“Doctoral degrees are thought to be stressful, and arguably therefore PGRs are potentially at higher risk of developing a mental health condition than undergraduates. Stress is not always negative and building resilience is an important quality for successful researchers. However, there is a common link between high job demands and emotional exhaustion or depressive feelings.”

Source: Vitae’s Postgraduate researchers: mental health and wellbeing report, 2018
https://re.ukri.org/news-events-publications/publications/postgraduate-researchers-mental-health-and-wellbeing-report

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Researcher Development Office supports a whole university approach
to postgraduate researcher wellbeing and
mental health.

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We are all different,
but we all have times when we have low mental wellbeing, where we feel stressed and difficulty to cope.

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Thinking about what is affecting your wellbeing is crucial and can help you to be more resilient.

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The Healthy Mind Platter also offers a theoretical model to study and optimize the mental wellbeing, brain health, creativity and performance. There are seven neuro-cognitive activities that nurture the mind and are related with mental health, which are summarized below within the Healthy Mind Platter. These seven daily activities make up the full set of “mental nutrients” that your brain and relationships need to function at their best. By engaging every day in each of these servings, you promote integration in your life and enable your brain to coordinate and balance its activities. That is, you build the strongest connections between parts of the brain and the most balanced way to ensure your mind stays sharp and resilient. These essential mental activities strengthen your brain’s internal connections and your connections with other people and the world around you.

The Healthy Mind Platter was created by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute and Clinical Professor at the UCLA School of Medicine in collaboration with Dr. David Rock, Executive Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute.

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For other science-based practices and activities for a meaningful life, you can also visit Greater Good in Action, which is curated by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. You can create an account, save your chosen practices, and then mark them as tried as you along with them.

Although it is advised to include these practices and activities in our daily lives, we can hypothesize that the postgraduate researcher population might find it hard to do so. Still, by giving some of these activities a try on a daily basis, evidence suggests that you can improve your mental wellbeing.

Taking small steps and making gradual changes can have a positive impact on your mental wellbeing and you can try to start with one or two things you feel able to do on our campus:

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