post dissertation fatigue

Burnout during your dissertation sucks, and these strategies are not a cure-all approach to make you feel rejuvenated and worry-free. They are simply things that worked for me to help make a stressful time a little bit more bearable. Hopefully they can do the same for you.

Unfortunately this can often lead to PhD fatigue which may eventually lead to burnout. In this post we’ll explore what academic burnout is and how it comes about, then discuss some tips I picked up for managing mental health during my own PhD.

I can easily say it has been 90h weeks 12 months in a row, with the hours taken of rest being vastly overshadowed by intense guilt (over not using that time to work) and inadequacy. I produced a lot of research, published 5 new papers, and produced a thesis which is now submitted for evaluation.

Symptoms including apathy, emotional instability, indifference, and extreme fatigue are a sure sign that you are getting overworked and overstressed. And of course such symptoms carry over to life outside the office.

So no matter if it’s only an hour break, burnout during dissertation writing is both very common and unfortunately very difficult to bounce back from. So taking some time to ensure your mental wellbeing before your hand-in deadline is both better for your dissertation quality and yourself in the long-term.

What is Post PhD Submission Fatigue? It’s a name (or even set of names) people have come up with to describe the feeling you get after the submission of your PhD thesis. Unlike what you’d think, most people do feel relieved but not in the happy-happy way they had imagined.