The Anxious Physicist

Personal blog of Dr Alex Mendelsohn

Month: August 2022

The story of how my Physics World article came to be

August 31, 2022 /

Referring to the article: A physicist’s experience of the mental-health system

and podcast: Start-up simulates quantum photonics devices, a physicist’s experience of the mental-health system

Alex wrote a manuscript about their experiences with mental illness that they shared with a psychiatric researcher, but received no response. Undeterred, they cold-emailed psychiatric researchers and scientific magazines but only received rejections. Eventually, the editor of Physics World magazine reached out and expressed interest in publishing the manuscript. Despite being surprised and skeptical at first, Alex’s article was eventually published after six months. Alex thanks the editor for being courageous enough to publish something not typically seen in a physics magazine and wonders if there are more people out there willing to act and care about mental health issues.

A while ago, my counsellor asked me to write something to give to a psychiatric researcher she knew from her work at a mental health hospital. She felt strongly that the things I was talking about in our sessions needed to be heard.

I obliged. I wrote a sort of manuscript looking thing. At that time I didn’t have the energy to write it in any sort of structure to help the reader. All I could do was splurge what was in my head onto paper. I cleaned it up as much as I could, then sent it off to her.

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My work routine

August 30, 2022 /

Alex discusses how they struggled with overworking and stress while doing their PhD work. They explain how they started meditating between 25-minute work sessions, which helped them to focus better and catch mistakes. He also talks about how they switched from task-oriented scheduling to theme-oriented scheduling, which allowed for more flexibility. They used a large whiteboard and created a crude week layout, which included headings like “Before Work,” “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Evening,” and a column for each day of the week. Alex assigned themes like “PhD Work,” “Personal,” “Gym,” “Admin,” and “Cleaning,” and then assigned associated tasks to each theme. This approach allowed them to structure their day, while also providing flexibility to move things around as needed.

I realised quite quickly on returning to my PhD that it was immensely difficult to pull myself away from work when I was in the middle of trying to do a task or solve a problem. The “I can’t leave the problem until it is solved” feeling. As time went on, it would feel like I was getting closer to a solution, that I had laser focus, but in reality, I had tunnel vision. As time went on I became more and more stressed meaning my ability to solve the problem worsened. Further, if I went past the 25-minute mark, my stress levels would rise almost exponentially. It would potentially wipe me out for the day, or for a particularly frustrating problem, two. During which I would be limited to very simple tasks which would still feel quite painful to do. Meditating as a break in between 25 minute work sessions seemed to allow me to work for the full day.

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