Mental health tips for transitioning from PhD to postdoc

Question

I finished my PhD in physics in the middle of last year in the UK, and have started my postdoc in Germany. My PhD had a lot of guidance and I met with my supervisor every week, but it's totally different with my postdoc. The big thing is that my postdoc is not a fulfilment of a specific grant for an experiment or project, but is a general appointment and gives me total freedom to do what I want. This means I have to be totally self-motivated, but unfortunately I'm just not. I have work to do, but it just isn't happening, and it's almost physically painful to even consider doing it. I'm not alone in this country, I live with my wife, which helps a bit, but I do miss living in the UK too. My postdoc here is for 3 years at least.

I'm proud and happy with my PhD work, but this totally undirected self-motivated career is pretty crushing. Combined with working from home due to the pandemic, and having no regular meetings with my new boss, who seems to be letting whatever happens happen, it is difficult. When I was in my PhD my old supervisor mentioned that he went through a similar depression when he started his second postdoc which was similarly unguided. How on Earth do I make the transition? Is this normal?

I also have strong feelings of guilt: I'm being paid for this, yet I'm too lazy to actually work, and yet my wife is out there working a lot as a mechanical engineer.

Answer 1

This sounds like classic burnout. It is a common occurrence after an intense degree program. The solution is to find a mental health professional who can give you advice.

Advice from a layperson may be helpful or not. But some things help, like getting exercise, taking breaks, getting enough sleep, taking up a hobby...

Anyway, yes, it is pretty normal. "Toughing your way through" is probably not optimal. For most it will probably clear normally over time, but you don't have a lot of time to be catatonic.

Talk to a pro. The university may be able to provide one for you, though I don't know the custom in Germany.

Answer 2

First, I do not doubt that Covid and the personal and professional isolation of working from home (in a foreign country) have some impact here. Getting the help Buffy suggests is highly recommended.

Second, looking back on my post-doc, I moved from the US to The Netherlands and took up a similarly unstructured post-doc role. I was pretty independent already, had lots of ideas, but it was not clear what I should do, exactly. What I decided to start with was jumping in to help the students make progress - I knew the research techniques and analysis tools quite well, and was a better writer/editor than they were. I also knew that I did not want to 'compete' with the students on ideas and projects. So, I helped a lot while I continued to contemplate what I could take on as my own. In the first few months I didn't personally get much done, but the students did. Lots of data (theirs) to discuss, ideas to bounce around, papers to write (and rewrite, and rewrite). And I got to know the students, and everyone else in the institute really well (staff, technicians, the coffee lady).

I also decided that I needed to learn Dutch since I lived in The Netherlands, so started taking courses. That got me out of the institute and meeting a variety of people, and got me feeling more comfortable at coffee time when everyone around me started speaking Dutch rather than the English used for science. I could schedule squash games with other players at the local club. I was no longer felt like a tourist, I lived there (in retrospect, I should have played tourist more).

Once I felt I was part of things, I started getting new ideas, could plan out new experiments, and got motivated to get things going. I could 'play' again in the lab and get excited about things. In some ways I am reminded of the section in one of Feynman's books when he went to Cornell after the Manhattan Project and felt really burned out until he saw a spinning plate in the cafeteria and started wondering about the mechanics of it even though it wasn't 'heavy duty' physics, just play. That reignited his motivation, much like mine was.

Now, none of what I did is currently possible for you because of Covid (although perhaps there is finally light at the end of the tunnel in Europe). Get help, get outside, get to meeting people at work and outside of work. Find a question to play with, with no deadlines or expectations.

Answer 3

The problems of lack of motivation and difficulty getting started on a massive task aren't confined to those doing postdoc.

Here are some general tips:

Set a tiny goal

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear argues that if you aren't a runner, but you want to be, you should start with extremely small goals. Not 1km, not even 500meters, but just putting your shoes on and tying the laces!. The next day, try to do that again, or even go further and walk out the door. By slowly forming a habit, however small you start, you can build on it until it's at the extremely productive level you desire.

Identify the critical tasks

We can sometimes be unmotivated to take on tasks that feel impossible. Break the massive task into tiny ones, throw out (or at least set aside for now) the non-essential ones.

Take pause to think about why your task matters

If you're dreading a large task, take the pressure off, and try to find a way to get excited about it before you start working on it. That might be through things as simple as researching its history, finding people who work on the same problem who you admire, thinking about how it will benefit you, or understanding what makes it important (to someone, even if it doesn't feel important to you right now).

Change environments

Take your laptop to a cafe or park table and work from there for 2 hours. Go for a walk and talk your idea out aloud on a video recording. Changing environments has massive effects on our psyches, and walking has been shown to improve creativity!

Survey the entire task/problem

Ask yourself: if I only had 2 hours to do this, how would I go about it?. Then set yourself the challenge to do it in that crazy timeframe (even if it's 2 months' work). You'll inevitably fail, but just getting ideas (however nascent) on paper can really help. You can delete whatever you produce (whether it be a written document, code, whatever) shortly after completing the exercise. I have done this exercise alone and with colleagues and have been very surprised how much we learned in such a short time. You'll also be indirectly surveying the problem, necessarily at a high-level (since you simply don't have time bogged down by details).

Get physical exercise

You'll be healthier and happier, and able to think more clearly. Of exercise, Tim Minchin (at 5m20s) says:

Play a sport. Do yoga, pump iron, and run, whatever but take care of your body, you’re going to need it.

And Sam Altman gives similar advice:

Exercise. Eat well. Sleep. Get out into nature with some regularity.

Answer 4

Since I had the exact same experience with my first postdoc, I would write a few thoughts.

First, I don't believe it's just burnout. The motivation, for most normal people, is external. If your environment motivates you, you do things, if it doesn't, you don't.

The problem is that with the pandemic your environment is gone. You do have to have your regular meetings with someone, you have to have your busy schedule, prepare for conferences and so on. Your boss isn't giving you homework. Neither are your colleagues. Setup regular meetings with them and start designing new projects and promising (realistic) things and set deadlines for completing tasks.

Also, working from home isn't easy. If you don't remove all distractions, there is a high chance you won't work efficiently. If you can't, you need to work from somewhere else.