5.10 reset or rest - getting past resistance
if you've ever sat at your desk, willing yourself to get unstuck, and not having it work, this episode is for you. i give you my two step formula, reset or rest, for getting past resistance, because belting yourself to your desk chair (actual suggestion i received once from a prof) isn't it.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
If you have ever found yourself sticky, distracted, frustrated, or worse, this episode is for you. This is a saying, , an anchor phrase that I like to use, which is called reset or Rest, and it is a phrase that I use when re. Comes up now. Resistance looks different for different kinds of people. It can be when you're sticky, you're distracted, you are spinning your wheels, you're frustrated, you can't land.
For some people I know it looks like scrolling. It could look like switching between all of your tasks all at once. It could look like tab hoarding. It's as individual as the snowflake, but almost all of us have. Experienced resistance when we just don't wanna do it or we can't get into it, or we can't seem to figure it out.
We're just stuck. Now, many people will tell you to push through and there is some merit in that advice, I guess. If you keep pushing, sometimes you do get there, but I find that it is a recipe for burnout much more frequently than it's a recipe for success. So push through methods often look like, ah, set a timer and make yourself stick to it.
I had once a professor who recommended that you belt yourself to your chair if you were finding it hard to write because you would eventually have to do it if you were belted to your chair.
Now. There is some. A theory behind strong arming yourself into doing something. But what I find much more often is that that actually feeds the resistance. It makes it harder to keep going because not only are you, trying to do something that's very hard, which is why you're experiencing resistance in the first place, I guess.
But you are also now stuck in this loop where you're trying to do a hard thing. You find it hard, you feel some resistance, and then you amp up all of those negative feelings. By forcing, by cajoling, by punishing, by removing good stuff. It just leads to more frustration, more fear, more anxiety, because if every time you sat down to write, you had to physically belt yourself to your chair in order to do it, then of course you're going to avoid that.
You're going to find it harder to get excited for the next writing session. You are gonna find it harder to settle. It just doesn't work long term. You might get a short term gain, you might be able to do it that time, but as a sustainable solution, a sustainable strategy, I find that it does more harm than good.
Now, I of course, am not gonna leave you there and be like, this thing doesn't work. Good luck out there. Bye. But what I do find that works is if you offer yourself the choice to either. Reset or rest. This is part of a loop where you notice that you're getting distracted. Where you notice that you're feeling the resistance.
It is difficult to learn how to do that because for many of us, it feels like multitasking. It feels like busyness. It feels like we're at least removing something. But if you find yourself just sort of circling the task and never quite landing, noticing that. Next, accepting that and being like, yeah, I'm feeling it again.
Harder than it sounds. A skill to practice and then taking action. So as part of this notice, accept, take action strategy, that last part, the taking action is where the reset or rest comes in. A reset is something that I love. I love a good reset. I've talked about it on this podcast before. I will share links in the show notes, but basically to quickly sum it up, there are two types of reset.
In my vocabulary, there's a soft reset where I just say to myself, okay, we're resetting. I like to couple it with something physical a little bit of stretching, some wiggling, doing a lap around my office, or maybe a lap around your workspace. Switching tasks and being like, okay, this one doesn't work, but maybe this other one will.
But you basically give yourself the permission. To reset the vibes. You reset them physically, you reset them in terms of what you're working on, what you're focusing on, but instead of just staying stuck in that loop of resistance, you do something else. Now, soft resets work for me through the like gentle resistance.
If I'm really not feeling it that day, if it's really sticky, then I often need what I call a hard reset. Now a hard reset is definitely body forward. You need to do something different with your body. In order for this reset to really take, I find my go-to is a shower. I basically am just declare it a new day and do whatever I'm gonna do In my morning routine.
I take a shower. I sometimes go as far as to getting a new cup of my favorite hot beverage. I can offer myself a snack, but basically I'm giving my body a chance away from my desk to do something different. I find that the more overwhelming the difference, like the difference between my shower and my desk is pretty big, so that works really effectively for me.
But going in through my body, giving it a break, giving my mind, my literal eyes, a chance to do something different, hear something different, feel something different, and then coming back to it often works so much better than trying to think my way through it. That reset acknowledges that I'm not doing what I wanna be doing.
It gives me a chance to breathe, do something different, and then try again. You might say, oh, I don't have time for that. But what I find is that it actually is faster to acknowledge that you're stuck. Take a step to a ameliorate that situation and then come back to it than it is to try and sit and soldier way, soldier your way through it, and figure out how best to move forward without taking an action.
Now that's the reset side of the reset or rest equation. But more often than not, a rest is actually maybe what you need even more profoundly. I don't necessarily mean going back to bed, although sometimes a really good nap can do it. There are lots of different kinds of rest. There's community, rest and creativity.
Rest and sensory rest. I will link to a great article in the show notes to help you explore the different kinds of rest, but giving yourself a chance. To replenish can often make much more of a difference than punishing yourself until you feel ready to work. My therapist likes to say that we're all just big toddlers and that a snack and a nap fixes most things, and I wish that that were less true.
But for me, it really is, and for you it might be as well. So give yourself that chance to say, okay, I am probably finding this even harder than normal because I'm tired, because I'm sensory overloaded, because I'm burned out because I had a really intense few days. I had a really intense situation this morning, and I need to rest before I can try again.
And like resetting where it often is faster to take care of yourself and come back to it. I find that adding rest into the flow of your day or your week can be much more effective than waiting until you absolutely collapse and then resting all at once. So taking some time to give yourself some physical rest to go and stretch your body, to take a fitness class, to have a snack.
All of these different things help you notice, accept where you're at and take action as opposed to just trying to do everything through your brain. This can be hard advice to take sometimes. It's definitely stuff that I am still working on, but when you find resistance, I encourage you this week to reset or rest.
See you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
2.14 feel good at something - get a hobby!
in today's episode, i am going to encourage you to think seriously about your summer plans....no, not all the reading you'll do, or writing you'll get caught up on....but your hobbies. and i'll give you a bunch of research-backed reasons that hobbies might be one of the ways that you can make your life - human and scholarly - more sustainable!
resources:
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The best thing you can do for your scholarly work might be to do something completely different with a big chunk of your time. Let's talk about hobbies in this week's episode of
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
Whether it's conscious or unconscious, it's really common for academics to have a default setting of work for most of their free time. Half an hour? Get some reading in! Got a couple of days free that you didn't expect? Go ahead and get caught up on that writing project. But one of the things that is definitely true when your default for time is work, is that it is exponentially easier to burn out, lose interest, fall out of love with your project, and just generally feel less good because you're working all of the time.
Unlike other curves, the effort put in to work produced curve is not a linear one. What I mean by that is that the more work that you put in, it's not necessarily going to lead to more and more achievement. You can work 17 hours on a piece of writing, but if you're exhausted for 13 of them, it's not going to be that much better for your final project to have put in all of those extra hours, because you're just not as efficient.
What can we do about this math that we wish would math differently? And I'm here to introduce you to a secret. Maybe something you haven't heard about. Or maybe something that tickles a far away piece in your brain. Hobbies. Yes, that's right. This week's episode is all about why I think that you should get a hobby, resurrect a hobby, have a couple of hobbies, or just generally have projects that engage you outside of work.
And here are a couple of reasons why. I've always been a big fan of hobbies, but even more recently after I've read this book Rest, which obviously I'll link to in the show notes. Rest by Alex Soojung-kim Pang has lots of actionable things, but the best chapter in it for me is this chapter about recovery, where he talks about something that we all need, which is recovery time from the parts of our lives that are stressful, require a lot of effort and focus.
And if that's not a definition of scholarly life, then I don't know what is. So this chapter is pretty actionable and it's built on the workof, Dr. Sabine Sonnentag who's a professor of work and organizational psychology at the university of Mannheim. She has studied burnout and recovery from work-related stress for years and has identified four major components of what she calls recovery.
Psychological detachment; relaxation; mastery experiences; and control. Now I value your time and I don't want this podcast to take 45 minutes. So I'm just going to talk about two of these elements that I think that a hobby specifically can really help you with . But the idea behind all of these elements are that they don't just help you take a break from work. They actually help you recover, which is something different than just breaking.
It's going to replenish you recharge your batteries, so to speak. And I think if we approach the time that we're not working as something that is going to actively help restore us, it makes burnout a little bit less likely. Now of course burnout has its roots in all sorts of systemic and unjust systems. So you're not going to be able to fix work burnout or prevent it altogether with a hobby.
But it might go a really long way. And it's because having hobbies really help fulfill these two elements of recovery, psychological detachment and mastery experiences.
So psychological detachment. Is the ability to disengage from work-related thoughts and concerns during non-work time. If you laughed out loud at that, you are not alone. I did too. But it is useful to think about what activities, habits, or tools help you take a mental break from work. It might look like taking emails off your phone or reading fiction or watching TV to help put your brain in a completely different area of thought. My brain is a little bit. Uh, persistent, stubborn, and sometimes a single input isn't enough to get it to psychologically detach from work. So for me, this often looks like activities that involve my body too.
Otherwise, it's too easy for my brain to keep braining while I'm trying to watch that show. So I might add in coloring while I watch TV, or I might listen to that podcast, but go for a walk around the block at the same time. You get it. That's psychological detachment, one of the four elements of recovery.
The second element of recovery that we're going to talk about today are mastery experiences. So mastery experiences are anything that promote a sense of competence and achievement which you might feel at work, but maybe not all of the time. Dr. Sonnentag defines them these activities as engaging interesting things that you do well.
And there's a lot of research that the more uncertain your job is, the more doing things that you feel good at and competent at in your off time can help you to counteract that. Hobbies can be great for this. Games. Who doesn't love winning a game? Volunteering where you feel useful and needed. Teaching something non-related to your work like teaching a knitting class. If that's something you're into or teaching a niece or nephew, how to bake cookies.
But this element of recovery can seem kind of counterintuitive, right? Because it takes a lot of effort and mental energy to teach or volunteer or do something that is engaging and interesting. . It has that psychological detachment benefit. So it helps you think about something else on purpose and it makes you feel like you can do things and you can do them well, or that you're progressing at them or they feel supportive .
And it feels good to feel good at things. It feels good to do things ,well to be needed, to see progress, to notice achievement. And the more that you're not getting that at work, the harder those benefits are going to hit for you.
So. Why am I pushing hobbies so hard? And it's, I am pushing them because I A) think that grad school doesn't own every hour of your time. And that having more things that you're excited about or doing is only going to benefit you, but it's really useful because the time math doesn't always work out the way that we want it to.
You know, up top, I mentioned that the effort curve doesn't always make sense --that the more effort you put in you do reach a sort of plateau where more and more effort isn't going to necessarily yield the performance benefits that you want. But the time also works similarly, but to your own benefit. So if you have 40 hours in a week to work on a project and you spend five of them on a hobby or a separate project, um, hopefully something a little bit different from work.
But that hobby is going to have benefits that far outweigh the five hours that you quote unquote took away from the project. Those five hours, according to the research and definitely backed up by my own experience are going to help you focus better. When you get back, they're going to help you, help you recover more, avoid burnout, and avoid some of those crashes that's so many of us are prone to.
And now that we've reached the summertime, and if you're in the American quarter system, hold on, it's coming for you. But summer recovery is especially important because that default sense of time being work time, no matter what is intense during the summer, if you're a scholar, because that's when we're supposed to catch up. Right?
And it can feel luxurious to the point of irresponsibility to say that I have two equal goals this summer, and one of them is to learn how to crochet. And the other one is to finish this dissertation chapter. You might not want to say that to your advisor, but in my experience, if you actively invest in your own recovery, through hobbies, through other experiences that help you detach and feel good and competent, then you're going to have more energy, not just for the summer to help you kind of move past any stickiness or burnout that you might already be feeling or help you recover from any of the bumps and bruises that we all tend to get during the academic year. It's going to also make it much more likely that you're going to show up on the first day of your new term. AKA academic new year. Uh, more rested, recovered person instead of a husk that pushed hard all summer long to try and catch up, I didn't quite get there and it starting the year already behind.
And if this permission slip to have a hobby and to make that hobby important. If not, just as important as your other work, the summer appeals, then you are going to love the free new summer planning workbook that's available in the link in the show notes. It's got all sorts of questions and activities to help you plan a summer. That's actually going to help you. Move forward and not burn out. And it has all sorts of other information about things that are happening in the thrive PhD universe this summer.
I appreciate you listening to this so much, and I hope it gives you a little bit of space to start a hobby, or maybe pick one back up again in the next couple of days. See you soon!
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!