Benefit #4: The potential to learn one of the most useful skillsets on the planet

It felt fantastic to get back to the university and my PhD. This feeling proved short-lived when it dawned on me that I was back at the university and had to do a PhD. Many mentally healthy people leave the experience with a mental health problem. I was going into it with one. Reducing external sources of stress was a molehill to the mountain of stress emanating from inside my brain. Akin to learning how to walk again, I needed to learn how to think again. Fortunately, my therapist helped me learn a skillset so powerful that it was possible for me to cobble together what remained of my inner shattered existence to take on the highest level of educational degree there is. I guess I would call it: the intrapersonal skillset.

The first skill in the set I learned is emotional observation. It is the act of, for lack of a better phrase, “checking in” with yourself. Essentially, I was training myself to think during states of extreme emotion. Since my general emotional state was pretty much always extreme anxiety, most of the time I would be checking in on my anxiety. For example, I would often ask myself “How anxious am I right now?” If the level felt manageable, I would continue what I was doing. If I thought the level of anxiety was high, I would readjust my plans and try to put in measures to lessen it.

The reality was a lot more complicated than I am making out. If my anxiety was rising, I would try to determine if it was caused by something I was doing, or an altercation, or bad sleep, etc. I would be looking into the future, too. I would try to predict my dips and rises in anxiety, planning to do more intensive work after exercise, for instance, or keeping work light after an important and/or long meeting. I was constantly trying to circumnavigate existential thoughts about death and suffering that my brain was throwing up all the time. I would “lead” those thoughts to a more positive emotion. One of the most difficult parts of emotional observation was making decisions on how long I could stay for a social event without it impinging on my sleep or mood. I left a lot of events early. Sometimes, when I lost functionality, I would even pull out of them to recuperate at home.

I was doing all of this stuff (though one at a time) in my head persistently. The person next to me would be none the wiser. If you think this all sounds incredibly exhausting, you would be right. In order to keep up this ridiculous amount of internal computation, I needed to recover energy as quickly as possible and be as efficient as possible with my time.

Fortunately, the next skill I learned provided me with the ultimate break from activity: meditation. Up until The Event I was pretty sceptical of it. As a scientist, it always seemed too mystical. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by its relaxation claims.

My therapist was able to teach it to me through guided meditation sessions. I would close my eyes, and my therapist would instruct me in a very soft voice what to do. We started with body scanning meditation, that is, sequentially focusing attention on specific areas of the body. “Erm, I can’t close my eyes…” I say, 5 minutes into our first session. The severity of my physical anxiety symptoms was causing my eyelids to shake too much. Not hearing a response, I turned to see my therapist’s face in a semi-blank, utterly confused state. I don’t think they had heard that complaint before. It became apparent that meditation was not going to be a straightforward skill for someone like me to learn.

For a while, I tried different types of meditation and different positions without much success. I actually found it quite difficult to stay in meditation. It took energy and effort. I was so used to the fast-paced nature of modern life I found it difficult to do nothing at all. Which is why I find week-long silent meditation retreats strange. I suppose those attending might feel fantastic after leaving those retreats, but I also think it would feel fantastic after being released from a week in prison. There is a difference between feeling relaxed and feeling relieved.

In the end, I decided I would just try to keep my eyes closed for ten minutes each day and see what happened. While taking this advice with a pinch of salt, I would actually propose this strategy for anyone starting out. During the first few weeks of meditation, listen to music, surround yourself with pillows (the comfortable type), have a conversation with someone, have a conversation with yourself, whatever it reasonably takes to keep those eyes shut for ten minutes each day. Then perhaps move on to body scanning or guided meditations, etc.

It took six months of daily ten-minute meditations for something to finally happen. As a side note, when others tell me how meditation is “not for them” after trying it twice, I find it only a tad difficult to maintain composure – ironically, meditation helps with this. It was during a hypnotherapy session (which for me didn’t really hypnotise nor provide any therapy) when I first felt the isolation meditation provides. It felt like something had clicked into place, as if the last cog had just been put into a mechanical watch so it could finally tick. It was an extraordinary experience. And a wholly unexpected one.

Meditation wasn’t really what I wanted it to be. I would eventually feel more relaxed (well, my weird version of relaxed) towards the end of meditations. At the beginning, I would actually feel more anxious with sprinklings of depression, sadness or anger. When most of us think of relaxation, we usually imagine still doing something, just less intensely. Maybe reading a book, going for a walk, or watching a program on television. During these activities, your brain still has to process the information your senses automatically send to it. In my opinion, the initial act of meditation is the attempt to close off the senses and therefore this processing. With nothing masking my emotions, I felt them in their totality. The opposite of what I thought meditation did.

During the occasional extreme emotional episodes I suffered from, which extended over several days, meditation actually made things worse. The last thing I wanted was to feel more of the pain these states provided. During acute episodes, and the rest of the time, meditation was immensely useful. It made emotional observation a lot easier, allowing difficult emotions to eventually subside, revealing the relaxed state I was after.

When I returned to the PhD, I quickly learned that I could only work for twenty-five minutes before my stress levels started to rise exponentially. Therefore, I started to use meditations as a break in between these work sessions. They acted like a reset button. It seemed to help my brain revert almost back to the state I was in at the start of the session. It was kind of like a very quick clearing of mental clutter. The constant refresh process would eventually stop working around the six-hour mark, when my fragile mind would finally succumb to the stress of PhD work. In fact, my brain was so fragile I could only work around three to four days per week. In all likelihood, I was ranked bottom in terms of the number of hours worked per week by academics at the university. Meditation isn’t a miracle worker.

It is, on the other hand, extremely useful at improving work efficiency. Meditation resets seemed to allow parts of my brain to work on problems in the background. Anyone who has done a PhD will know that it is frequently spent in a perpetual state of being stuck. I used to toil over problems, spending hours desperately trying to find a solution. After I learned meditation, I can’t think of a time when I have been completely stuck any longer than twenty-five minutes. The meditation breaks, while rarely leading me directly to the solution, would almost always help me decide which direction to go in next. It would just literally pop into my head. The effect felt extremely similar to the times I would go to sleep, unsure of what to do about something, and wake up with the answer suddenly in my head.

The quality of my work improved immensely because of meditation. Before it, around 70% of the work I produced could be thrown straight in the bin. I would spend a lot of time going down the wrong “path”. I would seek comfort in tasks I was accomplished at or liked doing, not necessarily tasks that needed to be done. It would take me a long time to notice mistakes, or to realise that the work I was doing was leading to a “dead end”.

The eventual relaxed state provided through meditation allowed me to see from a more objective standpoint. For example, when electronic calendars and task managers did not work for me, I came up with a way to produce a flexible schedule using a whiteboard and some magnetic dry-erase strips. Pretty much every idea, analysis, even large chunks of this very article, has in a significant part, come through meditation. After I learned this skill, around 10-15% of my work was not useful.

Only one problem remained once I moved into my new office away from my old research group and ex-friends. I didn’t have any place to meditate. The postgraduate physics administrator, who was lovely and very keen to help, suggested the chaplaincy. Unfortunately, it was about a ten-minute walk away, meaning half my day would be spent simply walking to and from it. So, we went looking for a quiet room within the department that no one ever used, or a series of rooms that were vacant at specific times. The only suitable room we could find had to remain locked, and I wasn’t allowed the key.

The fact that there was no room in the department where people could meditate was a little strange to me given the growing mental health awareness in society. Stranger still, there wasn’t even a wellbeing position in the department’s student-staff liaison committee. When I pointed this out to the committee, there was an enthusiastic consensus to create a position. They asked if I wanted to do it, and I naively said yes. I decided to quit the position I had proposed only three months later. As well as proving overwhelmingly stressful, I realised the role didn’t allow me to change the existing system. Fortunately, someone took over and did a much better job.

Unfortunately, I still did not have a place to meditate. After doing some exploring of my own, I came across the very quiet fourth floor of the materials science department building. The common area had eight rows of long and comfortable benches forming four small cubicles. If the area was empty or nearly empty, I used these benches to meditate on. Things were going rather swimmingly until one lunchtime, mid-meditation, I heard someone repeatedly say “excuse me” with growing ferocity. I took off my noise cancelling headphones and sat up. There was a professor from the chemistry department standing a fair distance away with a disgruntled look on their face. I politely asked what the problem was. In a stern voice, they said “What you are doing is incredibly unprofessional and highly inappropriate. This is a research area. My colleague and I are about to eat lunch, and you are taking up an entire cubicle. Can you please leave”. I looked around to see two empty cubicles and a lone PhD student happily eating lunch in the third. “I’m sorry” I hesitantly replied “I am meditating”. Without a hint of a pause, the academic retorted “Well if that is the case, you should go somewhere quiet to do so”. I paused for a moment, distracted by the sound of a pin dropping, before apologising again and slinking out, tail between my legs.

Halfway to my office, I somehow concluded that this was a person I could reason with. I walked back and knocked on the professor’s door. A moment later, I was met with a face that evoked a feeling of coldness I had not experienced before in my life. With it being too late to back out, I apologised again then tried to explain that I was meditating to cope with my anxiety. The professor simply repeated that what I was doing was incredibly unprofessional, highly inappropriate and I should go and meditate somewhere else that was quieter.

In the office next door to the chemistry professors’, there was a physics academic I knew quite well. I travelled the enormous distance of about four feet in tears and told them what had happened. The academic explained to me that the space I was meditating in was part of that chemistry professor’s “territory”. “This again?!?” I thought in quiet exasperation. The physics academic continued, saying that while they would try to talk to them, the political power of the professor within the university meant that I had likely lost my new meditation spot. Before giving me a hug, the academic vowed they would help me find a new one.

Which is exactly what the physics academic did. I pointed out a space in the common area on the third floor of the department. My supervisor’s office was nearby, meaning I could lay claim to the unused territory. Using their sway with the manager in purchasing, the physics academic bought a new bench and placed it in the spot I previously indicated. The academic told me that while this technically was a bench in a public area, I had priority use of it. So, if anyone happened to be sitting there, I could ask them to move. If there was a problem, I was to refer them to the physics academic. For the remainder of my PhD, I used that spot to meditate in the times I needed it most. It turned out I never had to ask anyone to move. That spot was just too dang quiet.

The final skill I learned, perspective shifting, helped me to move on from my conflict with the chemistry professor. Knowing I would still see them around the department, I used perspective shifting to imagine our confrontation from their side instead of mine. The goal was to achieve some kind of empathetic view, regardless of whether it was true. I came to the conclusion that a person who goes out of their way to pick on a random PhD student lying on a bench is not exhibiting normal behaviour. I questioned the emotional security of the professor. Why were my actions and my medical condition such an affront to their way of being? I started to pity them. I found it likely that they struggled to understand why other people did not act in the same way they did. I tried imagining myself in the position of someone with a serious lack of empathy. I could easily see myself chastising most people around me. After coming to these conclusions, I hardly thought about the professor again. My anger subsided. I moved on with my life.

Perspective shifting is the act of reserving judgement on an observation until a conclusive view from the opposite side of the judgement is found. I suppose it can be summed up as “how could the person do what they did and still think themselves as the ‘good guy’”. A more advanced version of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Although, it can be on anything really: TV shows, fashion, or, dare I say, even Marmite. As a basic example, it would be very easy for me to categorise the contestants on the show “Love Island” as completely superficial human beings. However, despite being two broken strands of elastic from fully nude, I realised they were treating each other as if they were fully clothed and dating for the first time. They were forming complex relationships. It was odd, to say the least.

My ability to shift my perspective kind of emerged after a lot of counselling sessions. My therapist would often offer an alternative perspective when we were discussing past emotional conflicts. After a while, I started to learn how to do this of my own accord as emotional conflicts arose in my life.

To clarify, when I write “emotional conflict” I rarely mean an argument or shouting match. In my view, an emotional conflict is any situation where at least one person feels emotionally hurt, misunderstood or confused in an interaction between two or more people. Both parties might feel contrasting emotions/views on a topic, or one person might deliberately be acting maliciously towards another, etc.

In an emotional conflict, the first thing I do is try to calm the heck down. It is a lot harder than it seems. In the age of TikTok and Twitter X, most of us seem to act immediately after any given emotional stimulus. This, I find, usually inflames emotional conflicts instead of resolving them. Sometimes I use meditation to help calm me down, but it can also make things worse as the anger/frustration/exasperation is then free to roam around my mind. The only reliable and effective solution I’ve found is physical distance from the conflict, and time (usually minutes, sometimes days).

Once I have calmed down, I try to get clear in my head what my actual views are. I find it useful to try and remember how and when the emotion came up. Was there a specific thing a person said, or just a general haze of emotion for the entire conflict? I have found the true reason I am feeling the emotion is rarely the first one that pops into my head. Here, the point is not necessarily to be correct, just to have some specific viewpoint that can be challenged instead of simply “I hate them” or “what they said was [input accusatory adjective or expletive here], they are wrong”.

Next, I start thinking about what the other person’s views might be, which again, is initially not obvious. I usually think of anything they went through recently or whether their interaction with me seemed out of character. The purpose of this exercise is to come up with an opening question that would likely lead to a non-threatening conversation. For instance, “when you said ‘x’ to me, were you trying to say ‘y’?” In our conversation, rather than give my view, I would listen and ask leading questions until I thought I understood their side of the story. Then, as a general rule, I would ask at least three more questions until I actually understood their view. Most of the time, I didn’t even have to give my side of the story; all the stress just melted away.

With more complex problems, I give my view so both of us can understand each other’s viewpoints. Most of the time, the conflict remains unresolved, but as long as both parties understand each other’s emotional state, there usually isn’t anything left to be stressed about. If I manage to communicate well enough, the other person may not even realise we were in a conflict.

I used to have the opinion that the aim in any emotional conflict with another person was to feel good. I wanted the other person to understand only my side of the story so that I could feel happy. Now, I believe that resolution for both parties is the ultimate goal, regardless of how it might make me feel. After The Event I rarely ever felt good after resolving an emotional conflict. In fact, I would mostly feel terrible, sometimes making the other person feel terrible too (e.g. break-ups). I would persistently put myself into vulnerable situations in order try to understand the other person’s perspective. It meant I could find resolution quickly, allowing me to move on with my life.

In the years leading up to The Event, small stressors I was oblivious to would add up over time. If I was annoyed with my supervisor or a colleague, I would hold on to that emotion for days, sometimes weeks. I was storing up righteous anger, as though it would make me feel better. The emotion related to the occurrence that originally annoyed me would keep popping up again and again, actually making me feel worse. Given the same situations after The Event, I still felt annoyed with the colleague or my supervisor, but by using perspective shifting, I was able to process it quickly and by the time I saw them next, it was gone.

Towards the end of my PhD, I began to notice in others the same little stressors adding up throughout the day. Some of my colleagues were stressed even before they arrived at the office. I noticed others venting regularly and repeatedly along similar themes. They would sometimes bring up specific events months, sometimes years after it happened. For instance, when I first talked to a new housemate about his ex-girlfriend, his manner and intensity gave me the impression that they had broken up the day before. In fact, they had broken up three years earlier.

When I started to tire while writing my thesis, shifting my perspective helped to utilise all the energy I had available. One bitterly cold day in winter, perhaps the coldest of the year, sticks in my memory. The combination of the UK’s lack of cold weather infrastructure and my lack of cold weather footwear meant my early morning trek to the health food shop was unusually treacherous.

I arrived gratefully into the warmth of the store. I got what I needed and walked to the counter. There was no one there. In fact, there was no one else in the store at all. “crud” I thought “how am I going to pay for this stuff?” The rapid deterioration of my IQ was interrupted by a warmly dressed clerk walking through the front doors of the self-opening store. They seemed to adopt the “Frankenstein Russian doll” strategy to counteract the freezing weather. Chucking on anything that had the quality of warmth. During the laborious process of stripping off the apparel, the cashier began to tell me about their day. In a strangely animated tone, the cashier listed the morning’s trials: the heating came on very late, the kettle broke, meaning the regular morning brew was off the table, and the freezing walk into work was miserable. The clerk told me they felt sorry for themselves and just wanted to go back to bed and skip work. This feeling lasted right up until they passed a homeless person bundled up in multiple sleeping bags at the side of the road. The cashier told me in that moment they thought “Gosh, some people have it so much worse than me, at least I am not in that position”. The clerk finished by telling me that seeing the homeless person put things in perspective and helped them to feel a lot better.

In that moment, my first thought was “No! That isn’t a useful perspective!” What if the clerk had got up that day and the little things they had experienced didn’t bring them down? What if the clerk didn’t get up feeling low and sorry for themselves? They would have had more energy. Perhaps they would see the homeless person and instead of thinking “I guess my life is not so bad” they would be thinking “I want to help that homeless person and others like them”. Without all the little things adding up and bringing the clerk down, there would have been the emotional space to be empathetic. In my experience, once the small emotional conflicts have been dealt with, the natural emotion that comes forward is empathy. Even when mentally ill.

Emotions have the greatest influence on the way we live our lives and yet most of us spend absolutely no time thinking about them. Instead, there are an endless number of motivational articles proposing specific mindsets or quick fixes that drastically oversimplify and overgeneralise the unique complexity of individuals. Without awareness of how your emotions affect the way you think and behave, it is unlikely any plan of self-improvement will ever work. I actually loathe anything mentioning “self-help”. We became the dominant species on this planet through social cooperation; why do we think doing things in isolation will ever work? Without the help of my therapists, family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, I would not have been able to even resume the PhD. Never mind complete it.

And yet there I was, finished PhD thesis in hand. I remember standing in front of a display along the main hallway of the physics department. It showed the pictures of all the physics PhD students sorted by the year of intake. My face was in amongst the fourth-year students. “I shouldn’t be here” I remember thinking, “I should be in a mental hospital… or dead… how am I here?” It didn’t seem real to me. It didn’t seem possible, despite the fact I had just done it.

It would not be long before I fully understood the extent of my achievements.

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