As a student, feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work and study I have to do can feel like second nature a lot of the time. Feeling overwhelmed not only has a massive impact on your mental heath (as it can lead to breakdowns in class meaning that your teacher who would rather be anywhere else has to awkwardly try and comfort you) but it can also affect other aspects in your life such as your interactions with friends and family. I see a lot of “just breathe” and “find inner peace” rubbish, which offers no help whatsoever and can increase panic so here are some tips that I (attempt to) follow when I am feeling overwhelmed.
Take a step back. I know not getting onto your work and stopping for a second can seem impossible and can stress you out further but just taking 2 minuets to asses the situation and collect yourself will help you calm down and deal with the problem at hand. Take a breather, tie up your hair, get a glass of water and then refocus back on what is making you feel overwhelmed.
Talk to a friend. Ranting to a friend about what you are feeling overwhelmed about can help relieve some anxiety you are feeling and they can help you come up with ways on how to deal with whats making you overwhelmed and calm you down.
Write it down. Writing down what is making you feel overwhelmed is great as it you can put down all of the thoughts that are swirling around in your head making a catastrophic tornado of stress into a formable visual form. Sometimes, this can make what is making you feel so overwhelmed appear much smaller than it feels like and it can help clear your head.
Plan it out. Making a plan of everything that is making you feel overwhelmed and how to deal with step by step makes it far more manageable to deal with and by breaking it down into little bits, makes it appear clearer. Often when you are feeling overwhelmed, it is because there a lot of little tasks and one main big task that need doing therefore doing the small tasks first can help reduce stress and make you feel motivated to do the rest.
Listen to music. It has been proven that listening to cringy (but iconic) angry songs can help reduce feelings of anxiety and make you feel calmer as Dopamine the “feel-good” hormone is released when you listen to music. Listening to angry music in particular can help get out built up frustration and aggravation making you feel better.
Make a hot drink. It has been proven that drinking a hot drink helps relax your muscles, lowers stress hormones and lowers your blood pressure. Even just putting on the kettle is a calming ritual that can help people relax!
i wish people would stop romanticizing not eating breakfast and not getting enough sleep and being dependent on coffee to function and always being in a bad mood and treating yourself poorly because that behavior is very unhealthy for you
I don’t know that it’s romanticizing it to just talk about it. I know it’s unhealthy, but losing the ability to talk about it publically won’t be a step forward, it’ll be a step back. Being able to acknowledge it and commiserate with others and maybe get tips on how to trick my dumb brain into complying with sleep and healthy food choices are all net positives.
Nah talking about it is good. But the whole gradschool culture? Where everyone lives off of coffee and pizza and beer? Is super unhealthy and also expected? Idk if it makes sense but it feels like you have to pull all-nighters in the lab and treat yourself like garbage or else you’re not doing grad school right.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” – Albert Camus
Academic publishing is broken.
For readers, the indecipherable prose, performative literature reviews, pedantic jargon and deep-theory references – the hallmarks of academic writing – are insurmountable barriers that keep most people out of the conversation, as do the obscene financial paywalls behind which these texts are sequestered. The move towards open-access journals in recent years has helped somewhat alleviate this issue, but these journals are few are far between.
Furthermore, open-access and the elimination of paywalls is simply not enough to make academic scholarship accessible to the audiences that can benefit most from its insights. Financial accessibility means little if the scholarship accessed is unreadable and incomprehensible to the vast majority of the public.
As scholars trained in this tradition, many of us struggle under the pressures and obligations to reproduce these conventions. We feel the heavy weight of hypocrisy: the arguments against social injustice and oppressive hierarchies that motivate our scholarship and politics often have to be couched in genre conventions and published in a way that reproduces the very elitism we want to resist. We dedicate ourselves to writing articles only to endure the painful academic journal submission process in all of its obsolescent tedium; when we do get published, we know full well that only a handful of other people, mostly other academics, will read our work.
Academia can produce fascinating, brilliant, and highly relevant scholarship and critical conversations that the world, especially those of us fighting for social justice, desperately needs – but it only means so much if only a handful of people ever read it.
That’s where Ph.Dumb comes in. The mission is simple: to resist and reject the elitist echo chamber of academic publishing. Ph.Dumb is a place for scholars to share their work with a general audience – the broadest English-speaking audience possible, for the sake of more equitable and accessible access to the work done by academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences that the various gatekeeping structures of academia inhibit. It’s a place for readers to learn, and even enjoy the work of the academy unencumbered by elitist writing, university affiliation, and/or financial requirements.
Ph.Dumb will always be free. It will always be welcoming to all readers who come with an open mind & who want to learn and engage in thoughtful, respectful discourse.
The journal, which will be hosted on its own domain, is ready to launch, which means we’re ready to start accepting submissions for articles! Check out our submission deets here, and be sure to give this blog a follow for regular updates and more about the clusterfuckery that is the modern American academy.
You can also support Ph.Dumb on Patreon.Patrons receive a number of benefits, including article PDFs, early access to new articles, and behind-the-scenes looks at the submission and editing process. Once we reach our first funding goal, we’ll secure the domain name and go live!
Please feel free to message the blog or email phdumbeditor@gmail.com with any questions!
Hey Folks! I am FINALLY taking the next steps to start my alternative academic journal, Ph.Dumb! If this looks like something you’re interested in, please consider submitting for publication, supporting on Patreon, following the journal’s blog, and/or signal boosting! THANK YOU!!!
MY DUDE I AM OVER ON THE SCIENCE SIDE OF ACADEMIA BUT I 100% FULLY SUPPORT ALL OF THIS
theproblemwithstardust 