My PhD coping mechanism (or how speaking my mind out loud helps me maintain my sanity)

Getting a PhD can easily become a lonely where students get depressed, feel out of place, thrown away alone with a mild to a sever sense of the imposter syndrome. There is no wonder that "graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as compared to the general population". Almost all my friends in graduate school face some sort of mental health struggle. This prompted me to write a post on my personal approach to dealing with my own issues and they all have to do with talking. Personally, I find it very hard to talk to strangers, so I focus all my talking to people I know. I talk to different people because defeating imposter syndrome, self doubt, angry thoughts, and most importantly the depression spiral requires multiple perspectives, especially with the highly logical PhD student.

Talking with advisors

One of the challenges of being a graduate student is feeling at loss when it comes to assessing my own progress, strengths, and weaknesses. I find myself feeling somewhat bothersome by asking too much from my advisors but I find that having different types of meetings to be very helpful:

Weekly progress meeting Those are backbone of the progress of a junior graduate student. In those meetings you brainstorm, get feedback on ideas, and present new results and approaches. Those are very useful and not having such regular meetings is a source of distress to many graduate students.

Periodic feedback meetings Personally, I like to get periodic feedback on my progress and methodology. This is not a common practice because some either prefer to get that from peers, or they are just not interested to hear someone saying what essentially is "you suck!". The way I see it is that I am always in need for improvement. I schedule a meeting per semester, usually towards the end of the semester, where I sit with my advisors and discuss what I did right and what I did wrong. These meetings have been very helpful in a period where all my papers were getting rejected but my advisors told me that this was just a part of the process and I needed to push through it.  

Personal guidance meetings Many professors, at least at Georgia Tech, have an open door to all students. I use that a lot whenever I am stuck either personally and professionally. Rather than stumbling around trying to dig myself out of hole, I walk in and ask for help. This has been very helpful in identifying problems and solutions to many situations ranging from course choices, teaching style, advising junior students, and many more. 

I have worked with multiple advisors and I know that in a lot of cases where it is not easy or even feasible to have all these types of meetings with the main advisor. Hence, finding other professors in the department that are willing to have such conversations is extremely important. Diversifying sources of input is important for personal growth as it provides multiple perspectives which helps a student to have a more complete picture. It also helps smooth harsh criticism and pinpoint sources of problems. This is an important approach to avoid falling into the spiral of depression caused by a single source of negative criticism, which also makes it hard to accept solutions provided by the same critic.

Talking with peers

I believe this to be one of the most helpful coping mechanism I have. My peers, specifically my lab mates and close friends, generously allow me to argue, brainstorm, and discuss my plans and vent about life and work. Having such open discussions in a lab stems from a non-competitive environment that our advisors create. These conversations also help maintain it that way.

In most cases, your peers are going through exactly what you are going through. You don't have to explain much and it is hard to be misunderstood, all without condescension. Views from my peers helped keep me out of some troublesome choices and allowed me to put bad events in perspective, like a bad review or a bad interview, and keep my self-confidence alive, even if barely.

Peers are different from advisors or mentors in one important aspect. Advisors and mentors tend to assume specific background, like events you have been through, topics you have read on, or people you must have met or read. This creates pressure in a conversation that was meant primarily for pressure relief. Peers, on the other hand, are going through what you are going through, more or less. They are also typically at a similar stage in life. This makes conversations easier and to the point.

Talking to myself

One of the most dangerous pitfalls of a graduate student's life is the tendency and the need to work solo for long periods of time, spending weeks at a time without speaking to anyone. These lonely periods, combined with any hints of depression, self doubt, and planning for the worst case, can lead to self-reinforced feeling that one is doomed. I find that talking to myself, sometimes even out loud, to be a very helpful way to counter this problem. These, typically one-sided, conversations help me keep my eyes on the ball during those long stretches of solitude.

There are two things that I find I need remind myself of: 1) things can work out and the average case is actually likely to happen, and 2) what I need to do to finish that stretch. This has worked many times to keep me focused and in kinda good mood about the potential average case. It also keeps ideas and problems that comes with thinking about the worst case in check.

Talking with my partner

If you are working over 12 hours a day with weekends counted as optional, this can put stress on any relationship outside the lab. I am married and one way my marriage helps me do better at work is that talking with my wife helps defuse me. Whether it is about work, our friends, house chores, or that restaurant that we *have to* try, setting aside my technical thoughts helps me shake the notion that work is all that there is to life. Remembering my "humanity" and sharing those experiences is an integral part of my day to day life and is a very important tool to keep me sane through a somewhat insane life style.

Keeping a relationship going under high work pressure is a topic for another post.

Talking with my parents

One of the harshest parts of being an international student is being away from one's family, especially if you are coming from a country where all families tend to live in the same city and see each other on weekly, if not daily, basis. Over the years I developed a routine of speaking on the phone with my parents on semi-daily basis to give myself a strong sense of connection to home for around 5 minutes a day. These brief conversations are a very important part of keeping any sense of home sickness at bay.

There are several other coping mechanisms including TV, video games, reading, socializing, and occasional running or playing squash.