“It never gets easier, you just go faster” - Greg LeMond.

This quip about cycling feels true about academia too. It’s not that my brain weasels are any less pesky, I’m just better at corralling them. When I feel too inadequate to the size of the problems, when it feels like none of my work makes any real inroads into understanding the problem or potential solutions, when I wonder if I have enough skill for this academic career, when the project I working on seems to be producing totally self-evident findings, and a thousand other versions of these thoughts – I am better at saying “ah ha! I’ve been around this rotary before. Let’s get off.” I tell myself these thoughts can wait for a better moment, or I outsource evaluation of the utility of my findings to a mentor or coauthor, or I talk to a trusted friend.

In the meantime, a friend/colleague has been trying to pass along this idea of pacing. A mix of mindfulness (what gives vs. takes energy, how activities impact your body) and attending to how you control the use of your time and schedule (insofar as we can). So for me, I think this means I need a mix of writing/thinking time, physical activity, and small meetings to balance out more energy-draining activities.

When my brain is doing a lot of spiraling, trying to keep track of all the to-dos, this tells me several things.

1. I need more written to-do lists (to get them out of my brain)

2. I need to practice the type of meditation where I try to be aware of the thinking, noting and letting go and coming back to the breath

3. I need more small goals and structures. Instead of a 30 minute writing period, maybe I need a 15 minute writing timer if my brain (and actions) wander off topic during a longer writing period.

Peer-mentoring/support meetings remind me (again) of the power of normalization and shared experience. Of not feeling so lonely and stuck in our own heads. As I reminded (myself) my colleague, part of our job is learning to recognize and manage these feelings, like imposter syndrome rearing its head in times of job searches or job precarity or when research is going poorly or just stuck in the doldrums. The advantage of being a little further in my career is I’m getting better at saying “ah yes, you again. Let’s see, how did I manage this last time?”. And I’m getting better at borrowing the judgements of my friends and colleagues, rather than my own harsher self-judgements.