Anxieties manifest in different ways for different people. But what happens when your personal stressors and coping mechanisms change?
I've always been a very, very loud advocate for mental health awareness and removing the stigma by being open about your struggles. Hell, I'm about to talk about my anxiety to the internet! (And yes, I know that this is easier for some disorders, and that awareness and affordable treatments have a long, long way to go). But despite the fact that I'm fairly well-known around my department for discussing my struggles and broadcasting my university's mental health resources, I've found that I've backslid into an anxiety that I'm more ashamed to talk about now, and it's rooted on one thing: the shift from coursework to becoming completely ABD.
Real quick, for my friends who don't know what ABD stands for--it's "all but dissertation." I've taken all my courses and, with the exception of teaching undergrad classes to keep my assitantship, I'm "free" to do nothing but work on my dissertation. My peers warned me about the difficulty of being ABD, but I didn't listen to them--I couldn't--I had my comprehensive exam blinders on and all I could focus on was how much better it would be when I was done with testing for good. And I was right. For a while.
Finishing my four written comps and then my oral comp in May 2018 felt like losing fifty pounds in a day. Finally, the specter of being expected to know as much as I could about my subjects, knowing that I'd never know enough, vanished. I was excited to take a break and then spend the summer getting a head start on all the projects that pertained to my actual work, my actual CV. I went from extremely broad themes to my extremely specific dissertation. It was time to put my nose to the grind.
Thaaaaat didn't happen! The relief was still there, sure, but I spent the summer making excuses and saying "I deserved a break" and barely met any of my writing goals. (Sidenote: I also got married in March and spent the summer acclimating to living in a new place. AND I wasn't wrong, I did deserve a break). My rational brain is very happy that I took a well-needed break this summer. My lizard brain (what I call my Generalized Anxiety Disorder) still feels guilt and shame.
Here's the thing. My first three years of grad school, with coursework and comprehensive exams, was crazy hard. There were hard deadlines that I had to meet with weekly book notes or precis, end of term historiographies, the occasional book review and--gasp--sometimes even a research paper! My professors expected me to make those deadlines, and I can't let them down. I remember, fondly now, the late nights, the stream-of-consciousness garbage I sat down to write the day before to frantically polish right before the due date. I got it done! I survived! I did okay and dedicated a lot of time to managing my stress and anxiety! But here's the thing I've realized now that I'm ABD:
I have absolutely no self-discipline. If the deadline is self-imposed, I am very, very good at letting myself down. And I'll be super mean about it, which doesn't encourage me to do the work, but it sure does make me sad a lot!
It's not like I stay up at night worrying over my dissertation. I don't expect to write it in a day. If anything, it's still a big floating blob in my future as I work on smaller chunks and conference presentations now.
No, I'm meanest to myself about the little stuff. And that, I've found, is the hardest thing to get my friends to understand.
Imagine this: a friend comes up to you really, really down in the dumps, calling themselves a "garbage person" whose whole day is down the drain. You ask why. They say "I slept in til 10:30 this morning and didn't start working until noon. My whole schedule is off just because I refused to get up at 9."
Doesn't it sound stupid? Why is this person judging their entire day based off of sleeping in an extra 1.5 hours? For not going to the gym? For not cooking a sit-down meal for dinner?
For some reason, my Lizard Brain classifies these events as "basic tasks that adults do," and when I can't bring myself to do them, I'm a huge failure. Can't do a dissertation chapter in a day?? Obviously. No one can. That's hard. But waking up at 9 am? That's easy. It's a question of willpower. Where is mine?
It's a two-pronged shame: the shame of being unable to do simple tasks, and the shame that I let "sleeping in late" ruin my entire day.
To forgive myself, Lizard Brain says, is to enable staying up late and sleeping in. To be too kind to myself for skipping a workout is just a voice saying I won't have to work out the next day.
I can't imagine how much harder this lack of self-discipline will get as I reach crunch time with my dissertation. My advisor had better set some hard deadlines for me, because if I make up something like "do this chapter by October" I probably won't stick to it unless someone else is expecting me to.
I've found that people with 9-5's, in which they are mandated to arrive on time if they want to keep their job, and have tasks with deadlines and an office in which others will know if they don't get work done, have a harder time getting into my brain for this one.
I guess the point of this post was 1) to see if I was alone 2) to get some advice from fellow academics, or simply people who work from home on self-imposed deadlines and 3) to shine a light on something that's been helping me quite a bit.
For #3, my therapist has me doing a ACT with Compassion. ACT stands for acceptance and commitment therapy, and it targets therapy patients who struggle with self-criticism and shame. Treating oneself with compassion, they argue, is different than "enabling." The most basic advice is to "talk to oneself as if you would talk to a friend" and I sure as hell wouldn't be as mean to my friend about missing a day at the gym as I am to myself. We're also working on breaking my shame cycles, as we've found that my shaming isn't actually causing me to do more work, and is instead just making me feel worse!
Here's their website--it's mostly resources for therapists, but if you can't afford mental health care maybe some of the guided meditations would be good for you! It also helps to do some good-old Cognitive Behavior Therapy and writing down what happened, how you're feeling, and then forces you to analyze whether these reactions are rational, warranted, etc. as well as how you might adjust your behaviors. For the most part, once I write down my Lizard Brain reactions and force myself to confront them, I can see how unwarranted my shame and criticism is.
If i know one thing, it's this: I need to break my shame and guilt cycle. The work will never be over in academia. There's always another grant to apply for, another article to submit, another conference to present at, another book to read. If I don't learn how to be kind to myself, set reasonable goals, and give myself a break, while simultaneously finding some form of work structure that works for me, I'm in deep water!
If this post starts a conversation, or lets me know that others feel the way I do, then great! If this is just me shouting into a void, well, it felt really good to do so!
Be well.
Comments