Hi Reader!

After a long hiatus, made of colliding deadlines and a general "falling off the productivity wagon", we're back on track! This week, we ramp up our newsletter activity with a flashback to a post on how to face an addiction to social media, and a new tiny practice that helped me get through some of the difficult episodes in this intervening time without newsletters.

​

Flashback: Facing addiction to social media in the PhD​

(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog)

One common productivity (and mental health) problem PhD students report in our workshops is being addicted to their social media tools and feeds. Customizing the general process for facing addictions from Anna Lembke's book Dopamine Nation (see the previous newsletter), the post discusses how to overcome this addiction, be it mild or strong:

​

Tiny practice: The 3-minute breathing space

In the PhD, as later in our lives as researchers, we all go through rough patches. Maybe a scolding from our supervisor (or just mildly negative feedback) sends us into a self-hate spiral; a conflict with a colleague robs us of our much-needed focus and attention; the mounting length of our personal and professional to-do list gives us periodic anxiety attacks. Whatever it is, rest assured that it is both terribly disruptive to your productivity and well-being… and terribly frequent (for others as well).

In other blog posts we have covered the cycle of experiential avoidance that these negative events and experiences often lead to, and strategies and tactics to face them more effectively. However, in the moment, when we are experiencing these uncomfortable episodes, we feel powerless. We don’t even remember alternatives we can take, other than spiraling. Is there something like an “emergency button”, a quick and simple resource we can use to better face the adversity?

The “three-minute breathing space” is one such emergency tool. A staple of mindfulness-based therapeutic approaches, it is considered an “emergency meditation”, in that it does not require us to step away from where we are, or do much physically. You can find plenty of example audio/video or textual instructions to follow along, and the structure is so simple that you will memorize it after doing it just a couple of times.

In a few words, this practice goes through three steps, for roughly one minute each: 1) closing our eyes (if we can, optional), we notice all aspects of our current experience, including emotions, body sensations, thoughts, images… trying to get a holistic notion of how we are right now; 2) we gather and redirect our attention to our breathing, its bodily sensations in the nostrils, abdomen or wherever we feel it, and bringing our attention back to breathing when (not if) our mind wanders away from it; and 3) we expand our focus to be aware of the rest of our experience again, through the whole of our bodies, accepting that such experience is here… and trying to bring this sense of acceptance and presence to our next actions in the world out there.

If you are feeling bad these days, be it with anxiety, depressive thoughts, or stress, try this out… This will not magically make the difficult experience go away, but it will create some space around it, so that you can act with more presence, according to what you think is important in that moment.

​

May you always create space around your discomforts!

​

Did this content help you? Hit reply and send us feedback (I cannot reply to all the emails we get, but I do read all of them), buy us a coffee, or help us spread the word! Forward this email to a friend you think may find this kind of advice useful. If you are reading this and you have not joined the newsletter yet, you can subscribe and get exclusive access to a worksheet to make the strategic plan towards your next dissertation goal, in the button below:

​