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. 

Why Series 2?
It’s fair to say the response to Series 1 of Science Without Anguish has greatly exceeded my expectations! I’m extremely pleased with the high number of reads, the level of engagement in social media, discussion in the webinar, and the many enthusiastic comments I’ve received. People I’ve never met before approach me at conferences and start a conversation with “I really like your blog”. I really never expected this to become an ice breaker! And I’m hugely grateful for this feedback.
 
Writing it has also clarified my own thoughts even more than I expected. The thoughts I wrote about were already there, swirling around in my mind with the everyday noise, but I always find writing a great way to clarify them. And it’s given me more courage to speak openly with other scientists about topics that normally feel off limits, like how many of us feel overwhelmed, the many roles of luck in research life and how we define ‘success’. I hope it’s had the same effects for you too.
 
But there is definitely more to say, and some topics to revisit. So what can you expect in Science Without Anguish Series 2?

Every exam period at our school began the same way. Our head teacher gathered us in assembly and told us: “I would wish you ‘good luck’ but luck has nothing to do with it”. I was at an impressionable age and completely swallowed the myth that hard work was all it took. Up to a point it was a useful message. I did work hard and it served me well. But decades later I see the errors in that message. I was already lucky to be bright, lucky to have a (mostly) stable family, lucky to have parents who prioritised my school work and lucky not to suffer from exam nerves. Many are not so lucky.
 
The limits of luck
Fast forward 15 years to my first fellowship application. Life was less simple by then. My application was not even shortlisted, judged to be “too risky”, “lacking preliminary data”, “unlikely to work”. 

​Multiple desk rejections of my best paper followed: “not of general interest”, “more suited to a specialist journal”. If what I’d been told about hard work at school was the truth, how could a decade and a half full of hard work take me from being the equal-first student in my school to get into Oxbridge to repeated failure? Or was something else going on? It was a deeply confusing time.

I’m delighted to see we have over 800 users of this site from 31 countries in six continents, with many returning regularly to read new articles. This suggests to me a widespread need for better ways to handle the challenges we all face in research life. 

​For reasons outlined below, I will be holding a ‘Science Without Anguish’ webinar on Tuesday 18th June at 3pm UK time and it would be great to see many of you there! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/science-without-anguish-webinar-professor-michael-coleman-tickets-921471956427
 
Many of us have the experience of understanding exactly how we want to approach our research when we look at it from outside, helped I hope by sites like this, but struggling to put that into practice in everyday life. A big part of that is due to cultural influence in our workplace environment. It is hard, for example, to see through the irony that our sense of overwhelm is, in part, driven by our own creativity, when our neighbour is panicking about their own ‘to do’ list. Or to accept that peer review is an unavoidably noisy and imperfect, ‘least worst’ process while a colleague is fuming about the reviews of their own paper. 
 
Anguish is all around us, all day and every day. Much of it is harmful and it is infectious!
 
One way to counter this is to build a separate community of like-minded people, providing us with a reminder that there is another, actually quite widespread but often silenced, way of thinking. And thankfully today we can bring people together over great distances to do this. 
 
For this reason, and to generate wider discussion of these issues, I am organising the first ‘Science without Anguish’ webinar on Tuesday 18th June at 3pm UK time (16:00 in most of Europe, 10am US East Coast, 9am Central, 7am Pacific). Apologies to our (many!) Australasian and Asian readers. I hope to organise another webinar soon at a more convenient time for you. 
 
It would be great to see as many readers as possible at the webinar, so we have a lively discussion and recognise how many people share similar views about how we all approach our research. The link to register is: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/science-without-anguish-webinar-professor-michael-coleman-tickets-921471956427
 
In this webinar, I will give a 20 minute overview of the blog series – what inspired me to write it, a few cross-cutting themes, and where it could go from here. Then I’ll open it up to Q & A so we hear also from some of you. I am particularly keen to hear about topics you’d like to see covered in Series 2, which I will start posting in September. 
 
Thank you!

How to succeed in academia
Early career researchers often ask me for guidance on what to prioritise for their careers: “What matters most - publishing big papers, getting a fellowship, or networking?”. “Should I aim for first author papers, senior authorships or collaborations?”. “Should I work 24/7 or maintain work-life balance?”. “Is it better to work abroad or stay in one place to build relationships?”. “Should I teach or focus only on research?”.
 
The short answer is: “Yes”. 
 
But before you sink into deep depression and decide to retrain as an accountant, read on! This answer is more helpful than you think. 

“When I get my PhD place, paper, thesis, postdoc, ’big’ paper, fellowship, big grant, promotion, tenure, chair or esteemed prize, I’ll be happy”. We’ve all yearned for some or all of these at some point. Has any of them brought lasting happiness? 
 
The psychology behind research life is, in many ways, no different from everyone else’s. Society bombards us with adverts and messages about material successes that will supposedly make us happy. From our earliest memories we are programmed with stories that begin with dreams of riches, of escaping adversity, or outwitting stronger opponents. After a period of strife, the central character accomplishes their dream and lives “happily ever after”. 

​But in real life, the effect always wears off. Publishing a ‘big’ paper feels great at the time but before long we will always feel the need to prove we can do it again. A promotion brings more pay and prestige, but usually comes with new responsibilities and problems that will wear us down if we let them.   
 
So can we have a feeling of success that lasts?

It’s such a common experience in research. You’ve worked day and night for years on your project. You’ve generated interesting data and, just as you’re doing the final experiments for the paper, a notification pops up in your email: another group just published similar results. Your heart sinks. Your stomach sinks. Your limbic system catastrophises about the “wasted” effort, the “lost” career, the “inevitable” rejection of that fellowship application you planned to write. And if you manage to come to terms with any of that, your heart sinks again when you think about telling your colleagues. If you haven’t been there yet, be prepared, because chances are you will one day. 
 
Why does it hurt so much? Is it really such bad news? And what can we do about it?

Like many in research, I was brought up to produce the highest quality work I can and stay modest about it. If I achieved something worthwhile, I was told, others would notice; it wasn’t my role to tell everyone. Today however, I find myself in a world where ‘selling’ myself, or my team, is an essential survival skill. 
 
Organisational psychologist Adam Grant tells us that achievement attained by compromising our values is not success. 
 
So if we value humility but want to be successful in research, what can we do? Should we sell out on our principles and boast about our achievements, hoping this will bring “success” only for that to feel hollow if it does? Or stay true to ourselves and use whatever strengths this brings?
 
Can we be confident enough to thrive in research without becoming arrogant? Where exactly does the line between them lie?

I’ve always thought of myself as ‘resilient’. For years, I thought that meant being the type who would ‘grin and bear it’ to complete an important task. I particularly remember the 36h non-stop writing marathon to finish my PhD thesis, and tolerating 20 job rejections and a disruptive relocation to secure a PI position. These caused hardship too, but I’d push aside negative emotions to get on with it.
 
So here’s the surprise – I no longer call that ‘resilient’! I call it ‘short-term’ thinking. 
 
I see the success it brought but I also see its cost: to wellbeing, to family and, on numerous occasions, even to productivity. 
 
I still believe lasting success needs seriously hard work, but is that much pain inevitable or is there another, healthier way? A more sustainable form of resilience?

Many of us dislike not having time to explore all our ideas. For as long as each of us can remember, we’ve wanted to figure out how things work and whether we can make them work better. 
 
So here’s the problem: there are an infinite number of things to figure out but only 24 hours in a day. Having more ideas than we can follow is normal! Why then do so many of us feel bad about ideas we don't get around to? Think how awful the opposite would be: to finish our ‘to do’ list and have no ideas for anything else!

​We’re not just overwhelmed with ideas of course. It’s also emails, administration, peer reviewing, requests for favours, information, and even keeping up with the scientific literature. Many of us would like less of some of these to leave more time for research but that perfect world doesn't exist. For each of these areas of work, the same principle applies: 
 
Infinite demands meets finite capacity. So why does it feel so awful if we can't do it all?