Take Care

Take Care

Learn how to balance your personal life with work and go easier on yourself

Each issue, we’ll ask a trainee member to pose their career questions to an established investigator and mentor. Here, Macarena Ramos Gonzalez, MS, a third-year PhD student in the applied physiology doctoral program at the University of Delaware, asks for tips on balancing personal matters with productivity at work and strategies for self-care when things don’t go as planned in the lab. John Chatham, DPhil, FAPS, a professor in the division of molecular and cellular pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shares advice on how to keep the lines of communication open with your mentor, fight “imposter syndrome” and take it easier on yourself.

Q: What are some tips to enjoy free time without feeling guilty or that I should be working, not enjoying myself?
A: Working and enjoying yourself shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Taking time away from the lab is important and will make you more productive. Do something you really enjoy and that needs all your attention. Spend time with your friends.

Q: How can I not take research-related mistakes personally, and how can I differentiate my life as an individual from my life as a researcher?
A: Recognize that it is OK to feel bad when things don’t go as planned. Make sure you have non-work things you enjoy doing. Take time to celebrate successes—even the small ones. It is very easy to be overly critical of our “failures” and ignore those things that do go well. Instead of using the word “mistakes,” perhaps it’s better to think about it as “things not working out as planned or expected.”

Q: How do you prevent negative or difficult events in your personal life from interfering with your work? And how do you communicate this to your mentor properly?
A: It is impossible to prevent difficult events in your personal life from affecting your work. Trying to do so will only make you more stressed. It is important to talk to your mentor as early as possible so they know why you are less focused or productive. If you wait too long they will more likely be frustrated by your lack of productivity. Hopefully, your mentor will understand and will work with you in getting a plan together. If that doesn’t happen, find someone else to confide in—a member of your thesis committee, perhaps, or someone from the graduate school or postdoc office—and ask them for help. They can act as an intermediary between you and your mentor.

Q: Even when your mentor supports you, sometimes you may feel you are not doing enough, that you are not good enough. How can you stop that train of thought?
A: You will be surprised how many people experience the feeling of not being “good enough.” It is likely that these thoughts will reappear throughout your career, so it is OK to feel that way once in a while, but not all the time! Acknowledge the feeling and try to see if there was a trigger, such as a manuscript being rejected or an experiment that went wrong after you spent a lot of time working on it. It is OK to feel lousy when something like that happens. Take the day off or just an hour. Do something that is not work related, go for a walk or do something else for fun.

Q: What should you do if a mentor or colleague is the source of anxiety?
A: Talk to someone, perhaps a program director at the graduate school. They will have experience with this issue and can help you with coping strategies. If a mentor is causing anxiety because of inappropriate behavior or has unrealistic expectations, they can also address the issue with the mentor.

Q: Do you have suggestions for how we can support our colleagues if we suspect someone in the lab is experiencing mental health problems or a crisis?
A: Try to engage them. Suggest going for coffee or lunch. Give them the chance to talk to you and see if they will confide in you. If they do, encourage them to talk to their mentor or see a mental health professional. If they don’t or won’t talk to you, tell your mentor about your concerns for the individual.

Got a career question you’d like to submit? Email it to education@the-aps.org and we’ll consider it for an upcoming Mentoring Q&A.

This article was originally published in the November 2019 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.