1. Witness Your Thoughts

What are your habitual thinking and response patterns? Your meditation practice will help you discover these. As you sit, doing nothing, just being, you have all the time in the world to notice what is going on in your head. It can be extremely uncomfortable to just sit, watch your thoughts, and not react. If you do this regularly, you will start to notice that some trains of thought pop up again and again.

• For some of us it is ‘To-Do list thinking’ – ‘I have got to do x, y and z, oh and I forgot to call my mother, and I need to send my supervisor an email, what’s for dinner tonight?’
• For some of us it is ‘worry’ – ‘I hope it works out, but what if it doesn’t… I do hope I get my chapter finished on time… Why is she ignoring my messages?’
• For some of us it is ‘shoulding’: ‘I should have done this… I should really be more disciplined in my workdays…I should go to the gym more often…’.
• For some of us it is ‘problem-solving’ and rumination – How should I fix this chapter? What should I say to him/her? – Going over our obsessions again and again.
• For some of us it is blaming: ‘He/ she should/ shouldn’t have done this or that’.

And for most of us it’s a combination of all of the above. Find out what your habitual thinking patterns are. If you recall the stress cycle: you are now working with the first two arrows – the arrow between trigger and thoughts, and the arrow between thoughts and emotions/ feelings. When you witness your thoughts during your meditation practice, you can take this practice into your everyday life. What habitual thoughts do you have on a regular basis? What sets you off? Notice.

2. Let It Be

The second step is to practice not engaging with your thoughts. We are constantly fuelling the fire of our habitual thinking. What if we could press the pause button? What if we let the fire burn out? Often, our habitual loops are negative ones: they drain our energy, or make us worried or stressed. What if we could let these loops run their course, until they become silence? What if we could let the worries die down?

If it helps you, you can use images as metaphors to help you not engage with your thoughts. The classic image used often in meditation training is that of the sky (your awareness), with clouds passing (your thoughts). You don’t want to get caught up in the clouds – you simply watch them, as they emerge, change shape, and eventually disappear. An image I like personally is that of a train station. You’re standing on the platform and there are trains (thoughts) pulling in. You can see the destination written on the train (thought about my thesis: destination anxiety; thought about my supervisor: destination frustration; thought about my presentation: destination panic), and then you can decide to not board the train. You know where these trains of thought are going, you’ve been there before and you don’t want to go there again! So you stand utterly still, and you wait for the train to leave. As it will. And you are not on board. Hurray.

These two steps of witnessing and letting it be are very simple, and they are very, very hard. If you find yourself caught up in your thoughts, it is not a problem. It’s only normal and to be expected. Simply kindly bring your attention back to noticing and letting the thoughts arise, be there, and disappear. If you practice this technique often, and that’s where your regular meditation practice comes in, you will notice space starts to arise between the thought arising and your habitual mental and emotional reaction.

I remember all too clearly when that happened for me. I had been practicing a thought witnessing meditation daily for a month or so, and had come to terms with the fact that I seemed hopeless at not engaging with my thoughts. My habitual thoughts ruled supreme, and I had no control over them, that’s one thing that was certain. Until a particularly depressing thought about my health came up – a thought I thought many times a day in those days – and I decided to…just let it be there, acknowledge it, but not pay too much attention to it. I could hear myself thinking: ‘Ah, yes, I’ve seen this thought before. You are here. But I am not going to let you carry me into a depressed state. You have no power over me.’ And that was it. The thought left! I was ecstatic! I had trained myself to not bugger myself with my thoughts!

Unfortunately, that state wasn’t permanent… It’s an awareness that requires constant cultivation, and it is not something you will ever ‘master’. The mind has a mind of its own. And that’s alright.

3. Choose Being Kind (and Successful!) Instead

The third step is to decide that wherever you are, whatever you have done today, it is enough. You are already there. You can relax, and work from there. It helps to remind yourself of your small successes every day. No matter how small they are, celebrate them. They are enough.

Writing a PhD, being an academic, means always being up to your neck in unfinished projects. Everything is so long-term, the attention to detail is so incessant: even if you are well suited to this type of work it can get to you. Our morale prefers short-term boosts. Seen that PhD work doesn’t provide such boosts, can we give ourselves a pat on the back anyway? You are doing good work. It is these steps, one tiny step at a time, one argument at a time, one reference at a time that adds up. The results will be visible and tangible one day. Until that day, can we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt? Can we reward ourselves for showing up, and putting the hours in?

This attitude was key in how I finished my PhD. Before I had often used negative self-talk to motivate myself, and I realised it was a dead end. You can’t expect to change your patterns 100%, but I took care to be kinder, to value the process – no matter how tedious, and to give myself credit, even when my work wasn’t ‘finished’ (whatever that means in an academic context) yet.