Let Go off PhD Guilt While Socialising

I have always emphasized on the importance of being social in your PhD programme. It helps to beat the depression but then there is another perspective to it. Getting social and entertaining yourself, during the course of your PhD may bring you down to the stage of guilt and frustration whenever you do something to keep yourself happy.

 There are few ideas I can give you to deal with PhD guilt so that you can remain reasonably social during your programme, without actually feeling like a victim of guilt.

1.  Always focus on your mental health:  PhD work is so time consuming and exhausting that you may actually feel that you do not have any time to take out for maintaining social relations.  If you cannot stop feeling guilty about socialising, look at it as a part of your job so that your brain gets the required stimulation and enrich creativity. Interacting with a strange lot of humans would help you to refresh your brain in a way that no caffeine enriched drink would do.

2.  Set up a predefined workday:  PhD is not like regular school which has predefine work schedules and hours. It could be called as the best or the worst thing of a PhD programme. Within all this chaos and uncertainty, what I suggest is set fixed working days for yourself and stick to your schedules. Having stipulated and defined working hours would keep you in respite about having to work in limited hours and then to have time for yourself. This approach is very helpful as it doesn’t leave you floating here and there but ascertains that you work in the given time frame with the best of your efforts.

3.  Have a study place, specifically: It is not a good idea to work from home for your PhD. That may sound unrealistic for most of the PhD students but surely working from your bed or any convenient corner of the house brings in indiscipline and lack of productivity in the work.

4.  Record your activity: All the work that I have done in the past few years, I have managed to keep an electronic copy of it with me. Apart from all other benefits of record keeping, when you go back in retrospect, you can surely feel motivated and understand your capacity and productivity. To add to it, every time you see the amount of work you have done, you are able to be little easy on yourself.

Practice and adopt these techniques in your daily life so that you are able to let go easily.