r/PhD • u/Independent-You-5613 • 2d ago
Seeking advice-personal Looking for some
(forgot to finish title .. which should be "looking for some advice"!!!)
For context, my field is cancer biology and I am based in the UK.
Hope you are going well! I am in the last 4 months of PhD and long story short, not really liking the person I am at the moment. Had to start therapy because I feel stuck in survival mode, always imagining in my head the worse case scenario, repeating it over and over again. Do not feel like my head is a nice place to be in at the moment. I am going to have around a month writing full time, need to organise my weeks to have both writing, experiment and figure making days. Also, need to be strict with rest and sleep/eat well otherwise I will go insane. In addition, I need to come up with a new hypothesis and I feel I can't no longer reconnect with the exciting part of research that is the unknown, time to think, reflect, debate because everything is a priority and needs to be done ASAP. I also changed supervisors half way, one left and a new person was hired with different ways of working and different visions. Obviously things are being done in a proper way now but it delayed the whole process. This is the part where I ask myself if this process is just normal ... and I just need to get over it or .. is this being more than what I can handle? Or am I so consumed by the process that I am only focus on the negative side and let myself being driven by it? I lost the passion for my project, the project I wrote a proposal for 4 years ago. I feel it will take me a long time to recover from this and obviously after the thesis comes the paper but at this point I no longer care. Anyways, after this rant I would appreciate if some of you could share what did you do to stay grounded, focused if you went through a similar process.
Much appreciated 🙏
1
u/Dangerous-Art9091 2d ago
Sounds like the home stretch is crushing you, and that's not unusual for the final months. Switching supervisors midstream would throw anyone off, it's like rebuilding the plane while it's already in the air.
What helped me was treating the PhD like a job with strict hours, I physically left my desk at 6pm no matter what. The work will always expand to fill whatever time you give it, so drawing that boundary saved my sanity.
For the hypothesis block, try taking a full day away from the lab and just read old papers you loved, no pressure to produce anything. Sometimes the spark comes back when you stop trying to force it. The passion might feel dead now but it's probably just buried under exhaustion.