Grind culture seems to be something celebrated on a lot of platforms. Many of us talk about the nights that we spent, full of caffeine and manic energy, trying to keep up with assignments, readings, and everything else on our plates. There can be an almost toxic celebration of the suffering that comes from the ‘grad school grind’. I know that I fell into this trap of putting aside my physical and mental health while trying to keep up. And it always seemed like other people were doing more, and handling things better. Why couldn’t I keep up? Comparison really can be the thief of joy – no matter how hard I worked someone was always doing better.
There is a lot of side labour that graduate students are expected to perform outside from the graduate research. From attending conferences, to sitting on committees, and of course the ever-present pressure to ‘publish or perish’. For most of us, our research is already a full-time job – and then you throw on these other pressures and it becomes too heavy a burden. The kind of pressure might turn some people into diamonds, but it turned me into a sad pile of coal dust. Trying to ‘do it all’ just lead me to burn out, to a point where I couldn’t even look at my thesis. Which of course made me feel even worse about myself!
This is all to say that having all these responsibilities piled on a person’s plate, alongside any other things that life throws at you from family and friends. There just aren’t enough hours in the day! So sometimes you have to ‘let things go’. Accept that no one can do it all. So sometimes that means taking a break from the conference circuit, or setting aside the publication that has you up all night pulling out your hair. There is so much pressure to fill every hour of the day with productivity, but that is unrealistic. And this does not leave enough time to breathe, relax, and live your life. Just because you are in grad school does not mean that you don’t deserve a break! Try to take breaks when you can and let go of the idea of being perfect. You will burn yourself out trying to do it all, no one can.