Maintaining your well-being while working on your PhD can be challenging, but you can always get help. If you are experiencing stress, time pressure, conflicts with colleagues, or other issues that are affecting your mental health, here are some tips:
Don’t hesitate to ask for help or discuss your work with people in your group other than your supervisor. Sometimes supervisors are difficult to get a hold of, or your question may seem too basic to ask your supervisor. Colleagues are usually within reach and may well have experience with your questions from their own research.
The time scale of the work done in a PhD project can easily be months or even years!
Don't worry too much if completing a part of your project seems to take forever or if writing an article becomes months of work. If you're in doubt, discuss it with your supervisor. It’s part of their job to make sure you're not spending too much time on one thing or digging yourself into a hole.
It can be easy to feel that your work is unimportant or trivial, or that you aren’t making enough progress in comparison to other PhD projects. Remember that you are an expert in your field, and you can make your project whatever you want it to be.
Don't worry if you find that the work you do is quite different from the project originally planned. By nature, a research project will change based on what you uncover along the way. It is very common that your final project is different than your initial idea.
It is important to find time for social activities while you work on your PhD. The university has many different facilities, like the fitness center and the student house, as well as various clubs and groups that host many different activities, like board game nights and the Friday bar. You can find more information about clubs and other services using the links on the side.
