Science Without Anguish

​We love science but not the stuff that comes with it: all those events that trigger anguish, insecurity, overwhelm and frustration. 

​The failed experiments, short-term contracts, spiralling administrative demands and reviewers who just don’t seem to get it. How can we keep a clear mind with all that going on?

​Highs and lows
I’ve had some amazing career highs, interspersed with lows that had me reinventing myself as a bicycle courier. I’ve been a PhD student picking myself up after a year of failed experiments. I’ve been a postdoc dealing with inexplicable desk rejections of my best, supposedly career-launching papers. I’ve dealt with existential funding crises as a PI, a few challenging colleagues, imposter syndrome and relocations. 

Like everyone, I need a way to make sense of all this. I need a mental map that helps me navigate this landscape, to understand why research life can be simultaneously filled with so much intrigue and fascination and so much struggle and hardship.

​What’s in this blog series? Below is a brief summary of what it will cover
This blog series is the guidance I wish I would have had earlier. It’s what I’ve learned from years of slowly improving how I handle the emotional ups and downs so I can stay rational and do my best science. Writing it down helps me clarify it, and perhaps parts of it will work for you?

Interestingly, much of it comes from outside academia. This blog maps many insights gained elsewhere onto research life to fill that gap.

Security: the disruptive elephant in the room
We all need security. As a tenured professor, I realise I have more than most people. But I regularly think back to times when I hadn’t, and observe those who haven’t today. What I see is a constant striving towards career goals so that every setback distracts us from the very things we enjoy about research: our curiosity, our desire to make a difference, barrier-free collaboration, training a new generation, or whatever works for you. Even the excitement of being the first to know something is quickly replaced by the worry of: ‘Will I get scooped before I can publish this?’.

So here’s the irony. Our best chance of gaining the security we crave is to avoid becoming emotionally derailed by setbacks on the path towards it. This is not easy, but a first step is to accept that there will be hurdles to jump, even some that unfairly trip us up, but to know that we will always find a way around them or a way to adapt.

Success, but not as we know it
We hear plenty of advice on how to succeed in research. But whose definition of success is that? Defining what success means to you is widely acknowledged outside research as the best way to harness intrinsic motivations, values and commitment. These could be curiosity, solving disease, improving research culture, a good work-life balance or something else personal to you. As drivers of our actions these are more powerful, and far more reliable, than extrinsic motivators – ‘high profile’ papers or big grants. These may come too, but if we make them our primary goals we place our wellbeing, and our continued motivation, in the hands of others. 

Emotions, life and research
For as long as we’re alive, we have emotions. That means scientists too! So what can we, as scientists, do with our emotions to remain objective in our research?

​One thing I’ve learned, to my complete surprise, is that emotions are not there to distract us. Their role, in evolutionary terms, is to channel our energy where we need it most. At best, they help us call on reserves we didn’t know we had. They are our friend, as long as we understand and manage them. So how can we explain the fear of what reviewers will say about our paper, or of questions after our talk, and how can we deal with it? Is being scooped really the disaster it can seem? Where does overwhelm come from and what is it trying to tell us? Is procrastination just a time management issue or something deeper? 

Truths and perspective
Like any job, research involves some hard truths that are not going away. There will never be enough funding for every good project, the high degree of specialisation means peer review will always be imperfect, and labwork will never be the best training for managing people. 

The best solution is to gain perspective. This helps us understand what truths we need to accept, even if we dislike them, and channel our energy into what we can influence. We can’t change the role of luck in grants, papers and jobs, for example, but we can make more of it. We can all build resilience. And choosing humility over arrogance can bring surprising benefits.

Where do these thoughts come from?
Like many, I find ‘self-help’ important: we are all ‘work in progress’! At work for me, this means a lifelong fascination with the psychology of performance: ways to get the best from myself and others by understanding the people behind the research.

Despite the welcome new emphasis on research culture, the most effective guidance I’ve found for managing stress and enhancing performance comes from outside academia. One rare exception is the highly effective coaching I’ve been privileged to receive from psychologist Hugh Kearns. But while brain imaging, molecular biology and optogenetics have transformed our understanding of human psychology, scientists have been surprisingly slow to apply these new concepts to ourselves.

The ideas I explore then, come mostly from the application of modern psychology to business and sport, which I then extrapolate to my own experience in research and find many parallels. The best-selling books of Steve Peters, A Path Through the Jungle and The Chimp Paradox, describing ways to understand, manage and harness our emotions, have been particularly influential for me. So has Shankar Vedantam’s deeply revealing and therapeutic podcast on the unconscious human mind, Hidden Brain, and his book Useful Delusions. Further dives into psychology in the podcast series The Happiness Lab from Laurie Santos, Work Life from Adam Grant and Life Lessons from Simon Mundie, have also contributed, as have themes from entrepreneurs Steven Bartlett, Conor Neill and Michael Hyatt.

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​How can you help?
My aim is to help today’s best young scientists and most helpful colleagues become tomorrow’s leaders in research. Too many times I’ve seen such people leave, not because they want to, or lack scientific or people skills, but because they become emotionally drained. And I aim to help those who remain to improve both their wellbeing and productivity.  

If you find these articles useful, or if there is anything you would add or change, please leave discussion and feedback, especially as I plan to post more blogs in future. Also, please spread the word to colleagues and on social media and/or contact me by email [email protected], Twitter/X @Lab_Coleman or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-coleman-743a2128/.

If these articles help just one early-career researcher stay in research and prosper, or one mid-career scientist manage their stress better, improve their output and inspire a new generation, that is what ‘success’ will mean to me.