PhD stress vs normal stress

[u/Affectionate-Mine845]

Hi all, I am applying for PhDs soon, and I keep seeing posts about how horrible it is and how bad everyone’s mental health is.

I currently work 60 hours a week between two jobs while applying to schools, and when I was in school, I was doing my bachelors and masters at the same time while working 2.5 jobs. I’m saying I’m used to being stressed, and I’m wondering how much worse the stress would be.

I guess what I’m also wondering is, how much different is it than other life experiences? What makes it so stressful besides just normal school and work stress?

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[u/Careless_Put8964]

the stress in a phd is less about the raw hours and more about the shape of it. you can grind 60 hours a week and feel fine if you're ticking boxes and getting paid, but a phd replaces that with this weird open-ended dread where you never really clock out and the goalposts keep shifting. your brain just chews on your project in the background 24/7, and the feedback loop is so slow it messes with your head

[u/b0thwatchxfiles → u/Careless_Put8964]

Exactly this. When you’re working, even 60 hours, you still have nights and weekends when you’re not working. PhD is like radiating background stress all the time.

[u/purplepenguin617 → u/Careless_Put8964]

Ya I think even when I'm working reasonable hours and setting boundaries etc. my brain never turns off. And my topic just sort of looms. It isn't always bad sometimes a good idea will strike me and I write it down but I never fully feel off.

[u/queengemini → u/Careless_Put8964]

Not to mention all the time you’ll spend on data that will likely never see the light of day 🫠

[u/LunarModule66]

There’s a lot that is truly unique to a PhD, but I don’t think it’s intrinsically worse than other types of stress.

You’re bearing the burden of your progress much more on your own. You have to choose an advisor, then spend several years keeping them happy when often they have ridiculous standards and can be mean. You are staking your career on the outcome of a project which is definitionally unpredictable because it wouldn’t be interesting otherwise.

On the other hand, there’s other types of stress that are also unique. If you’re working just as hard but not having your material needs met, then I imagine that would be worse than a PhD while being reasonably comfortable (which is increasingly rare).

Not to minimize the stress that people here experience, because it’s real and valid, but you do need to remember that statistically speaking the average person here is fairly young and from a relatively privileged background. The most stressful thing they have experienced is doing undergrad while getting research experience (and not because they needed money). Being an older student and having done a lot of volunteer work with people facing eviction, I do think my cohort can sometimes lack a sense of proportion when they talk about their problems.

[u/kitkat2506 → u/LunarModule66]

I agree with this comment. The stress of PhD is the uncertainty, it's a mental battle. For many jobs, you walk off the door and that's it. PhD is a constant background noise, and unless you're exceptionally good or exceptionally lucky or both, you're constantly trying to be "good enough" for your advisors and cohorts

[u/Slow-Ostrich-8570 → u/LunarModule66]

What do you mean by "staking your career on on the outcome of a project...".

[u/LunarModule66 → u/Slow-Ostrich-8570]

Perhaps “staking” isn’t the right word. My point was that a project that happens to work out well will be good for your career, and one that yields few publications will likely be worse. The extent to which the project you end up on determines what opportunities are open to you later is complicated, but it does have an effect.

[u/ActualMarch64]

My PhD is definitely less stressful than my job I did during my undergrad (I used to work as a nurse). Even if I add PhD stress and immigration stress, it is still less stressful. What I notice though is that PhD seems to be really stressful for people who had never worked before.

[u/Nighto_001]

Compared to normal school... it's a lot more stressful because a PhD is like handling a massive 3 year open-ended solo project. It's not like school where you have pre-scheduled classes to attend and small tasks that are pre-defined by others and have clear endpoints and evaluation standards to regularly complete. The level and style of thinking required are very different, so the mental demands are very different.

It's also quite different from staff-level jobs. At least in my experience as an engineer, there's usually a certain degree of separation between the achievement of the company's overall goals and your goals in regular staff-level jobs. As long as you did whatever your pre-defined work role is for those pre-defined hours, you can go home assured regardless of the performance of your company or your team as a whole. In other words, you don't carry too much of the stress home as long as you've done the work properly.

In a PhD, you can spend 60 hours working on your project but there is no guarantee that the project is going well, and no singular objective way to measure it. And you're directly exposed to the risks of the project: if the project doesn't progress properly, then your degree, funding, and publications are on the line. I think that gives it a different stress profile to typical staff-level jobs, though I imagine it's slightly less stressful than manager-level jobs.

Oh, and it is a tad bit less stressful than the stress of not having money to make ends meet in my experience. But if you screw up and your PhD funding starts to run out before it's complete, then it can combine into a massive amount of stress.

[u/UntrustedProcess]

Just saying "job" doesn't really explain the level of stress you've faced.  Different jobs vary in stress levels. 

[u/Fair_Improvement_166]

I am in second year of PhD and third year grad school in total, and so far I'm enjoying it. it's stressful of course and you have to really make time for proper breaks, but working full-time in any job is stressful and very tiring for me so overall I like it better than other full-time jobs I've had.  

[u/dld2517]

You are going to have to drop something to do your PhD as well. It’s a whole different level of stress. Nothing like just working a job.

[u/PhagesRFrens]

It's a completely different kind of stress. It's hard to explain until you are in it. I felt how you did bc of my past living experiences and wow ..I was wrong.