What do you do when you feel disappointed, stressed or overwhelmed? These are such common emotions in academia yet most of us don't really know how to respond to these emotions. In this episode, I'll guess what you probably do at the moment when you're experiencing an emotion you don't like, and suggest some things you do instead. Emotions are part of the human existence and we can learn how to look after ourselves a little more.
In this episode I mention the emotion wheel. There are loads if you search online but here's one I like - https://www.purewow.com/family/feelings-chart
Transcript
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to episode 22 of the PhD Life Coach. For those of you that follow me on Twitter, I have confiscated Marley’s squeaky ball, so hopefully he'll no longer be squeaking it while I'm trying to record. He's now staring at me looking unimpressed. For those of you who don’t know, Marley’s my black Labrador. If you like dogs following me on Twitter @drvikkiburns and you'll find lots of pictures of him doing silly things. I'm hoping he will forgive me for taking his toy and lie quietly while I talk with you guys today.
Our episode today is about what to do when you are feeling a bit bleurgh, and this has really come out of me having a couple of mornings where I'm just feeling a bit bleurgh and struggling to get going and then talking with some of my clients, whether they're my PhD students on my membership program, or whether they are academic clients, that sometimes our emotions are a lot and it's hard to know what to do with that.
I think this is really common. In academia, I think we don't talk about emotions very much. When someone asks how we are, I think probably 90% of the time the reply is “busy”. Now, busy's not an emotion. Busy is a thought, a state of being.
It only takes one look at Twitter to see that academia is actually a highly emotional place. We have people celebrating, having finished their PhDs, getting papers published, their first citations, where you're seeing them feel pride and happiness, and then we see people feeling frustrated and upset and let down by the system and let down by the people that should be looking after them.
I think we're getting better at talking about these emotions. The very fact that I'm seeing these things all over Twitter, um, can, is, is testament to the fact that people are talking about emotions more.
What I think we're doing less is understanding what we do with that. Are these emotions inevitable consequences of the environment that we are in? Do we know how to look after ourselves? Do we know how to change them? If that's appropriate, and that's what I really want to focus on in this episode is when you notice yourself having emotions that are not helping you feel good and are not helping you get done the things you want to get done, what do you do about that?
Now, as always, there's a caveat in the beginning, which is that everything I say today is not a replacement for mental health support. So if you have anxiety, depression, any other form of mental health condition difficulty, please do also seek support from counselors, from people trained specifically in mental health, it's really important that you get that sort of specific response.
When we think about emotions, we often categorize them as good and bad emotions. We want to feel happy. We want to feel proud, satisfied. We don't want to feel frustrated, bored, overwhelmed, stressed, sad, angry, for example. One thing I've also noticed in my academic clients and my PhD student clients, is that sometimes the absence of a positive emotion is also seen as a problem.
So absence of motivation, absence of confidence, for example, is seen as a real problem that prevents you from taking particular actions and from achieving your goals. So we really sort of categorize out emotions into the ones we want, and if we don't have them, it's a problem and the ones we don't want, and if we do have them, then it's a problem.
In this episode, I want us to think about why that's not a particularly helpful way of categorizing emotions and what we can do instead.
As hard as it can be to accept sometimes, emotions are part of the human experience. It's entirely normal to experience a whole range of emotions, even within a relatively short space of time.
Certainly over the time course of, for example, completing a PhD or through, you know, five years of your academic career, it's entirely normal to experience a whole range of emotions and telling ourselves that that shouldn't happen can become part of the problem.
So what happens when we experience negative emotions and we don't really know how to accept them and how to manage them? I'm going to tell you four things that happen. The first one is that we act out of that emotion without thinking about it. So if you remember the last time you felt frustrated, for example, and there's lots of reasons you could feel frustrated in academia.
If we feel frustrated and we don't really stop and think about the fact that we're feeling frustrated and what to do with that, often we just act from there. We snap at people, we get grumpy with ourselves. We don't get on with the things we want to do, we maybe make rash decisions. There's a whole bunch of things that we do when we're feeling frustrated that don't necessarily help us to achieve our goals, and importantly also don't help us to feel and process and manage that emotion.
The second thing we do is we avoid these emotions. They feel nasty, so we do something to try and make them go away. So if you felt bored or you felt embarrassed or shame, those sorts of things, then often we'll try and avoid it. And there's a whole bunch of ways we avoid our emotions. Sometimes it's the sort of things you might think of as traditional ways like drinking, taking illegal substances, those sorts of things.
Other times it's stuff like watching hours of Netflix or scrolling on your phone so that you don't have to think about the thing you don't want to think about, and you don't have to feel that emotion.
So we act from them, we try to avoid them. The third one is, and I've seen this in clients recently, is we worry about the emotion itself.
We think about the fact that we're frustrated, for example, and we start to worry what it means that we get so frustrated all the time. And if I keep being frustrated like this, then how are people going to treat me? And we start to worry about the consequences of the emotion.
I've seen this particularly with people who struggle with worry, that they feel themselves getting anxious. They feel the sort of physical sensations of being worried, and then they start to worry about the fact that they're feeling worried. They start to say, “oh no, I'm starting not to cope. I can't deal with this. What if this gets worse? I'm not going to be able to manage”. So we start to worry or have shame or have other emotions about the fact that we're having an emotion. So we're sort of layering one emotion on top of another and kind of compounding them.
And then the fourth thing we do when we have emotions without really understanding them is that we indulge them. If you imagine the parent that spoils their child, as soon as they have a little tantrum, they go, “oh, okay, yeah, yeah, it's all right. You don't need to do that. You can have this thing.” We tell ourselves that because we feel uncomfortable, we don't have to do it anymore. Actually, we should probably eat some biscuits and watch tv.
Then we indulge them by giving them space in our brain. We ruminate on them. We let it spiral round and round in our heads, not resolving it or anything, but just indulging that thought, just letting it be over and over and over again. We're not processing, but we're not acting either.
And if you are finding yourself resonating with any of those things, congratulations. You are a completely normal human being, particularly if you haven't had coaching and counselling and things like that before, the idea that emotions are just something that happened to us that we either act out of, or indulge, or ignore, or worry about, is completely normal. You are completely normal.
You are a human being in a pressured environment. The good news, though, is that you don't have to. You don't have to do those things. You can choose to respond differently to your emotions, and it starts by accepting that emotions are normal. We are human beings. We are not academic robots.
This isn't about being so resilient, we can tolerate all the pressures that people put on us, and we should never feel bad and we should never feel stressed. And if we do, it means that something's not working, that we are not good enough, or that we haven't paid attention in coaching enough, that we are failing at that as well.
Emotions are completely normal. You are never going to be able to structure your way out of emotions. You are never going to be able to coach your way out of emotions. You're never going to be able to talk your way out of them, whatever it is, and that wouldn't be desirable. Who wants to live a life where you don't experience emotions? Positive and negative emotions are all part of the human experience, and you don't get one without the other.
Once we accept that though, there are some things that we can do to look after ourselves. So, you know, I've given you a parenting analogy already of the overindulgent parent who just, as soon as their child has a negative emotion they give into them. Well, there's different ways they can learn to parent, and there's different ways that we can learn to look after ourselves.
So I'm going to give you four things that you can do instead. It's all about the fours today. The first one is you could just experience the emotion. And often people don't know how to do this. And certainly when I started coach training, this all sounded a bit woowoo to me. I wasn't really on board. Um, but sometimes if you are feeling disappointed, let's say maybe a paper didn't get accepted and you're really disappointed because you really wanted to publish it in that journal, maybe the best thing you can do in that moment is just stop for a minute and be disappointed.
Tell yourself it's okay. Of course I'm disappointed. I cared about this. I wanted it to be published there. It's okay to be disappointed. I'm going to feel disappointed for a while. And what you do is you can put yourself in a safe space, put yourself somewhere where you feel like you are either with people that you love or you are alone and somewhere where you can be quiet, and you can just experience that emotion.
How does it feel in your body? How would you describe it? If you were trying to tell an alien about your emotion, what would you tell them? What does it feel like? What does being disappointed mean in your body?
And the whole time you are experiencing this, I want you to be telling yourself that it's okay to be disappointed. Now some people don't want to do this because they feel like if they start feeling an emotion, they'll never stop. But the fascinating thing is that you don't.
When you sort of expand the room for that emotion to exist, when you sort of increase your capacity to have that emotion inside you then, and you give it a little bit of time, you don't act from it, but you don't try and make it go away either, you often realize it's not quite that bad.
It's a sensation in your body, and that's okay. and you find that after a little while you start to feel it a little less strongly, and that's not the point of it. The point of accepting it isn't to make it go away, but often by just sort of accepting it and experiencing it, it does start to feel less crushing. It starts to feel less intense.
So the first step is always giving yourself space to experience it. One thing that can really help within that is try and name it. So often when I ask people how they feel, and in fact I did it in the title of this, they say, oh, I feel a bit bleurgh. Oh, I feel terrible.
Terrible's not an emotion. Terrible's kind of a quality. It's kind of a, a description we are giving to those emotions. If I asked you to name the emotion, how are you actually feeling? Sometimes just taking a little bit of time to try and name it can really help you to experience it and understand it.
If you find that difficult, there are quite a lot of emotion wheels online, which give you the names of loads of different emotions, sort of categorized by their type. That can be really, really helpful if you find that difficult, so I'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you ever want my show notes, transcripts, all that stuff, it's at the PhD life coach.com/podcast. You'll find all of my episodes with any links that I mention and the transcripts there. You'll also find links to my YouTube channel there, if you ever want to watch my face instead of listening to this, or if you're already watching this on YouTube, you can find links to my podcast episodes there.
So you can take this in however works best for you.
So the second thing, after you've experienced it a bit, you've kind of named it, you've kind of given it some space and reassured yourself, it's okay. The next thing I want you to do is ask yourself what the emotion is trying to tell you. Is it trying to tell you that you've tried to jam too many things into your week this week?
Is it trying to tell you that you really wanted to publish in that journal? Is it trying to tell you that you haven't had enough sleep this week? What is the emotion trying to tell you?
Always check your basic needs first. So often when we experience emotions the most, it's when we are tired. It's in particular phases of our menstrual cycle for people who menstruate. Um, it's where we haven't drunk enough water. I just bought myself a fancy thingy off the internet like a proper influencer.
If you can't see it. I've got a one of those massive water cup things that's like as big as my head with a sustainable metal straw. Often it's that we haven't drunk enough water. We haven't eaten good food recently. All of these things we haven't got out of the house. Have you seen the light today? Have you been in fresh air yet?
So, checking our basic needs. Are our emotions, trying to tell us something about our basic needs. Is there anything you can do about that? So in some situations, like if you haven't drunken enough water, there's something quite straightforward you can do about that. You can go grab yourself a glass and have some water.
If it's that you are feeling tired, for example, you might be able to do something about that immediately. Go and have a nap. You might not, in which case you might want to look at other ways that you can look after yourself. I'm really tired today, so I'm going to put some music on to keep myself going. Or I'm really tired today and I can't nap, so I'm going to make sure I do some nice, quiet, methodical work that's not too taxing, but that does need doing. So you can start thinking, okay, how can I look after myself through that.
So first step, experiencing the emotions, trying to name them. Second step is exploring what they're telling us and how you can kind of look after yourself through that. Again, not with the aim necessarily of making the emotion go away, but with the aim of helping you feel safe and secure and looked after while you're experiencing that.
The third thing, and I really don't want you to jump to this, this is third for a reason, okay? The third one is you can challenge the thoughts that are causing the emotion. Now, we often think that the emotion is caused by the thing that's happened to us. The emotion is caused by the fact your paper's been rejected or caused by the fact that your supervisor hasn’t replied to your emails, whatever it might be.
It's not. It's not saying those things are okay, but your emotion is caused by the thought that you are having about it. And we can choose to challenge those thoughts.
Now sometimes we'll look at those thoughts and think, actually that's entirely appropriate. So let's take that circumstance of your paper's rejected by a journal and your thought is I really wish that it had been accepted, let’s say that. And your feeling is disappointed. Now you might look at that and go, you know what? That thought's totally acceptable. I'm down with that thought. I agree with it. I am really sad that it's not going to get published in that journal. And so, yeah, I feel disappointed and I'm going to look after myself through that.
So in that one, you are looking at the thought and you are going, you know what? Yeah, that thought will work. But if you look at it and your thought isn't just, I really wanted to publish in that journal. Perhaps your thought is, I really wanted to be published in that journal and now it's never going to get published anywhere.
Now, that might be a thought that leads to, I don't know, hopelessness or something like that, where we might go, you know what? I'm going to challenge that thought.
So it's where there's a thought where you can see it's adding pain, it's adding an extra dimension. It's adding a sort of so what to your sentence that isn't necessarily there, and we can look at that and decide. Does it mean that? Now those of you who come to my coaching sessions, um, know that the three questions I'm going to make you ask yourself is, is this thought true? That's the first one. Second one, are there other thoughts that you also believe are true that you could focus on instead?
And the third one is, what if it is true and that's okay.
So in this case, if your thought is I'm never going to get published anywhere, is that true? Is it, is it actually true? Let's explore what evidence is there that that's true? What evidence is there that that's not true? Okay, so you can work through that.
You can also ask yourself, what else do I believe is true? I believe I could revise this and submit it somewhere else. I have no idea if they're going to accept it or not, but I do believe I could revise it and try somewhere else. So that might be a thought you want to focus on. So maybe you can keep the thought “I don't think anywhere else is going to publish this”, but you focus more on the thought, “I am capable of revising this and sending it somewhere else”. Okay. We don't have to make the other one go away. We don't necessarily have to believe this other place is going to publish it, but as long as we believe that we're capable of revising it and submitting it somewhere else, we keep open that possibility.
And the final thing is, maybe it's true and that's okay. Maybe this paper is not going to get published anywhere. That could be okay. Lots of us have got papers. I've left academia after 25 years or whatever it was, with a whole ton of papers that never got published. Some of them, because they got rejected and I never bothered to do anything about it.
Some of them, because I didn't get that far, never actually got round to writing it up. It happens. Talk to your supervisors. It happens. How could that be okay too?
So when you're challenging your thoughts, you're not just telling yourself you're wrong, you're saying, which bits of this do I believe in? What other things do I believe instead? Is there evidence for these thoughts? And even if it is true, how could that be okay? How would I look after myself?
Now as always, one little extra thing. If your circumstance is somebody behaving inappropriately towards you, then we are not going to challenge our thoughts that it's unacceptable. So I read a tweet this week for example, where somebody was talking about their supervisor being physically and verbally abusive towards them.
And the thought there is, this is unacceptable. We are not going to challenge that thought. We are not going to work on figure out how to put up with this, how to cope better in that environment. How to feel compassion for the person who's abusing me. No, we are not going there. That's not what we're doing.
The bit of the thoughts we might challenge is if you are thinking as this person was, my supervisor is being abusive, but I'll never get on another PhD program. That's the bit we might challenge. My supervisor is being abusive and no one will believe me. We'll challenge that bit. If you are having issues with this, do make sure you go back and check out my - I've got two episodes where I talk about how to have a good supervisory relationship and what to do if you have a toxic supervisory relationship. They're numbers 18, 19. Go check those out if that's relevant for you.
So just be cautious. We're not gaslighting ourselves. We're not challenging thoughts that we know to be true. We are challenging what we make that mean potentially.
And then the fourth thing, the fourth thing is with some emotions.
And I'm going to say some emotions. We are going to accept that they can exist. So negative emotions. We can accept they can exist and we can still do the thing we intended to. So for example, boredom. People often think that if you feel bored doing a task, you either need to stop doing the task or you need to make the task more fun.
You know, go somewhere interesting. Put some music on all these things. They can be great tactics, potentially. That's what you want to do. You want to make it less boring. But, I want you to leave open the possibility that one solution here is you feel bored - that's a negative emotion - no one likes feeling bored, but you can do this thing anyway.
It's something we talked about in one of our group sessions a while ago. Sometimes there are parts of academia that are boring and we can choose to experience boredom and do them anyway. We can feel uncertain, perhaps. We can feel uncertain about whether an experiment's going to work, or we can feel like we are lacking motivation or we are lacking confidence to take on a piece of work or to go and do a presentation. We can lack motivation and still do the thing.
And sometimes the way I find to do this is to actually talk to. and actually say to us, I know. I know. It's boring. It is boring. Of course it is. It's stupid paperwork. You don't want to have to do that stuff for your accountant. That's what I'm doing after I've recorded this podcast.
It's boring. That's okay. I've done boring things before. I can do boring things again. We're going to do boring things for an hour, and that's okay. Can't expect to run a business without some boring things. Can't expect to get your PhD without some boring things.
Similarly motivation. I'm not motivated to do this task. Okay? Why are we doing the task? Ask yourself that, genuinely. Why are we doing the task? And if you like your reasons, if it is something that you genuinely want the big picture of, you want to finish your PhD, you want to finish your paper, whatever it is, but you just don't feel motivated in the moment, that's OK. You don't need to feel motivated.
There's a whole science out there about how to make yourself feel more motivated and it's stuff we will touch on in future episodes, but you can also decide, I don't feel motivated to do this, but I'm going to do it. Those of you, and I'm sure there are millions of you who have had, um, I don't want to call it prep.
Now remember, when we accept these emotions, it's not about squashing them down, denying their existence, any of those things, you need to go through the other steps first. But sometimes you just decide, you know what? I'm not going to squash down the fact I feel bored. I'm going to accept that I feel bored and I'm going to choose to do this thing anyway.
So next time you are feeling an emotion, I want you to go through these four steps.
1) Give yourself a minute to experience it safely and try and name it. Really be there with that emotion.
2) Explore what the emotion is trying to tell you and figure out how you could look after yourself at the moment.
3) Challenge the thoughts, not until you've done the other things. Don't try and challenge the thoughts in the midst of an emotion. It never works. It turns into kind of self blame. So step three comes after you've experienced the emotion, you've looked after yourself, you've figured out why it's there. Then we start to challenge it.
4) And then we can decide in certain situations to do the thing anyway.
I really hope you found this useful. I have definitely worked my way through some of these things this week and are feeling a lot better for doing it. I hope it helps you too. Let me know on Twitter if it does. You can find me @drvikkiburns. you can also sign up for my free group coaching, um, if you come along to, uh, PhD life coach.com/workwithme, that sounds terrible.
Find my website, you'll find all the different ways of working with me. Um, most importantly, if you think your PhD students need coaching workshops from me on how to be your own best supervisor or how to write when you don't want to write, let me know.
Figure out who in your university has the power to make these things happen and put me in touch with them. Have a great week everyone, and I will see you next week.
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