"Stress is an essential reaction to danger, a mechanism ingrained in us long ago to force a “fight” or “fly” response. However, it’s how we react to stress that impacts our long-term health, including the potential development of anxiety through cognitive distortions and unhealthy coping mechanisms. While we three may have already been naturally anxious people, this became increasingly heightened when under the stress of working on our PhDs...
What’s most confusing to those around us is that we were “good students” and appeared so calm, leading others to wonder how and why we could ever be worried. But those logical thoughts are pushed out by cognitive distortions when five years of work becomes an important crossroads to you, where your work ethic, intelligence, and passion are tested.
We thought that once we defended our dissertations, the stress and anxiety would disappear. It didn’t. We’ve obtained one of the highest levels of academic achievement. We found great jobs immediately doing what we love. And every day we have to work to manage our anxiety. We believe that more honesty and communication on the topic, more acknowledgment of this as a reality during graduate school, and more support (even when we didn’t realize we needed it) would have been helpful. We wish we could have anticipated the amount of anxiety we might experience during a PhD program."
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