By Stephen Scherer, Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist,
We’ve been working hard toward identifying the things that add stress to our day and to what degree, what makes us feel fulfilled/refilled emotionally, and what motivates us to keep doing what we do.
Understanding the judgements that come to mind during a task, what your drive is and the meaning you give to your career are vital aspects of not just surviving, but thriving in academia in the long term. It may mean reflecting on past accomplishments and hardships, re-assessing your personal values and writing them down in a place you see daily, and it can mean exploring your thoughts through introspective writing and distilling the themes or judgements you see arise on the page to better understand where they come from.
Knowing what drives us also gives a deeper understanding into what is needed to sustain ourselves. Last week’s action step was designed to provide a sense of direction for what we need to feel refilled and how we can reduce the drain of tasks to begin with (by modifying our perspective or reducing judgements). What did you come up with?
A useful tool for more easily shifting our perspective in a situation is called cognitive/thought restructuring. This technique is designed to help modify our perception of a situation to reflect the reality of what we are facing. The table below will help you walk through the use of the skill:
1. Situation I Have to Manage | 2. Thoughts About the Situation | 3. Emotion Triggered by the Situation and the intensity (0-10) | 4. What are the Facts of the Situation vs My Assumptions and am I assuming a Threat of Some Kind? | 5. My Original Thought Without Judgement | 6. New Emotion Triggered by Thought Without Judgement (0-10) | 7. Plan to Manage the Situation and Take Care of Myself |
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I have to edit and submit a grant proposal that my colleague was supposed to do earlier this week. | “I can’t believe I have to clean up their mess, this always happens because of their irresponsibility, and I shouldn’t have to be the one to fix this.” | Frustrated (7), Disappointed (8) | My colleague promised to handle this earlier in the week and didn’t follow through. This is the 3rd time this has happened. I have a lot on my plate and I feel overworked and that I don’t have time for this (threat). | “I feel frustrated and disappointed with [name]’s behavior in this situation and I am not happy that I am being asked to handle the situation for them.” | Frustrated (5), Disappointed (4), Tired (6) | Review the proposal after lunch, make the edits I need to. Identify talking points to bring up to [name] and see what caused the delay and how it can be avoided in the future. Consider adding another PI in the future to reduce workload. |
In order to use cognitive restructuring you will:
Identify the situation you are faced with first, describe this as non judgmentally as possible.
Write down your thoughts about the situation. For example, if you are having an issue with a colleague your initial thought about the situation may be: “I can’t believe I have to clean up their mess, this always happens because of their irresponsibility, and I shouldn’t have to be the one to fix this.”
Ask what is the emotion this is triggering and how intense is it (10 being the most intense you have ever felt)? It sounds like frustration and possibly disappointment toward the colleague’s behavior.
Remove the emotion-driven judgement from the thought by identifying the facts of the situation and how it is impacting you. Then restructure the original cognition in step 5.
Restructured cognition may sound something like: “I feel frustrated and disappointed with [name]’s behavior in this situation and I am not happy that I am being asked to handle the situation for them.”
Name the new emotion and the intensity (the emotion may still stay the same and the intensity may be less). Now that the emotion and the situation are separated, we can more easily plan around handling it and move to step 7.
Finally in step 7 you think about how you can take care of yourself: Regulate emotion with something that “fills your glass,” then you can either talk to the colleague about them managing their responsibility differently because it adds an extra burden on you, or you can handle the situation. Either way, it’s much easier to see what the problem is because the facts of the situation have been distilled from the emotion you experienced.
Care-Full Action Step: Take another look at your glass and your plate. You may have a better sense at this point how much space each of these things on your plate takes and how addressing them drains your glass and by how much. How can you shift your perspective on these tasks to make them feel more aligned with your passion? The task in front of you may not have changed, but the amount you feel drained after completing it likely will because the way you approach the situation is different!
How can you use the cognitive restructuring tool this week to help you reframe your thoughts? With more practice this reframing will happen automatically. Once this has occurred you have successfully changed your perspective on things and will feel less drained going into a situation to begin with!
*The information in this blog post is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult with a qualified mental health professional before making any changes to your lifestyle to make sure they are right for you.
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