Staying motivated during difficult times

Having made it clear in a previous post that hitting difficult times during the PhD is normal, I wanted to address the second part of the question in this post: how to stay motivated when the hard times hit.

While there is no one size fits all solution for this, here are a few ideas:

• Tell others: First things first – don’t suffer in silence, but let your colleagues and supervisors know that you are stuck.
• Take a break: If you are staring at the same problem for too much time, it is better to step away and let your mind run in the background.
• Socialize: Don’t isolate yourself when you are having a difficult time. Reach out to friends and family, go out, and get some fresh air.
• Take good care of yourself: Eat, move, sleep – you know the drill. Simple, but not easy.
• Identify small steps: If you feel refreshed, start to think about small tasks you can do that may help you get unstuck. You may be looking at small side calculations, or any tasks that gets you closer to the material again.
• Revisit what you did: Once you feel more comfortable with taking a better look at what went wrong, revisit your previous logical critically, to see if you can point to the step where your logic derailed – with that, you will know where to return to.
• List potential solutions: Finally, once you have identified the moment where you made a wrong decision, take some time to list potential steps forward. You may want to do some reading to get a broader set of ideas here. Don’t start to take action yet, but first think about all the possible solutions for moving forward.

What do you do when you get stuck in your research?