Why Doing a PhD Feels Like Losing Your Mind

Doing a PhD means you are in your head a lot. You live inside your own thoughts, and it becomes very difficult not to go into great depths of negativity. You start to ruminate, to fixate, to compare yourself to others, and it becomes this spiral where you feel horrible about yourself.






Loneliness becomes an industrial hazard of the profession. You are rated against others constantly, and you start to think you are not as good as you should be. It is a very strange, internal negotiation—just you and your own mind. Some days you get it miserably wrong and have a miserable day. Other days you get it just so, and you have a good day.






Over time, you begin to realize that managing your head is the real work. You learn to find good people around you, to step back, to wander, to rest, and to give that poor soul in your head a break. The outlets that are healthy will feel like a waste of time, but they are not.






This is the hardest part of doing research: managing your mind, learning how to live with your own thoughts, and finding peace in the fact that you will never fully control them—but you can keep coming back, again and again.