Collaboration and the PhD experience (Part 1 ):

Positioning your self-care

This blog post is going to be a part of a mini series focusing on collaboration and the PhD experience drawing on excerpts from a book that I wrote with my dear colleague, Janet Salmons, last year called Reframing and Rethinking Collaboration in Higher Education and Beyond. My intention is to set up a mini series of excerpts from the book where I link into wellbeing and self-care where a bit of theory is shared and an activity is made available for you. Some elements of the posts will be direct excerpts and samples from the book and other parts I’ll curate for you.

Taking care of yourself as a PhD student

Self-care is anything you can do to help your physical, mental or emotional health - it’s about our capacity to choose behaviours that allows you to balance stressors (Richards, Sheen & Mazzer, 2014). Self-care is a proactive action that focuses on step to develop, protect, maintain and improve health, wellbeing or wellness (Self Care Forum, 2019). There are a variety of, and indeed combination of approaches and strategies you can engage with to help you with this. Discussions around self-care have become more prevalent in recent times as many of us are feeling pressure in life; in that we are always connected, juggling multiple demands, feeling time poor, managing multiple roles across different areas of our lives, and feeling the load of assumptions and expectations that we put on our self personally and professionally.

It is important to remind ourselves of the act of self-care. Self-care allows us to be and become our best for ourselves and our collaborative partners. Taking care of ourselves is part of being responsible to others.

Undertaking a PhD is a lengthy process. Taking care of yourself is an imperative to last the distance. Your PhD study is a long process with many key milestones that are exciting as much as mentally, emotionally and physically draining). And we acknowledge that “self-care has been somewhat neglected in higher education institutions” (Walton, Aquino, Talbot & Melia, 2019, p. 123).

At the core of self-care is an awareness that placing self first in terms of caring for yourself mentally, emotionally and physically is not selfish. It is important to do, as if you do not look after your own wellbeing, you will find that you are not able to sufficiently care for others or even your work. Looking after yourself does not mean ignoring others, rather it should embrace connection with others (Neff, 2011). It is not a dirty word, rather it is a way to focus on how you can look after yourself in order to be the best version of you. Tuning into what you need and asking the question of ‘what do I need right now?’ is a great starting point to explore your self-care needs. This approach is not selfish, rather it allows you to position yourself in a way that means you are being true to you.

The Five Ways to Wellbeing designed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF, 2010) reminds us that we need to be well rounded in order to support our wellbeing. They note the five areas of:

Connect
Be active
Take notice
Give
Keep learning

This framework provides you with a great way to consider self-care from a mindful perspective, especially drawing on awareness and curiosity. Under each of these areas we invite you to think about how you show your self-care, and to take time to map this in the table below. We recommend that you do this often to remind yourself of the importance to be well rounded in your wellbeing, especially at pressure points associated to being a doctoral student.

Try this mapping your routine activity across the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework as a way to think your self-care across diverse areas. List your self-care routines, strategies or practices.

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In your mapping what do you notice? Are there moments that show good patterns of behaviour? Or perhaps there are some gaps?

In considering your self-care routines holistically in this way, moving forward will require you to engage with those practices and behaviours that support you, while also recognising you have some gaps that may impede you or may benefit from some extra attention (especially when you are feeling under pressure). Walton et al. (2019) offer some advice for thinking about application of self-care, and we have pulled together some of their best top tips including:

Celebrate milestones by engaging in some well-deserved self-care – you’ve earned it! (p. 47)
Schedule in time for self-care activities into your daily/weekly routine (p. 68)
Think 3 Ps: Planning; Prioritising; and Playing and how these fit into one day (p. 118)
Consider planning in self-care days, just as you would for medical and other health appointments (p. 118)
Accept setbacks as part of the journey (p. 125)
Don’t be afraid to ask for help (p. 125)
Learn to be patient (p. 126)
Build a work and non-work network (p. 126)
Do not compare yourself with others (p. 126)
Know what makes you happy (p. 126)
Sleep well (p. 126)
Exercise and eat well (p. 126)
The importance of weekends (p. 126)
Take a break and travel (p. 126)

So, as you position your self-care as worthy of your attention during your PhD, how can your collaboration with your supervisor support you? What might this look like? And who else would be on your team of support?

References:

Neff, K. (2011). Self-compassion: stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind. London: HarperCollins.

Richards, K., Sheen, E. & Mazzer, M. C. (2014). Self-care and you: Caring for the caregiver. SilverSpring, MD: American Nurses Association.

Self-Care Forum. (2019). Self-Care Forum: Home. Retrieved July 27, 2019, from http://www.selfcareforum.org/

Walton, H., Aquino, M. R. J., Talbot, C. V., & Melia, C. (2019). A Guide for Psychology Postgraduates: Surviving Postgraduate Study (second edition). London: The British Psychological Society.

Photo by Emily Rudolph on Unsplash

In Part 2 of this Collaboration and the PhD experience Series I’ll connect with the concept of job crafting to help you to connect to your why.

This is an excerpt from the book Reframing and Rethinking Collaboration in Higher Education and Beyond and you can find out more from the publisher here.

Collaboration and the PhD experience (Part 1 ): Positioning your self-care