Bounce back: handling the mental and emotional challenges of doing a PhD

Introduction

Key terms: resilience, stress, work-life balance, finding strength and direction, introductory course, relevant for students in any PhD phase.

Writing a PhD is a demanding, complex and sometimes lonely activity. It requires not only intellectual, but also mental and emotional strength and flexibility. In other words: you need resilience. 

People’s resilience differs: some people seem to be able to handle just about everything, while others are less stable. The good news is that you can learn to be more resilient. This course teaches you the skills to do just that. 

Through lectures, exercises, reflection and practical tools, the course teaches practical skills and offers an in-depth explanation of the emotional and mental challenges of a PhD and how to deal with them.

You will learn how to work with a wide range of stressful situations and you will deepen your (psychological) insights and understandings of yourself within the context of academia. 
 

ECTS: 2
Number of sessions: 3
Hours per session: 3 
 

Entry level and relevance

Prior knowledge or experience is not required. The course is useful for PhD students in all stages of their project and in all research disciplines. 
 

Relations with other courses

There is some overlap between this course and the EGSH course How to manage your PhD project. Both courses deal with practical skills pertaining to time management and communication.

Sessions and preparations

Session 1: Your struggles and the five pillars of resilience 
In the first session, we will collect issues that participants are struggling with. These will form the material we will work with during the course. We will then look into the definition of resilience and the 5 pillars that constitute it. Pillar 1 (clarity) and 2 (self-care) will be discussed. 

A peer supervision is part of each session. You will end the sessions with practical interventions you will experiment with in your daily PhD life.

Session 2: Self-compassion, difficult emotions, and self-knowledge
We will look back onto what you did in the past week and address pillars 3 (self-compassion and dealing with difficult emotions) and 4 (self-knowledge). You will leave with some personal interventions that you will try out or continue to do. 

Session 3: Finding strength and direction, and your personal recipe book
We will look into the 5th pillar, which is finding strength and direction. You will discover how you can move forward and what can help you to do so. After a peer supervision we will end the session with writing your personal recipe book, so that you know exactly what you can do when things get difficult during your PhD.