​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.

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​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!
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​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. 

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!