As it is explanatory in the title, you may have chosen to look at this blog because you are feeling sad or low by your PhD. The stress of you PhD has overwhelmed you, where depression, anxiety, self-doubt and, burnout are taking over the confidence, talent and brightness of your personality.

I often feel that irrespective of the discipline or the university chronic unhappiness has been as an integral part of most of the PhD candidates. Why does this happen and what can we do about it?

To start with, there are various topics that bring in sadness to PhD students. Some commonly found mistakes can be:

• Ill-defined topics
• Incomplete data sets
• Un cooperative supervisors
• Un constructive, de motivating feedback
• Financial Challenges
• Fear of outcome and result of the hard work

Should these problems in PhD be big enough to lead to failure or fraud or let it affect the physical and mental health of the scholars? What about those students who enjoy writing a PhD. Are they different or do they work differently?

I want to say that though there is a great role played by universities in helping their students, but eventually the solution has to come from the end of the student only. Rather than giving the regular expected tips here, I want to end by saying that, we can actually look around and learn from each other instead of wanting to every time reinvent the PhD wheel of wisdom. Become honest to yourself and accept that it is fine to ask for help. Maintain your sanity, irrespective of the help you get from your university. I really hope that when we complete our PhD’s we are able to look back and say that despite being tough it was a good experience and you would do it all over again rather that thinking “Thank God it’s over!!”