​When I did my PhD, I remember how excited I felt when I found a book called ‘How to get a PhD’. I have long since lost my copy and forgotten almost everything in it. Apart from one thing: the section on isolation.
 
I’d never thought of it this way before, but this section resonated with me immediately. Family and friends didn’t seem to understand my research or the lifestyle around it. Meanwhile, talking to colleagues about my doubts or fears seemed off limits.  Everyone else appeared to have it all ‘under control’ and no-one discussed such things. As the failed experiments piled up, and my thoughts of what I could achieve got scaled down, this felt increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, here was a book that talked my language!

​A lot of time has passed. Today, we have social media, other excellent books and courses, graduate programmes, and mentoring initiatives. But isolation remains an issue.
 
I’ve often felt isolated as a PI too. This seems paradoxical because a PI’s job involves far more people interaction than working at the bench does. But feeling understood can be further away than ever.
 
Staring at a grant rejection email, knowing I have to break the bad news to my group, is a very lonely place to be.  Figuring out how to handle a challenging workplace conversation, when confidentiality prevents me discussing it with colleagues feels like there is nowhere to turn.
 
In the context of a world with a crisis of isolation outside science too, how can we handle this better? And what can we do to support others?

​What would you miss most if you quit research right now?
 
An answer I often hear is ‘having autonomy’. Academic freedom comes at a price, both financially and metaphorically. But having this level of agency is a huge privilege. If we take that for granted, we allow a culture of negativity to prevail without this vital positive to balance it.

The importance of agency
The feeling of being able to exert control over our environment, and to some extent over our destiny, is one of the most basic human needs. Our brains are wired to feel pleasure from having agency over our lives. Even our health depends on it.
 
At its best, research fulfils this need very well. Many of us have substantial autonomy over our research topic and over how we organise our day, while actually getting paid for it.
 
However, it comes as part of a package in which we seem to have very little agency in other areas of our work. Whether it’s a compulsory training course or a meeting where we feel unable to speak, the contrast could not be greater.

​For people drawn to academic freedom, having less freedom on other issues can seem particularly problematic. It helps to understand why these limits are there, and to ask: ‘What agency do we have?’ and ‘How can we use it?’.    

We all feel out of our depth sometimes. It is normal to experience imposter feelings in these moments, but by managing these feelings better, could we reduce the risk of slipping into the far more damaging  ‘imposter syndrome’?
 
Imposter syndrome shows up in diverse and often damaging ways, including many we don't normally think of this way. These include unhealthy levels of procrastination, overworking, perfectionism and unconscious avoidance, not just a lack of confidence. Which of us doesn’t experience at least one of these sometimes? Imposter feelings, in contrast, could be seen as a ‘growth moment’, a healthy driver of personal development that helps us perform at our best.

​Staying on the right side of this fine line is a challenge. If we had a better understanding of what drives imposter feelings in research, could we learn how to harness their stimulus for growth instead of damaging our wellbeing and productivity?

​There was a political earthquake in the US last week. There are major ongoing wars, climate change, economic uncertainty, a post-pandemic world we are still adapting to, and the new challenge of ‘artificial intelligence’.
 
And somehow, in the middle of all this, we need to stay calm and rational enough to do good science!
 
How does that work?

​You may be relieved to hear this post is not about politics! Or the perceived moral high ground of either 'side'. You may find it helpful to read regardless of where you stand on those issues. It is about finding the clarity and motivation for science in an uncertain world. What are the prospects for science in a world that questions its role in society? And how can we reinforce our own personal values in a changed landscape?

​No-one said it would be easy! We are, after all, pushing back the frontiers. That may sound grand, but there are reasons why the frontiers are where they are.
 
Progress is never as quick as we would all like it to be. The world is imperfect. Equipment breaks, experiments fail, projects run into dead ends, good papers and grant applications get rejected, administration takes time (often far too much), some people let us down, and the world is full of distractions. All of these take time not only from our research but from that of all other scientists. And they have done so, to greater or lesser extents, for generations.

​​Even worse, these problems drain our motivation. We need an unbreakable sense of purpose, and commitment to it, that we can tap into to ride them out. So what is purpose and how do we find it? 

​The world is full of people who achieved high levels of ‘success’ in business, sport, wealth and other domains only to find this did not bring the happiness and satisfaction they sought.
 
Success in research is no different. My own experience on being awarded tenure, for example, was an immediate sense of relief after years of career insecurity, and of gratitude for the hard work of my team, followed by an unnerving feeling of ‘what now?’, when faced with the opposite extreme.

​However ironic this sounds, this is a remarkably common experience that needs its own solutions. The way I rationalise it today is that my craving for security and success had unconsciously taken over from the intrinsic motivations that brought me into research in the first place. So once I had all the security I could want, there was just emptiness.  Reconnecting with these underlying motivations, and the values they relate to, takes a while but that process is crucial.

​
​Organisational psychologist Adam Grant writes: “Success is most rewarding when it serves the people and principles that matter to you”. Your values, in other words. Success when it comes feels hollow unless or until it is aligned with our deepest values.
 
But is a focus on values just a privilege of those lucky enough to have security? And what are values? How can we get crystal clear on ours, and, crucially, how can that help us in other career stages?

​Feelings of insecurity in research have many triggers: when the remaining funding period ticks below a year; an argument with the boss; being scooped on a paper; a fellowship rejection.
 
But feeling insecure can be even more damaging than job precarity itself. What does that chronic, pervasive, nagging doubt do to our research and to us? And how can we manage it better?
 
The answer to both questions is ‘much more than we think’!

​Science is a creative endeavour: without ideas there is no science. So why do our best ideas come in the shower? Or while out for a walk or staring into space? Long train journeys once had the same effect, before we had smartphones. What is it about these environments that allows our thoughts to flow freely and can we replicate this elsewhere?
 
My personal favourite is seminars where the speaker has completely lost me. Confined to my seat by the embarrassment of leaving, I feel desperate to occupy my mind. I’m drawn to random words from the talk, or any small fragment I can follow, before heading off at a tangent to wherever my thoughts take me. Perhaps I should be more grateful for these presentations!
​

​What do all these circumstances have in common that allows ideas to flow? How does this process work? And how can we use this knowledge to optimise our working style and research culture?

If that title sounds scary, you really need to read this!

But how can you afford the time? After all, you’re overwhelmed!

​One of the biggest ironies about wellbeing and productivity in the workplace is the belief that we don’t have time for our own mental wellbeing. Under everyday pressure, we blunder along on three cylinders, hoping that working ever harder will solve our overwhelm problem.

​It won’t!

​All it will do is reduce our capacity by exhausting us. Our to-do list will remain infinite for all the reasons described before!
 
Working long hours at an intense rate for a short time can sometimes be useful. It can give us a productivity boost that gets us over the line with a major project. But it only works if we do this intentionally and build in deliberate rest time afterwards. If instead we do it in a state of panic, in the belief that our world will end if we slow down, we are heading for a crash sooner or later. 
 
Like all negative emotions, overwhelm is actually there to help us. It is a message that there is a problem, requesting us to take an appropriate action. So what problem is it, and what action do we need to take? This is where we usually go wrong.