Why can’t I make myself open the document?

Why can I not start when I still care about it?

Caring is intact. What has broken is the link between effort and any sense of having got somewhere.

For years the work paid you back. A result, a chapter, a supervisor who looked pleased, a sense of moving. Then the feedback loop lengthens. Months pass between anything that counts as progress, the experiment fails for reasons nobody can name, the paper comes back for a third revision. The effort continues and the return disappears, and what you are left with is an engine running with nothing attached to it.

What follows is usually mistaken for a character problem. You sit down, you open the file, and something in you declines. You tidy instead. You answer email that could wait a week. Clients call this procrastination and treat it as a discipline failure, which is the least accurate description available. In my experience it is closer to self-protection: opening that document means finding out again that you cannot make it work, and a tired mind will do a great deal to postpone that. The tiredness is real, and the fatigue that builds up while living abroad sits underneath it rather than beside it.

Why does my supervisor’s silence feel so loud?

Research gives you almost no ordinary evidence that you are doing acceptably, so silence fills the gap and it fills it badly.

In most work, somebody tells you where you stand several times a week. In a PhD or a postdoc you can go a month with nothing: no answer to the draft, no comment on the figures, a meeting rearranged twice. Nothing has gone wrong, and your nervous system does not know that. Absence of news is read as bad news, and the reading gets worse the longer it runs.

A study of PhD students in medicine at a Dutch university centre found that the strongest factors in burnout were lack of sleep and the frustration of 3 needs: autonomy, competence and the sense of being connected to other people.¹ It was a one-off survey of 464 people at a single institution with a response rate below half, so it cannot establish cause or describe every department. I mention it because those 3 needs are exactly what a long silence starves. You cannot tell whether you are competent, you have no say in the timing, and the person whose opinion decides your future is not in the room.

Why is this heavier because I moved countries for the post?

The department is your work, your social world and your right to be in the country, and all 3 wobble together.

A researcher who grew up here can have a bad year in the lab and still go home to a family, a football team, friends from school. You moved for this. The people you know are the people on your corridor, the permit is attached to the contract, and the contract runs out in 14 months. So a difficult relationship with a supervisor is not just unpleasant, it touches whether you can stay. That is a great deal of weight for one working relationship to carry, and it makes ordinary academic friction feel existential, which it occasionally is and usually is not.

Isolation does measurable work here. A survey of 692 PhD candidates in medicine at a Swedish university, over half of them from other countries, found that those working alone rather than within a research group reported lower engagement and higher burnout.² It was cross-sectional and confined to medical fields, so it describes a pattern rather than a cause. It matches what I see: the people who struggle most are rarely the ones working hardest. They are the ones working by themselves, often in a second language, often at a desk they could leave for 3 days without anyone noticing.

Is this burnout, or am I simply not good enough?

Exhaustion is an unreliable witness about ability, and it always testifies against you.

This is the question almost everyone brings, usually in the second session once the practical complaints have been laid out. The honest answer is that you cannot assess your own capability from inside this state, because burnout does not announce itself as tiredness. It announces itself as evidence: the reading will not stay in your head, the writing comes out flat, the seminar question you would have answered easily 2 years ago now finds you blank. All of that reads as proof of a limit you have finally hit. It is, more often, what a depleted mind does.

There is a separate question underneath it, and it is worth asking plainly rather than letting it run in the background. Do you still want this life, or did you want it at 24 and have not been able to say otherwise since? Those are different problems with different answers, and some of the people I see are not burnt out at all. They are doing well at something they have quietly stopped wanting, which has its own particular flavour of getting what you worked for and feeling nothing.

What helps when the deadline cannot move?

Protect sleep and contact first, output second. Those 2 are what the work is actually running on, and they are the first things a researcher cuts.

• Make the first task of the day absurdly small. Open the file and write one sentence, however bad. The barrier is starting, and a small enough start does not trigger the dread.
• Ask for the thing you are owed, in writing. A date for feedback, 20 minutes in the diary. Supervisors are frequently unaware that silence is doing damage, and most respond to a specific request.
• Get one hour a week with another researcher. Not to be supervised. To work alongside somebody and discover that their experiments also fail.
• Guard sleep before you guard hours. Working until 1 in the morning for a fortnight costs more than the fortnight gains, and the cost comes out of the thinking you need most.
• Keep one activity that cannot be optimised. Something with no output, no metric and nobody from the department in it.

Those are adjustments to conditions, and conditions are usually what is wrong. They are not enough in 3 situations. Where the flatness has lasted months and extends past the work into everything else, so that nothing at all appeals. Where you have been managing on very little sleep for so long that you cannot tell what you feel. Or where the trouble is not the workload but a supervisor who belittles or isolates you, which is a problem about power and needs to be named as that rather than solved with better time management.

When I work with researchers, we usually spend the first sessions separating 4 things that have been fused into one: the exhaustion, the fear about the career, the isolation of living here, and the older question of what you are proving and to whom. They are far more manageable apart than together. If you are earlier in academic life, much of this also applies to the strain of being an international student in Copenhagen, and my psychotherapy for expats in Copenhagen describes how I work with people who moved here for something.

Questions people ask

Is burnout something therapy can actually help with?

Yes, though the work is as much about the conditions you are in as about you. Sessions tend to focus on what is draining you, what you can change and what you have been tolerating without noticing.

I have no time. How can I add a weekly appointment?

That objection is usually the clearest sign of the problem. One hour a week is a small amount of time against months of not being able to work.

Will my department or supervisor find out?

No. I am in private practice and nothing is reported to your institution. What you bring to the room stays there.

Can we work in English?

Yes. I work in English, and most of my clients are not Danish. Thinking about your own life in a second language is hard enough without doing the therapy in one as well.

What if I decide I want to leave academia?

That is a legitimate outcome and not a failure of the work. My interest is in you reaching the decision clearly rather than making it in a state of exhaustion.

If you cannot face your thesis any more, I can help you recover in burnout therapy without giving up on what matters to you.

Sources

1. Burnout and engagement among PhD students in medicine: the BEeP study. Perspectives on Medical Education, 2021.
2. Study engagement and burnout of the PhD candidates in medicine: a person-centered approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.