Emotions
Students find it exhausting to experience emotional rollercoasters.
Challenging projects seldom leave those who brave the odds entirely unfazed - to the contrary. Advancement drives enthusiasm and optimism, while setbacks fuel doubt and worries. While some researchers tend to experience these feelings more pronounced, others keep their cool for longer. However, the majority of researchers who subject themselves to work on topics they personally care for will experience either a tame or rather ferocious form of emotional rollercoaster.
Research is commonly a deeply personal affair. People build careers around their interest in questions, as well as their ingenuity and aptitude to solve them. Success and failure can often not easily be disconnected from personal performance and, thus, advances lend you wings while passages of stagnation or regression can ground you in heavy depression. Especially when things turn out less positive than expected, the resulting uncertainty and worry about the progress of one’s project - and oneself - often leads to comparison behaviour. Comparing with the advances of others, however, does seldom provide appropriate and complete assessments and leads to little more than overestimating the achievements of others. This, in turn, merely hands a struggling researcher a shovel to dig an even deeper emotional hole, reaching a place where great performance and advancement just becomes more difficult to realize. Rebounding from a setback that materialized itself much more profoundly than necessary takes considerable amounts of time and effort - time and effort which, then, does not remain accessible to do the actual work on the project. Thus, remaining emotionally well calibrated - to respond within reason to any news of the project - and refraining from patterns that accentuate emotional responses is a key quality for researchers.
Instead of riding the emotional rollercoaster as a junior researcher - and investing too much time into restoring a mentee's productivity - let’s rather work towards productivity patterns that help insulate personal productivity from project successes or woes.
Emotional responses - particularly negative ones - often manifest as low energy levels in disguise: a setback early in the project, still with fully charged researcher batteries, does not strike nearly as substantially as a setback closer to the finish line while running low on energy. Thus, maintaining motivation and energy levels during a thesis project is a critical foundation to avoiding a ride on the research rollercoaster. Beyond maintaining energy, it is helpful to refrain from comparing with the progress or success of others. Impressions are hardly ever complete accounts of achievements and often serve to undermine your own progress. Finally, it is useful to retain a useful distance between your personal identity and your identity as a researcher. If both are close to interchangeable, you will have little space to temporarily evade storm clouds in your research project. Part of that is also making sure to be kind to yourself - you are aiming to achieve much.
How do you manage to sustain productivity in light of demanding research projects? What are your techniques to keep rides on the research rollercoaster as short and positive as possible?