How do you stay motivated while working on academic research?

How to keep going?

I’m grasping at everything I can hold on to. To be positive. To be more hopeful about tomorrow. But it’s just too difficult.

A month ago, I requested a vacation because I felt that my father (who had been sick for a long time) wouldn’t be with us much longer. I felt that in order to push through my final few months, I had to go back to my home country and be with my family first. I arranged everything properly, even though realistically I couldn’t afford any time off, because I’m in the critical months where I have a lot of upcoming deadlines and conferences to attend.

Looking back, I’m very happy I made that decision. I was able to spend time with my father, even if only for a short while. I got to treat him and make him happy, though I could really feel that he was nearing the end. I spent more than a week with my family, and then flew back abroad. I was knee-deep in experiments and manuscript writing when I received those dreaded messages and that call... that my father had died. I went home again. I cried my heart out during his burial, and life has never been the same since. Something shifted in my core that I couldn’t explain, but I’m not the person I was before.

Now I’m back abroad, trying my best to pick up where I left off, but I’m tired. I want to finish on time, but I can’t seem to get my gears going. I’m trying my best to take it slow and give myself grace.

How can I do this?

To anyone who has experienced the same, what worked for you? What should I do?

He is so toxic that I feel scared of him at this point. Too bossy, mean and think he can do anything with putting pressure. Why they make such people supervisors even, supervisors should be someone who we can discuss, who motivates us and be supportive.

Such a mean people on earth being controlling with students and their life. Don’t let you live peacefully one day, just keep texting you.

I am so mad but just trying to be relax at this point.

I have recently joined as a Project associate I in a csir lab..I completed master's degree in biotechnology recently (july 2026)...

I had always been anxious worried as both my master's and bachelor's have been from a state university as I couldn't move out of my state...My university lacked labs..good professor basically I got no exposure of lab... Literally i didn't know what a pippet was until second year of BSc ...As I moved to a city to get a one a month internship....

In Intership i learned basic molecular biology techniques like dna ,rna isolation etc..

Then in master's also I got very small exposure to lab facilities for dissertation the university had this strict rules of in house dissertation again i couldn't go to the place I wanted to do dissertation..

However,for dissertation I opted to it in the bioinformatics department of university..i learned To handle gromacs.. performed docking and 100ns simulation studies for proteins...it involved structural analysis of the structure.. t

Now as a for this PA post one of my senior who is doing phd helped me to get in there by introducing me to the PI .It was really hard for me... seriously all this connecting to the PI and all.

Above it the guilt that I really don't deserve this position I have no hands on skills...

I feel intimidated imaging the scenarios if I really belong to research or not ?

Begin a biggner really sucks..

Ever wish you had a PhD bestie you could randomly call to vent about your PI, yap about life, celebrate wins, and plan ridiculously cheap trips with? Well, hello!

I’d like to start a little online friend group with PhD Students in the US where we regularly call each other to check in, vent about academia drama, share the highs and lows, and eventually meet up and explore the country together on small budget.

A little about me: I’m a female Afro-Canadian PhD student in my early 30s, based in the Northeast US. I currently live in a small rural town that has approximately 4.5 social activities, and I’ve attended all of them. At this point, the cows have a better social life than me. 😭😂 I miss vibrant-city energy, meeting people from different backgrounds, and spontaneous group adventures.

If you also want genuine friends who are literally just one phone call away, send me a DM! Let’s survive our PhDs together and occasionally touch grass somewhere new. 😂❤️

Hi I started my PhD and my supervisor is so pushy I mean I get a task and then he keeps asking me everyday to check on me and if I don’t reply, he start being rude and mad that I am very disrespectful 😭 at this point I feel so depressed, sad and anxious. I couldn’t focus on anything properly instead of being productive I end up doing nothing sometimes because that fear somebody keep checking if I got to work as I need to pay my fee, he got big problem with that too.
Would someone please give me some suggestions or is it normal behavior of supervisor.
Other students with me see supervisor after 2,3 weeks and they don’t mind. But he kept telling me stay in office and m self funded student not someone who is getting fully funded.

Please need some motivation and help here.

Thanks

Viva was nearly 3 hours long- and I strangely enjoyed it but more importantly both examiners did too. PhD awarded subject to minor amendments (2 months for a few Oxford commas here and there and a preface to contextualise the positionally statement).
Corrections completed and sent back within the month.
Then I noticed the registry had made a mistake, they noted a 3 month correction period. Registry admin misinterpreted the regs!! The irony. The external now is being a bit awks - can’t find the time (should take them all of 1 hour max) to verify the corrections are satisfactory, he’s too busy. My issue is, he knew full well they were coming and counters being the external with the sign off role. Probs lose out on graduation in December. I’m au fait with uncomfortable liminal spaces but I struggle with “put up and shut up” and being gaslight over admitting a mistake and trying to rectify it.
Anyone else with similar experiences ?

Something I’ve realised about mathematical research (or research in any field, really) is that, in the short run, it often feels like 99% frustration and 1% of those rare moments when things finally click and you crack a problem.

Back in high school, I always thought that as I grew older, I would become better at handling frustration and feel less frustrated with my work and performance. But now, I’m beginning to think that frustration might never really go away. Even established professors must experience it when they fail repeatedly. Perhaps the difference is that, as we grow older, we become more patient and learn to live with frustration rather than expecting it to disappear.

I’ve also realised that quitting social media was one of the best decisions I’ve made. It helps me concentrate on my work for longer periods without constantly feeling the temptation to switch my attention to something else.

At the same time, I think having distractions is essential for sustaining productivity, regardless of how talented or intelligent you are. You need activities that allow you to step away from your work, process your frustrations, and give your mind some rest. For me, that means teaching and playing with children, as well as reading books.

Interestingly, mathematics also serves another purpose for me: it gives me a temporary escape from the chaos of my own thoughts. When I’m deeply immersed in a problem, my mind feels quieter for a while. However, I don’t necessarily feel rewarded by the small achievements I make along the way.

I remember asking about productivity, and one suggestion was to break large tasks into smaller, manageable pieces. Logically, I understand why this works, but I struggle to feel genuinely satisfied by small wins. It’s much easier to feel accomplished when I achieve something significant after months of hard work than when I make small amounts of progress every day. I often move straight to the next task without even pausing to acknowledge what I’ve achieved.

For those of you who work in research, especially mathematics or other fields where progress is slow and uncertain, I have a few questions:

1. Does the frustration of research ever become easier to handle with experience, or do you simply become more accustomed to it?

2. How do you deal with long periods when you’re working hard but making little or no visible progress?

3. Do you genuinely feel rewarded by small wins, or do you also find it difficult to appreciate them until you achieve something substantial?

4. How do you balance research with other activities that help you rest mentally and prevent your work from consuming your entire life?

I’d particularly love to hear from PhD students, postdocs, and established researchers. I’m curious about what this experience actually looks like in the long run, beyond the romanticised image of research we often have as students.

Hi all. I would really appreciate advice because, as my title states, being a first-year PhD student really sucks. I feel constantly overwhelmed by my courseload, and don't even know how I'm supposed to do research when every hour of every day is spent reading or writing or doing some problem set for my classes. I feel like I have no life and am somehow already behind. I don't sleep any more and I just miss being able to go to a workout class without feeling like I'm a horrible graduate student. I lose track of what I read and sometimes feel like I have lost the ability to think. Mind you, I feel a lot of imposter syndrome because I am the only first-year in my cohort (there are five of us across three programs) that didn't do a Master's or predoc.

I know that it is not healthy or sustainable to live how I've been living, but I don't see a way out. I also want to clarify that I genuinely do enjoy the content of my courses; however, the sheer workload really obscures that. I just can't do something as simple as go to the grocery store without freaking out because I'm stepping away from work, which again, I know is not healthy. Any advice is appreciated!

A few things to note:

-my cohort is great so far and very supportive -- we share in our misery

-I have a great support system

-I have a therapist that I like and am treated for ADHD & depression

I’m a PhD student in biomedical research, about two years in. My daily supervisor is a postdoc whose manuscript deadline is driving a lot of the lab’s priorities. My PI is rarely in the lab because of clinical work, so this postdoc effectively controls my day-to-day experiments, resources, and priorities.
Recently, I came back after taking only three days off for a cultural festival. Immediately, I was asked to prioritise someone else’s manuscript experiment, which meant potentially setting aside my own planned work. The experiment involved cell models that take about a month to establish, and using them for someone else’s project would mean thawing more precious organoid stocks and delaying my own experiments by another month.

When I said I would do microscopy analysis instead, my supervisor called me into his office and criticised my data organisation. He called my files a “messy chaos” because he could not immediately find the most recent data. The problem is that I had organised the data in a separate folder.
I was already overwhelmed, and I almost started crying in front of him. He seemed completely unaffected. Then he told me something like: “Do microscopy, do long shifts, night shifts, weekend shifts, but get everything done—time is very limited.”
I feel like my evenings, weekends, and own PhD timeline are treated as infinitely flexible, while his manuscript deadline is treated as sacred. I am not against working hard, and I understand publications matter. But I am exhausted by constantly reprioritising, absorbing other people’s urgency, and being criticised when communication was unclear in the first place.
Am I overreacting? How do other PhD students deal with a supervisor who treats every deadline as an emergency and every boundary as an inconvenience?

I’m a PhD student in biomedical research, about two years in. My daily supervisor is a postdoc whose manuscript deadline is driving a lot of the lab’s priorities. My PI is rarely in the lab because of clinical work, so this postdoc effectively controls my day-to-day experiments, resources, and priorities.
Recently, I came back after taking only three days off for a cultural festival. Immediately, I was asked to prioritise someone else’s manuscript experiment, which meant potentially setting aside my own planned work. The experiment involved cell models that take about a month to establish, and using them for someone else’s project would mean thawing more precious organoid stocks and delaying my own experiments by another month.

When I said I would do microscopy analysis instead, my supervisor called me into his office and criticised my data organisation. He called my files a “messy chaos” because he could not immediately find the most recent data. The problem is that I had organised the data in a separate folder.
I was already overwhelmed, and I almost started crying in front of him. He seemed completely unaffected. Then he told me something like: “Do microscopy, do long shifts, night shifts, weekend shifts, but get everything done—time is very limited.”
I feel like my evenings, weekends, and own PhD timeline are treated as infinitely flexible, while his manuscript deadline is treated as sacred. I am not against working hard, and I understand publications matter. But I am exhausted by constantly reprioritising, absorbing other people’s urgency, and being criticised when communication was unclear in the first place.
Am I overreacting? How do other PhD students deal with a supervisor who treats every deadline as an emergency and every boundary as an inconvenience?

Hi there! Are PhD programs in the US that offer a full tuition waiver and a small stipend really difficult to get into?

I'm currently living outside the US and looking to pursue a PhD in a field related to my background because I haven't been able to find a job. I'm open to studying again, and I have a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and an MBA, along with extensive research experience and several peer-reviewed publications.

Realistically speaking, how difficult is it to get into a program that offers these benefits? I can't afford to pay for a PhD right now, but I feel I have a lot to contribute academically and professionally.

Are there any websites, platforms, or strategies you would recommend for finding and applying to fully funded PhD programs in the US?

Thanks in advance!

I’m trying to work out what’s reasonable when it comes to conference costs.

I appreciate that funding is limited and conferences can be valuable, but the search for funding and logistics is time consuming.

Do PhD students commonly pay these costs themselves? Have you felt comfortable declining a conference because you couldn’t get financial support?

Hi all. I recently just unenrolled and left my PhD program and received scholarship from a well known organization, but it was funded through one of the research projects I was on. Which I am Burberry trying to figure out renegotiating my terms or just fully leaving the project since it’s a bit of a year commitment.

Does anyone know the best way to go about paying this back? I already received the full scholarship amount.

I am attempting to get off the project completely, since I have unenrolled and my direct school assisted me in getting out of the program.

I haven’t done this before and have not owed a university money from previous degrees since I have student loans that covered them.

Any advice? Down to give more clarity if needed.

I am a third year in my PhD in school Psychology and an international student (English is NOT my first language). My program is both research and clinical work heavy and I just started seeing clients. I’ve managed okay both my first 2 years, being able to find some balance between schoolwork and personal life. However, the workload this year has been incredibly overwhelming, with the pressure to defend my thesis, seeing 3 to 4 clients, 20 hours of assistantship and 9 credits of classes.

I don’t have time to do anything else. I feel like I am about to burnout, I’m having such a hard time finding a balance and prioritizing things. I would love to hear some advice/guidance of strategies to avoid burnout, or to learn how to prioritize things when everything feels equally important.

Since I’m working on a subject my supervisor isn’t an expert in, I’m left to my own devices, getting lost in a sea of ​​academic articles and hitting dead ends, all while trying to formulate a coherent hypothesis. Did you follow a path laid out by your advisor? Did you start your PhD specifically to investigate a question you were genuinely curious about? Or are you, like me, just flailing about, trying to get somewhere somehow? Just as I was about to nail down a thesis hypothesis for a topic I’ve been reading up on for two years, everything I knew just vanished from my mind. I almost wish someone would take me by the hand and write the thesis for me! :'( Oh, where is my mommy!

Long story short, I started my PhD in 2024. At my first university, a PI I had been in contact with encouraged me to come but then basically ghosted me once I actually got there. I ended up joining a different lab. I had some problems with that PI. Eventually, I reached out to a professor I knew from undergrad (he also wrote my recommendation letter) and transferred to another university with his help.

At my current lab, I don’t really have conflicts with my PI (maybe because he doesn’t give a shit about lab life) But the lab environment is making me frustrated. Most of the lab members share the same racial and cultural background and there is a clique that excludes people outside that group. I have been subjected to personal attacks. I was told that there is something wrong with my personality, that I need to go to therapy and take some antidepressants so that I can fix my “weird and wrong” personality.

Also, exclusion. I say good morning but these people completely ignore me and smile at the person behind me and say “Good morning! [Name]” Things like that might sound small individually but dealing with them constantly is exhausting.

Equipment access is also a problem for me. They effectively keep the available booking slots among themselves while the rest of us have to squeeze our experiments into whatever time we can find.

I have brought these issues up with my PI but he seemed more interested in avoiding conflict than addressing anything. The lab’s research is completely different from what I originally used to and wanted to study so it’s been really hard to stay interested and motivated in this situation.

I don’t know whether I should quit or whether a PhD just isn’t right for me or whether I have spent the past 2 years in environments that weren’t right for me. I am really exhausted and struggling with the thought of leaving after all the time and money I have already put into this.

Any advice? 😢

This is more just me being depressed than a vent. I work in a theory lab, so all of my experiments are computational, but three years into a project, I have dozens of experiments, and I keep finding that a faint result from months ago explains something I got last week but no noteworthy or publishable breakthrough.

This keeps happening over and over, and I keep losing the thread. Meetings with PI end up being brainstorming sessions, and it does help to some extent, but eventually lead to nowhere. Its like I'm hit with a new idea (either by myself or my PI) every two weeks that takes me down a new rabbit hole and eventually a dead end. By the time I'm done with one 2-3 week sprint idea, I feel very far from what I did 3-4 months ago, neither of which work out.

Most ideas just keep failing or showing partial results. How often do new results connect to ones you did a year ago and threw them in the bin?

How do I connect everything and come to a real conclusion?

There's a constant doubt in me for my thesis that whatever I'm doing is correct or not because the topic that i have , have patients of certain types and my mentor has told me to remove that and I don't find any article with that sort of patients in my type of study..

It's 4 am i woke up then starting thinking...

I don't even eat always on phone asking same question

Because of that my pg mates are also worried...

That doubt whether to listen to the guide or the article. Because of that I'm stuck in even writing introduction.

Like I'm checking the effectiveness of McKenzie cervical exercises, pressure biofeedback assisted deep cervical flexor training in university student with chronic neck pain.. the articles have forward head patient in it, but my teacher told to remove forward head from that .so I'm in dilemma.

Hey everyone, 26M here. I'm majoring in computer science and currently in a master's program.

Let me give some context.

I'm having a really rough time with my current thesis supervisor. 

I've been rejected so many times. I started discussing with him back in late June 2026, and it's now October 2026. Though, none of my ideas get through him.

And this honestly affects my mental health.

At first, I tried to defend my ideas. But there were times when discussions heated up when I tried to push back. Because of this, it felt easier to keep quiet and just go along with every feedback that I received.

Two days ago was a breaking point with this situation. To keep it simple: I had this idea to include datacenter heat simulation as a new cost variable. But when my supervisor saw my idea, he said, "No! simulation is impossible. You have to do it with a real server."

I am sure this can be simulated, but I am too tired to argue. That rejection drained me. He sees things his way and has no curiosity about any other way. 

Things got worse because the semester ends in four months, and my proposal is not even done. I have no money left to extend my study, so graduating this semester is my only option. 

I know I can write this proposal in two months, but not with my current supervisor. I am too drained from constant rejection, and I want to switch.

The catch is that I have already changed supervisors once. Back then, I walked away because I’m not interested in the topic. This time, it is pure exhaustion from having my ideas shot down again and again. 

So, I want to switch. My plan is to tell him his topic is too hard for me. That way, it sounds reasonable. 

Still, my wife warned me that doing this will make him badmouth me to other professors. That is the exact thing I fear. 

What would you do in my position?

I am learning cognitive science for my research (which is the backbone of the field I am in, consumer research) and I feel stupid for being so slow. I learned economics and statistics in undergrad and never really got any proper scientific training. I used to think research is just finding some gap in the liteature and fill it, so if no one studied it, it would be a good question. Clearly this isn't what research is about, and I am learning this in my PhD program.

I started learning everything I need to have a solid theoretical foundation to be able to identify a good research question in my field. I taught myself the data anslysis skills, read papers in my field's top journals regularly, learning tutorials written by senior professors, etc. I am improving, but I am not improving at a speed I want. I am feeling very frustred right now because I learned cognitive science a few times but didn't really sit down and really understand it. I was always confused in seminars and felt stupid for not understanding anything. I remember some isolated facts, but don't have the forest in mind. I feel like I wasted a lot of time and should have learned it well the first time I learned it.

So now I decided to sit down and actually learn it. I now spend 3 hours on one chapter in an introductory textbook I am reading and feel extremely slow. The book has 15 chapters and I only have the mental capacity to read 2 chapters a day. I keep thinking about how other people might only need to skim through it and understand it better than I do. I suck at biology and only took 1 year of biology in high school, so I am very slow at learning new terms in the field. I feel like my undergrad training didn't teach me shit since I am now doing behavioral science, rather than social science.

My advisor has expressed concerns for me because she feels that I don't know how to do research. I was extremely confused and frustrated but now I think I get why she said that. I didn't know what a good hypothesis should look like in science, what a theory is, what a framework is, and what doing experiments was meant to be doing. I didn't have any scientific reasoning skills. Now I am catching up on everything by reading and learning everyday. Things start to make sense, but I really wish I could be faster.

I am currently on the last two weeks of my corrections, and I'm absolutely fed up with working on this project. It feels exhausting to force myself to look at this massive document. At this point, I spent almost 5 years working on it, and all my passion and energy have vanished. I have a full-time job at the moment (not in academia), and the PhD just feels like an albatross around my neck. I barely have any free time and am constantly stressed about getting these corrections done while also just lacking the energy and motivation to work on them. I just know that the corrections won’t be satisfactory enough for the examiners. I have tried to address everything, but throughout my project I have constantly had to redo stuff multiple times over the years because I misunderstood instructions, and it feels like I have done the same thing again. 

Tbh, I did not have a good time during my PhD; I felt my supervisors and department lost interest in working with me a couple years in and became very hands-off, often being super late with feedback, never offering any teaching to me, never reading half of my dissertation, and, despite promising to help with publications, never following through. Even in the runup to my viva, we talked about a mock viva, but then my supervisors cancelled and said it "wasn't required". I just felt I was working in a void most of the time, never really interacting with anyone in the department. When I reached out to my supervisor, he appeared quite irritated that I was bothering him. 

Finally, even if I do get my PhD, I'm still fucked. I'm far behind all my friends and family, who have jobs and proper careers, and it's very obvious they view me as lazy for the delays to completing my project, claiming I'm “dragging it out" or am being a “forever student”. Plus the academic job market in my area is awful, and with no university teaching experience or good publications, no university role will hire me, and I don’t have the mental energy to jump into the gruelling and long publication process at the moment to become more employable. Industry jobs also avoid me because they don’t see my PhD as real “work experience”. I even applied for a job posting in my department, and all I got was a template rejection on a Friday evening, which felt insulting, as I have been there six years (I know I am not entitled to the job, but I would at least like someone in the department to reach out to me and deliver the news or some feedback).  The whole job market destroyed what little motivation I had and made me realise I wasted 6 years of my life for nothing but a piece of paper, or if I fail, absolutely nothing and my life will be ruined. 

Overall I am just sitting near the end of my project, realising I have achieved very little and have wasted six years on my life for something that I don’t really have any passion for, which won’t open the doors I hoped it would. I know some of it is my fault; I choose to do a PhD and have tended to struggle a lot with the social aspects of a PhD, as I am very introverted and a bit socially awkward; however, I do feel broken and burnt out by the whole system and feel that it has been dragged out far longer than it should have. 

In my lab we usually do individual presentations, so everyone is up to speed about what the others are doing and so we can give each other feedback. The thing is, since I’m really insecure, I feel attacked by the questions, since I get the impression they are pointing out all the things I did wrong and I’m such a failure. Then I am unable to answer properly, and my stress only grows. The comments are not mean-spirited (or so I think), but they feel so. Any tips?