,
volunteer for a charity, read a novel, play a musical instrument, learn
a new language, or play a video game with your friends. It doesn’t
matter what it is, as long as you enjoy it and it is meaningful to you.

Small tasks make large progress


Your thesis is a huge task, and it’s often difficult to gauge your
progression. Creating a system to keep track of your progress and
monitor your productivity can help keep you motivated and manage
feelings of stress and anxiety. There are many different ways to do
this (to-do lists, bullet journal, Gantt chart, Pomodoro apps, etc.).
There is no one right way, find a system that works for you and use
it.

Ask for help, and ask early


The most important thing that you can do is to ask for help if you
need it. Find out what resources are available to you and develop a
plan about how to access them if needed. Be prepared to use this
plan and to ask for help early. It is often much easier to solve a
problem early on rather than letting it grow into a larger problem.

Taking steps to keep mentally healthy during your PhD can help you
stay on track with reaching your goals, maintain your motivation,
and maybe even enjoy the process a little more along the way. Be
prepared for setbacks and most importantly don’t be afraid to ask
for help.

Karra Harrington is a registered


psychologist and PhD candidate in the
Cooperative Research Centre for Mental
Health and Florey Institute of
Neuroscience and Mental Health at the
University of Melbourne. Her research
focuses on developing models of
cognitive change associated with healthy
ageing and preclinical dementia in older
adults. Follow her on Twitter.

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