Three realisations for coping with stress and anxiety when PhD plans go awry

Author: Elan Shellard // Editors: Rashmi Danwaththa Liyanage & Oliver Hartley

A PhD is a somewhat unique challenge in that, while some have a strong mentorship and supervisory team, you are essentially left to sink or swim on your own merit. For those coming straight from taught programs, even a taught master’s degree, this can be daunting. Personally, coming midway through my medical degree, it took me a good few months to transition from a revision and lecture-oriented mindset to a curiosity-driven, developmental and problem-solving mindset, fundamental for research.

My PhD looks into the immunology and genetic basis of psoriasis. So, what better way to encompass this than an experiment that would allow the mapping of psoriasis risk genes to individual cell types along the disease pathway? This would take the form of an (expensive) single-cell experiment that required securing funding sources outside of those encompassed by my PhD. The first two years of my PhD were a series of preliminary experiments, figuring out the best way to go about it. The science gods, however, had other plans…

Come my third and final year, I finally had everything. I was ready. I was prepared! I had my samples, proof of concept, chosen stimulants, and quality control steps sorted. I sent the email to the core facility stating that I was ready to send in my samples and asked how to pay. They informed me that they had changed the criteria for their single-cell runs and could no longer run my sample. The sample that would have provided 60% of the data for my entire thesis…

I am not ashamed to admit that I cried.

Thankfully, and realising that not everyone can say this, I have an incredibly supportive lab. The core facility presented me with a potential alternative, so I emailed the single-cell expert asking about the feasibility of the alternative for my experiment. The reply? ‘No. This will require a rethink.’

I cried again!

In hindsight, this was when the importance of a support system was hammered home. Cue realisation 1: The Need for a Human Connection. Whatever year of your PhD you are in, the stress and all-encompassing nature of the degree can make it easy to push friends and family away; cells that require babysitting over holidays, long days in the lab processing samples, stuck in a writing hole because you ‘just need to get it done’. Speaking from experience, you need these people. You need them to sanity check you when your head is swimming with protocols, you need them to remind you there is a whole world out there, and you especially need them when everything crashes down around you. Even if you have been ignoring them a little bit (guilty), chances are if you call them up crying about how everything went wrong, they might be bemused about why you are crying over a ‘single cell’, but they will hold you together through it. I found that the easiest time to call people is when I am commuting to/from the lab, as I can’t do anything else with that time, and when I get home, I don’t always have the energy left to cover more than the essentials. Calling someone close at the end of the day is an easy way for both of you to decompress and laugh about situations that may have felt all-encompassing in the moment.

Of equal value is connecting with other PhD students. A PhD can be lonely. You are the only person doing your research. It is unique. Connecting with your peers will often pay off. It is reassuring to find that you are not alone. Your peers have navigated similar fears and anxieties of feeling behind, stressed, or never quite good enough. So even if it is daunting at first, tell someone that you like their hair today, ask for help with a new protocol (those incubation steps are true bonding moments) or meet for coffee nearby.

Now, having had my experiment plan pulled out from under my feet, I was in major damage control mode. I had to devise an entirely new experiment that involved troubleshooting with my supervisors (conclusion: it was nowhere near as good but would do in a pinch), endlessly emailing the core facility and generally tearing my hair out. I woke up before my alarm with my heart hammering in my chest, dreaded going to work and shook my way through my supervisory meetings. I was (and still am) terrified that I wouldn’t have enough data for my thesis. While this was imploding, a first-year student and I were also optimising a CRISPR experiment that is still refusing to get past week one of a 3-month protocol. If not for the responsibility I felt for that student, the feeling of dread the lab evoked in me during this period would have driven me to avoid it altogether.

That’s where I came to my second realisation: Hobbies = Perspective. You need something to focus on outside of the lab. You need something that will pull your attention away at the end of the day, something that makes you happy and that you can drag yourself to do, even when you’d really rather not. For me, this is rugby. I cannot recommend the benefits of a team sport enough. Not only does it create a new friend group outside of the lab (realisation 1 check!), but the physical activity also floods your body with endorphins. It can get you out of the house even on the worst days, not just due to your sense of responsibility to the team, but because you genuinely love both the sport and the people. If team sport isn’t for you, I would recommend a hobby, activity, club, or anything else that would get you out of the house and together with a group of like-minded people on a regular basis. Running and the gym are great, I enjoy both, but as a PhD is such a solitary endeavour, it is important to build community where you can.

Unable to avoid the lab, I have had to rethink my single-cell experiment. It required a lot of emails, collaboration with other researchers to meet the new sample criteria, and pure digging my heels in. The new experiment will provide a lot of data, though not to the same depth as the original, and I must accept that. The ability to adapt is the single greatest skill needed for lab-based research. I am still crossing all of my fingers that I will receive my data with time to analyse (which will bring its own, thankfully new variety of, stress, because I am just learning R), but the coping strategies I have learnt, make managing just a little bit easier.

At this point, I should stress the value of talking to colleagues. Enter realisation 3: Never be afraid to ask for help. Worst case scenario, they say no! I talked to innumerable senior colleagues that, up until this point, I had been too nervous to approach. I pestered them with meetings, emails and quick questions in the corridors, and I can say that not even one of them made me feel like I was imposing. Even discounting the proficiency of their help in determining the suitability of various alternative experiments, it helped immeasurably to feel a sense of belonging to a team, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone.

With these coping strategies in place, I found that my stress levels eased enough to find smaller ways to navigate each day. Find a favourite café to work in, or perhaps prepare a meal that brings you joy, and most importantly make sure you slow down. Look around enough to find one thing that makes you smile per day. After all, it is important to have at least one bright spot in the day that you can look forward to, even something as simple as a well-made cup of tea. Remind yourself to breathe, adapt, and that this (probably) isn’t the end of the world.