Lately Rex and I have been sharing various bits of advice for graduate students. [See all posts in our “how to” category.] When it comes to advising graduate students, there are two topics I find I end up talking about far more often than I would like: stress and depression. So while it is a bit off-topic for this blog, I feel it is worth sharing.
Caveats: Before saying anything else, I always advise students to make an appointment with a professional. Stress and depression are very different problems, and in serious cases the remedies are quite different. If stress is too debilitating a student may need to consider directly addressing the underlying causes of stress by making major life changes. Perhaps leaving school for a while to pay off crippling credit card debt, or ending a tortured relationship. Depression is a disease and a doctor might suggest taking medication as part of a comprehensive cure. It is also worth investigating the possibility that depression is a symptom of an underlying illness that needs to be treated separately from the depression.
Having said that, in my experience there are a lot of people who suffer from low levels of stress and depression which are treatable through common sense life-style changes. In these cases, the advice I give is pretty much the same for both stress and depression. I think it is worth seeing if these simple steps can’t bring about some measure of relief before trying other remedies. I also believe that these suggestions are still useful when used in conjunction with more radical measures. I generally make the following five suggestions:
Exercise. Regular, intensive, aerobic exercise can greatly help the body deal with stress or depression. [Read one person’s account of how they fought depression by taking up running.] One often hears how one needs at least thirty minutes of exercise three times a week. I understand this as being the bare minimum we need to avoid turning to jelly. To really improve one’s general sense of well-being I recommend at least 30-60 min of intensive aerobic exercise a day. (If you don’t currently exercise regularly, be careful about the risk of injury when you start your new regime. Start slow and gradually increase how much you do.)
Stimulants and Depressants. Avoid them. It seems like graduate students live on coffee and cigaretts. Avoiding these can greatly improve the quality of one’s sleep, which is important for dealing with both stress and depression. Same for Alcohol, especially right before bed. Avoiding these drugs should help reduce dramatic mood swings. Caffeine can actually cause stress. I generally suggest trying to go cold turkey for three weeks and see how it feels before gradually adding limited amounts of caffeine and alcohol back into one’s diet, but some people suffer from such extreme caffeine withdrawal that it is better for them to gradually reduce their intake over a longer period of time.
Breathe. There is good scientific evidence that focused breathing exercises help reduce stress. Moreover, regular practice and training at breathing mediation can make one even more efficient at reducing stress. You can do something simple, like this breathing exercise, or this meditation, or you could enrole in Tai Chi, Yoga, TM or other meditation classes. I recently learned about electronic biofeedback devices and if you can afford one (they’re not cheap) they seem to work very well.
Talk. At least one recent survey suggests that talk therapy can be as effective as pills for some forms of depression. Having support can also help one better manage stress by sharing goals and evaluating one’s progress.
Lists. Getting organized and having clearly stated goals which can be acted upon can help focus your attention on what needs to be done right now without feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of all of life’s problems. There are numerous ways of doing this, including the popular Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, about which one can find a lot of information online. The key element of all such approaches is to write everything down and then regularly review your list. The main advantage of this system is that you can really focus on what needs to be done right now, and ignore a lot of things which add to your overall stress level (or the depression which comes from feeling overwhelmed) but which aren’t immediately relevant.
This Scientific American Frontiers episode about stress is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the topic. The show focuses on how prolonged low levels of stress can make you sick, but it also talks about stress relief. You can watch parts of it online, and while some of the links are dead, their resources page is still useful.
I’m glad to read this post, since these issues are terribly neglected by departments. I know whenever I mention something to my supervisor about my personal life, I can see her looking around awkwardly because she doesn’t know what to do.
A few pointers from someone down in the trenches:
I would also make the point that being social with one’s cohort is important. I hated the last year, and it was worse when I was living away from my cohort. I’m not sure why I feel better hanging out with people when we just sit around and complain, but it helps a lot.
Eating well is important. In any given day, most of my friends skip breakfast, eat take out, snack from vending machines, take creams and sugars in their 3 coffees, maybe drink some beers, and eat hot dogs from the campus vendors. One can do better. E.g., try cooking wholesome lunches on Sunday to last the whole week.
I think a lot of stress comes from things that don’t really matter. I never thought of anthropology as a job, but after a year of listening to everyone talking about jobs, I found myself spending time worrying about whether UMichigan grads were going to beat me out for a position. Stopping to think about what I’m doing and why, makes all the difference.
Peace.
I’m guessing that you also advocate reading a self-help book a day in addition to a journal article a day?
I’m honestly surprised and more than a little shocked that academics within a discipline that prides itself as being critical have failed to engage criticially with various pop-culture bits of advice, for example:
1) The issue of the medicalisation of depression – while it’s obviously important for the writer to make clear that he isn’t offering professional advice on this topic, I’m somewhat shocked to see the whole “doctor and medication” package simply trotted out. Yes, you do say a little bit about talking cures, which is good in order to get people thinking about options, but again, this is couched in the unproblematic language we would use for “take a headache cure”. The medicalisation of all forms of mental distress and the proliferation of anti-depressants as a catch-all cure for all manner of problems are themes that anthropologists should be thinking constructively about, not unproblematically reproducing with a slight caveat talking about talking cures towards the end.
2) Your entirely negative tone towards depressants and stimulants reeks of ethnocentricism – and I’m not just saying that to be flippant. These are an important part of some people’s culture. Surely such a complete withdrawal from the cultural life of which you feel a part is only likely to result in a greater sense of isolation and distress? Please note, I am not advocating that all graduate students have to drink or take stimulants due to peer pressure. That would be awful. I am simply saying that it may well be possible that stimulants or depressants may constitute part of a wider positive life experience in the lives of some graduate students, and this is a possibility that the writer should at the very least consider. Is this kind of unthinking rejection of non-prescription drugs (whilst, ironically, remaining about the problem of prescription drugs!) a reproduction of a particular form of temperance puritanism, something that might be understood in the context of DARE programs and twelve step programs, or something else? Some critical thinking definitely required.
3) We might also think about the possibilities for miscontrual when breathing exercises “travel”. What is the aim of an exercise aimed at control of the breath? In some contexts, might this lead a practitioner to adopt bad breathing practices or bad posture that may have knock on effects out of the time of ‘meditation’? (Alexander technique may prove an interesting field of enquiry for anthropologists here.) Would something more analogous to vipassana awareness meditation (focussing on the breath, not attempting to exert conscious control over it) in fact be more useful in allowing a person to grow in awareness of the world around them, and perhaps to place some of their stresses in a wider context, rather than simply trying to force the breath to reflect the heroism of the lone individual hammering out own will. What I mean is that it is interesting that meditation is often used for individualistic ends (I, the ego, am in control here) which can undermine the very goals towards which the self same meditation practices may originally have pointed (e.g. the ego is illusory, or, I do not have control here).
Richard,
I agree that “the medicalisation of all forms of mental distress” does deserve critical thinking. I’m the kind of person who spends half a day researching pain killers before deciding if I’m going to take them, and I encourage other people to similarly question their doctors before taking any medication. But that doesn’t mean that it is always wrong to medicalize particular forms of mental distress. Figuring out when to be critical and when drugs might be necessary needs to be done on a case by case basis.
Of course “stimulants or depressants constitute part of a wider positive life experience.” But I believe that a good night’s sleep is essential to recovery, and the research that these things interfere with sleep is pretty solid. There is a reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. I only recommend such withdrawal as a short-term strategy in order to see if it helps, only a deliberate misreading would construe this as advocating abstinence. Especially since I recommend reintroducing these substances after that three week period.
Regarding breathing, the science suggests that focusing on your own breath helps quiet the brain by focusing brain activity on the amygdala (which controls breathing, as well as other things). That’s why the biofeedback machines are effective. The Scientific American episode I linked to above suggested that someone trained in TM or other forms of meditation can achieve more dramatic and more long term reductions in stress levels with longer periods of training.But I’m only talking about strategies for reducing stress here and don’t really care to judge people’s practices in terms of whether it is for “individualistic ends” or for “awareness” (talk about ethnocentric!)
Finally, self-help books are, in my mind, pretty much a waste of time and money. One of the reasons I wrote this post is that I think the actual usable advice given in the best self-help books is fairly simple and straight forward and can be easily summarized in something as simple as a blog post. But many of the books give advice which I consider damaging – leading people to blame themselves for their own problems. (See Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book.) I know it was a flippant comment meant to offend, but for that reason I am glad you are not Albert’s advisor. Or perhaps you are?
Good Advice, Kerim, and some reasonable doubts raised by Richard. On the whole, I agree with the suggestions, though. I do think that caffeine and alcohol can be useful in accomplishing tasks and reducing stress (respectively, please don’t confuse the two) if kept under control. For example, there is evidence that caffeine and an amino acid called L-theanine can improve cognition in ways that neither does alone. These are both found in quality green and white teas, and I often have a few cups of tea while I’m working on papers or reading background material. Little bits of caffeine can be good, but caffeine addicts generally need some all the time just to feel normal. I avoid coffee (it tastes empty to me), and don’t drink alcohol very often, so I can enjoy the benefits of small amounts when necessary.
On the breathing, I have been doing breathing exercises since I was a teenager as part of Aikido training. I don’t do the regular aikido breathing any more (called Ki Breathing), but I do practice some focused breathing that involves counting breaths. I read some research that said that slowing your breathing to ten breaths per minute (I’m still not clear if that’s ten in-out breaths or 3 in, 3 out breaths per minute, but I err on the side of the latter) or six seconds per breath can dramatically reduce blood pressure. The research I read claimed up to 20 points in two weeks. In any case, the evidence for breathing exercises reducing stress is pretty substantial.
Exercise is one that I need to get more of. I ride my bike to and from campus, but if the weather’s bad or I don’t have to go to campus (or like right now, I’m in Nevada far from campus), then I tend to not get any exercise.
However, sometimes all that still isn’t enough to keep me stress free. Every now and then, things just pile on and I get a little out of whack. I’ve learned that there are times when you just have to push through it all, and not expect to be happy and wonderful all the time. Sometimes, life just sucks, but hopefully those times don’t out number the times when life is good.
Thanks Jeremy,
You make an important point which I should have stressed in my post: the goal isn’t to be “stress free” but to manage stress without it becoming debilitating. In small amounts stress can actually be a good thing. The problem we have (as the scientific American documentary makes clear) is that our fight-or-flight response system wasn’t designed to deal with long-term low level stress day-after-day. And while it is sometimes possible to remove the source of stress (i.e. drop out of graduate school) sometimes it is not (or we have good reasons for subjecting ourself to stress). In such situations I hope the above advice can help students cope…
Good advice. One thing that the graduate students in my department recently did was to start organizing our own orientation for incoming students. We go camping and have a talk about things we think are essential knowledge for being a grad student – everything from how to deal with specific professors to how to balance work and play. More important than any specific piece of information is letting students know that other students are going through the same insanity that they are, and can be a resource. So I would add community to your list…