Never There

It is tempting to indulge in what I call ‘never there, never good enough’ thinking, as a reaction to academic struggle. It is based on the reasoning that once we get ‘there’ (once we have the chapter finished, the methodological problems sorted out, the presentation done, or even the whole damn PhD finished…), once we are past the phase of struggle, we can feel good about our work and ourselves. 

The main problem with this type of thinking is that ‘there’ never arrives. It’s true in our lives (when is everything ever exactly the way we want it to be?) but it’s especially true for academic work. Academic work is never finished…it is always there for you to worry about…and struggle is part of the deal. Even a ‘finished’ piece of work, such as a finished PhD thesis will only give you temporary relief. (A few days max!!) You’ll have to start thinking about getting your papers or a book published, landing that elusive post-doc position, at which point you can start stressing about a more permanent position, and about more and better publications, and getting ahead to further the rest of your career. It never ends…

My supervisor, in his fifties, who was considered a giant in his field, confessed to me he was worried about publications seen that his style (deep thinking combined with a narrative style) was now out of vogue (you were now supposed to do unimaginative quantitative stuff to get somewhere). Even though he had one of the most lucrative and secure positions possible, he too had academic worries to contend with…

The only solution is to work with this problem at its root: the assumption that ‘discomfort’, experiencing struggle, means something isn’t right. To take it one step further it makes sense to question the assumption of a causal link existing between our achieving something, and feeling fulfilled. If we buy into ‘once I get there – I can be fulfilled’ thinking it is near impossible to feel fulfilled, before we get ‘there’. Once we realise that ‘there’ never arrives, it follows that we’ll be waiting to be fulfilled for a very long time indeed.

How to be happy

For most of us ‘when I get there, I can be happy’ thinking is a motivation strategy. We are conditioned in effort-reward thinking, and it feels only natural to drive ourselves using this concept. In the short term it works, too. We may get more done, because we are driven by our reward – allowing ourselves to feel accomplished and to relax. But in the long run, this strategy is akin to shooting ourselves in the foot. Happiness becomes ever more elusive… When we really start to believe that we cannot be happy unless we get ‘there’ – wherever there is, happiness is no longer a ‘carrot’, but has become the ‘stick’. We forget it was ours in the first place.

If you have ever picked up a self-help book, you will know they are all variations on a theme (I have had a lot of time to read self-help books –  certainly enough to be able to generalise ;-)): your happiness exists inside of you, and is not something you can find outside of yourself. It’s a cliché (both that happiness can only be found within, and that hardship creates insight), but my years of illness have taught me this to be true. Because I have spent years feeling unwell physically and unable to do much, I know for a fact that happiness is a state of being, not a result of doing something or getting somewhere. When I first fell ill, I swore to myself that once I got better I would spend the rest of my life being happy and unworried: I would sing and dance and skip through my days. Nothing could ever bother me again. And certainly not my PhD! It all seemed so insignificant. I realised I had taken so much for granted. At that point I had lost everything, and I was determined to enjoy everything to the fullest once I got back to a place of health and wellbeing.

It was only when my healing did not seem to be happening  (it took me years, probably about five, before I was at a place of relative comfort), that I realised I could not postpone living until I felt better. I started to flirt with the notion of being happy despite anything. I realised at a very deep level that today is all I’ve got to enjoy, and that I have no idea what tomorrow will look like.

No matter what was going on, maybe there was a way to enjoy my day anyway. And if enjoying the whole day felt too daunting, maybe I could just enjoy the present couple of minutes in which I made myself a cup of tea, or chatted with my neighbour, or arranged the bunch of flowers I bought myself. Occasionally (occasionally!) I managed to be content, even though my life was in pieces. To this day cultivating happiness is my daily practice. Now, I know it’s really nice when I achieve things, and I enjoy it fully when it happens, but I also know I am not going to wait for anything before I allow myself to be content. I let myself off the hook.

I give myself permission to be happy now. Loose ends and all. Disasters and all. Imperfection and all.

I’m telling you this personal story because it made all the difference when I decided I wanted to finish my PhD. I realised it was time for a change. It was time to make a shift towards fully supporting myself. Regarding my work I had the habit of self-criticism down to an art (more on this tomorrow). When, after years of not being able to work, I was brave enough to open my Word file named chapter 4, I realised that if I wanted to stand any chance of finishing my thesis I needed to become my own most supportive friend imaginable. I had no energy to waste on self-criticism or self-doubt. I was too fragile and I could feel myself cringe one negative thought at a time. For the first time in my life I started to seriously ask myself the question of why I was indulging in self-criticism in the first place. What good did it bring me, honestly? Did I really believe I would perform better if I berated myself? Did I really think I would propel myself forward by measuring my performance against my own perfectionist standards, constantly? Why was I so hesitant to feel good about what I’d done, exactly as it stood, right then and there?

And so I stopped doing it. It’s ironic how we discover self-love (because that is what it is) when we are feeling our most fragile, and feeling like an utter failure. I figured that if life had really stopped loving me (that’s what it felt like), maybe it was time to step up and love myself. To hell with everything else. That’s the attitude I finished my PhD with: no matter what would get in my way, I would support myself. I would stay out of my own way. (And I would politely but determinedly ask anyone who got in my way to do so too). No more messing around.

It’s important to note that I had never really realised I was being so hard on myself before I got ill. Self-criticism, and ‘never there – never good enough’ thinking were just background habits that were part of my ‘normal’ thinking repertoire. I am guessing this is true for many of us. We engage in these thinking habits because…just because. They’re habits. Nothing more, nothing less. We aren’t willfully trying to make ourselves miserable. Unfortunately, this type of thinking does become so familiar that it may feel scary to let go of it.

Take worry, for example. We all know that worrying about something doesn’t help the cause. But, just try to stop worrying when something is bothering you, and you’ll notice quite soon that is easier said than done. We are so used to our habitual thinking patterns. They give us a sense of control. We may be worried that if we stop worrying or thinking about a problem it won’t be solved. We may worry that if we stop being unsatisfied there will be nothing to propel us forward. We will lose our grip! For academics especially, mental coping strategies such as over-analysing, worrying and criticising are our lifelines. What we do without them? What if the world falls apart if we stop thinking?

Studies on academic resiliency (e.g. Martin 2002) show that fear-based thought habits that were once part of motivation strategies, such as anxiety, worry, failure avoidance and fear of failure, are major long-term ‘motivation guzzlers’, as they call it. They severely diminish academic resilience. These studies propose that success should be built into students’ lives as much as feasible. Because the structure of PhD research is often hardly success-oriented, we need to do so for ourselves. Look at what is already there. Consider that you are already successful. What you have done today is enough.