Using pop songs to maintain good mental health in academia

It is increasingly clear that mental health and wellbeing is as important as physical wellbeing. As most of the things in your body that can be physically broken can to, a greater or lesser, extent, be replaced or fixed, keeping the one thing that makes you, you, working is vital. Since it is Mental Health Awareness Week, I wanted to explore some of the challenges to mental health that come from working academia and how I attempt to cope with them.

I think I do need to make the following disclaimers:

1. I have no psychiatric, counselling or any other useful type of training, this is just how I try and deal with the things that derail me.
2.  None of these ideas are actually mine, most of them have come from discussions with my mate Alan (@alanvfoster).
3. Everyone is different and every situation is different but these have worked for me.
4.  I’ve probably put in too many, but was on a roll.
5. If all else fails and you get bored – can you name the artists that sung the subheadings?

The only way is up?

An academic career is structured like a pyramid (to be honest, it sometimes seems like a Mayan pyramid, with a priest waiting to throw you off the top). At each step up there are seemingly fewer opportunities and these are in competition with brighter, more hard working, more successful individuals. Sadly the likeminded people on my final year course with whom I used to drink too much and play stupid games with at the back of the lecture hall have all left science and are now working in the city. That leaves only the people from the front of the class, the ones who turned up on time, read the papers, asked the questions (there is another whole blog here on education being wasted on the young, but I digress). This competitive feeling is only accentuated by the emphasis on high impact, big money etc and comparing yourself to other apparently more successful individuals can have a wearing effect. It can be most difficult at big conferences, I went to one once and the best description of it was a “Total Perspective Vortex”, in which ‘you are put into the Vortex and are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of immunology, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "Your research is here."’ (Heavily paraphrased from Douglas Adams. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. 1981).

Coping strategy # 1. Compare Down, never up. Never bench mark yourself against anyone else. Don’t think Dr A is younger, faster, smarter, nicer and has 6 nature papers. Say I have just done X, I am based at Y and I am blessed. If you (like me) are unable to view the world as anything other than a competition, find someone whose job you would hate and thank your lucky stars, some possibilities – sewage worker, children’s entertainer or corporate lawyer. This may reek of smugness/ arrogance, but you don’t have to tell anyone you are doing it (unless you are blogging about it) and if it gets you through the bad days then all’s well that ends well.

Loser

The experience for many people in academia to a certain point is a string of successes, without any real failure at anything (except maybe sport – but we tell ourselves that sporting success doesn’t really count). Coasted through school, got into first choice university, PhD in some high prestige lab, Science paper in post doc and then suddenly failure, remorseless, relentless failure. Failure to get an academic position, first grant idea smashed, second grant idea crushed, third idea not even reviewed, promotion overlooked, first senior author paper rejected by the journal of negative results for being too negative. Academia is basically a litany of failure, punctuated with a few ephemeral beacons of success.

Coping strategy #2. Treat these imposters just the same.  Read Mindset . If you don’t have the time/ don’t like self help books, in a nut shell you need shift the way you view success and failure. View each knockback as an opportunity to learn, for example grant A was turned down because of a lack of clinical relevance: better find a clinician to collaborate with. I ruined a work trip to Thailand by sulking for a week about my first grant rejection, I have got my sulking time down to a lunch time, though I probably owe my colleagues an apology for my behaviour that lunch time – in my defence they had just told me they were voting Tory. My mentor has got this down to such a Zen like art that he viewed a recent grant rejection as a positive opportunity.

Nothing else matters

We live and work in a bubble, surrounded by other academics, comparing up to other academics (or not– since you are following coping strategy 1), often married to other academics, or worse still to people from funding bodies who constantly meet all the smarter-brighter-better people! Sometimes we can lose perspective. Falling out with someone who you’ve known for years over middle author order on a paper in a journal that most people outside academia might have only ever heard of in the guest publication round in ‘Have I got news for you’ in the same breath as Sandwich and Snack News, is probably an over-reaction.

Coping strategy #3. Step outside, smell the flowers. I am very, very happy to work in academia, at Imperial College with all the amazing colleagues and opportunities it provides. But occasionally, I need to remind myself it isn’t everything, there are other jobs out there – there are even other universities (though this is harder to imagine). Take time out to do something else and clear your head. The simplest thing that restores harmony for me is walking between campuses across Hyde Park, stopping to admire the Henry Moore or Peter Pan.

Love the one you’re with

There are going to be aspects of the job that you don’t enjoy, individuals that you have to give more to and get less from, marking, ordering stationery, marking, fixing the broken drains in the labs, marking. If you are having an underlying bad day anyway, doing some of these timekillers can really push you further down.

Coping strategy #4 (&5). Shape the job, ignore the crap. Now that you have finished reading mindset, read 168 hours . It has a lot of advice about maximising the fun stuff in your work and life and reducing the drudgery. One particular piece of advice that stuck with me was that there is no perfect job out there and you have to shape your job to the way you want (and that this will change over time). The other thing that works for me is just to ignore all the rubbish until it is screaming so loudly you can’t ignore it any more, this way you get more of the important/ fun things done before ticking everything else off.

Jealous guy

Every so often, I will see some high impact paper, conference proceeding or grant that I have unsuccessfully applied for and see the name of a colleague/ friend and have a moment of extreme jealousy. I call this the Bibby effect after a good friend who claimed his PhD was going nowhere right up to the moment he published two nature papers. It may just be me, but seeing the people who you are similar in career stage to getting ahead is always slightly challenging! When my wife was an academic and we were applying for the same pot of money, the idea that one of us would succeed and one fail in the same round was not conducive to a happy home!

Coping strategy #6. Be pleased for people. It takes practice, a bit of cursing in the office when they aren’t there and a bit of being prepped in advance so you don’t have to pretend otherwise, but be pleased for people when they succeed. It turns out that success is not mutually exclusive, it’s a big enough world and there are several bits of cake. Furthermore, success probably breeds success, being at an institute where people are doing good work rubs off a bit on you and is one of the things funders are looking for in an application. Finally if you can be happy for other people, they will probably do the same for you.

Pickin on me

Criticism is hard to take. Criticism about something you have thought up from scratch and taken months to carefully craft every word harder. Criticism about something you have thought up from scratch and taken months to carefully craft every word from someone close to you, can feel impossible. It feels like a personal attack or even a stab in the back.

Coping strategy # 7. They are helping YOU! Call it something else – instant feedback is a term we have borrowed from friends. It has taken a lot of practice and I am still rally bad at it, but I am slowly getting better at taking the feedback on board – if your mentor, boss, partner can’t understand what you are saying when they have taken time to read it, the busy reviewer doing it the night before the deadline on minimum sleep because their baby just woke up won’t either. Ultimately it is better to get the feedback before submission than after rejection.

Where’s your head at

Teach, write papers, submit grants, fix the plumbing, mentor students, write references, read papers and so on and so forth. Normally this ends up with waking up at 4 am with head in overload, especially if there is something acute and stressful at work – grant deadlines normally. I would like to claim to be a reasonably well socialised academic, not often shouting at colleagues or sending them have you done it yet emails too often (hopefully my students won’t read this). However when a deadline is looming I get a bit tense/ turn into grantzilla.

Coping strategy # 8. Mindfulness. Essentially meditation rebranded. This one works for me (Headspace). But there are others, find one, choke back cynicism give it a go.

The long and winding road

What will my legacy be? I haven’t got any “high impact” papers. No one else rates the work I am doing. I am worthless.

Coping strategy # 9. It’ll all come out in the wash. Who was the last deputy prime minister, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize for medicine, what was the most cited paper in Science last year? These things at the time seem incredibly important and probably are at the time, but in the long run, fade into the overall scheme of things. I saw a brilliant talk by Prof Jon Yewdell from the NIH in the USA, who said our job as scientists is to train the next generation of scientists, not to worry about what is high impact at the time. Who could have predicted that fluorescent jelly fish would change the way we do science. Likewise Commander Chris Hadfield (the real Major Tom) said one of the most grounding things after landing on earth was seeing the plaque from your mission go up on the wall and the machinery simply roll onto the next mission.  If you are having fun, training good people and doing good science, you are doing enough.

Everybody’s talkin’

I have been lucky so far not to suffer from poor mental health, but have experience of friends and family who have. With hindsight, it is easy to speculate what the events were that triggered these episodes and keeping an eye out for them. But talking about good and poor mental health is really important. Talk to people, several departments at Imperial run mentoring schemes. If you’re department doesn’t, find yourself one – choose someone in your field who you admire (and more importantly like) and go and talk to them about career, most academics love to talk and give advice so this should be straightforward. Talk to your friends/ family/ dog/ Vicar

Coping strategy #10. Talk.

Pop quiz answers

The only way is up – Yazz and the plastic population

Loser – Beck

Nothing else matters – Metallica

Love the one you’re with – Stephen Stills

Jealous Guy – John Lennon

Pickin’ on me – Skunk Anansie

Where’s your head at – Basement Jaxx

The Long and winging road – The Beatles

Everybody’s talkin’ – Harry Nilson

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Explaining the paper: MF59 mediates its B cell adjuvanticity by promoting T follicular helpers and thus germinal center responses in adult and early life.

The immunological pain of childbirth

Birth is a traumatic event, immunologically speaking. Babies go from the controlled environment of the womb where everything is filtered out by the mother to the bacteria, virus and fungus filled world. All of which is new to the baby, some of which can kill the baby, but most of which is harmless. We are slowly improving our understanding of how babies respond to this new environment and this is particularly important in the development of vaccines. In a recent paper by Beatris Mastelic Gavillet et al (sciency way of saying and others) published in the Journal of Immunology that I was fortunate enough to contribute to, the vaccine response in early life was explored.

Adjuvants improve vaccines

The paper demonstrates that normally vaccine responses in early life are poor, but the addition of MF-59 significantly boosts the vaccine response. What is MF-59? It is one of a class of drugs called adjuvants, which are added to vaccines to improve the immune response to them. They work by a variety of mechanisms, but very broadly speaking they act as a red flag to the body to say that the vaccine is foreign and that it would be good to mount an immune response to it. The paper drilled down further into the type of response and the lead authors found that a specific white blood cell called a T follicular helper or Tfh was central to this. Our understanding about these Tfh is relatively recent, but they appear to be critical in helping another white cell called the B cell make antibodies. My lab’s contribution to the paper was to show that when the vaccine plus adjuvant was used in early life it protected against influenza infection. This work suggests approaches to improve vaccines in early life, either by the inclusion of safe and effective adjuvants like MF59 or by developing novel strategies to target this vital cell (the Tfh). The next step will be to assess these vaccines as part of the infant vaccination schedule.

Collaborative science in the EU

My involvement in this study came about thanks to a unique EU funded project called Aditec in which 42 research partners from both industry and academia from 13 countries have come together to create a network of excellence in vaccine design and development. As a relatively junior academic, it has been a remarkable opportunity for me to work in close proximity with world leaders whilst moving my own research forward. This kind of opportunity would not necessarily be open if the UK were to leave the EU and it may be a small part of the argument about the future of the UK in the EU, but an important one, if we were to leave, it is unlikely that this level of funding would be available and as such UK science would suffer. Something else to think about on May 7^th!

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There’s never a convenient time to have children: Academia and Family, can they be balanced?

A friend once told us “There’s a never a good time to have children, they’ll always cock up your life”. Inspired by a seminar at work about balancing academia and family life, I wanted to think about my own experience.

Timing

Academia is inherently unstable as a job, especially at the early stages of the career when you are most likely to have children. It doesn’t get much better the higher up the ivory tower you climb, the good old days of tenured professors sitting in their rooms drinking sherry are sadly long gone, but it is certainly at the most acute at the post doc level. Short term contracts, highly competitive fields and shrinking research budgets all contribute to this lack of job security. The received wisdom given these circumstances is to wait until both partners are in ‘permanent’ positions. In our case, we decided on balance that we would regret not having children more than not winning the Nobel Prize (though I still have my eye on it). Even within the normal bounds of academic instability, our situation at the time we chose to have children was not ideal. I had less than a year on my contract and my wife less than 2. However, in a roundabout way, having children has actually led to greater job security for both of us. Yes, we are no longer able to work the mythical 60 hour week, but it turns out this doesn’t matter as much as pushy supervisors might claim. If you do 60 hour weeks, you probably get more done, but probably not as much as twice as much and arguably (though this may just be self-delusion) in the creative process of science, and science is creative, less is more. Clearing the mind, changing space, doing something else, all enable inspirations. The rare flashes of genius I have don’t usually occur while staring at the screen for hours on end, rather they occur in the bath, whilst at gigs, after a 5 minute power nap at my desk or while running. A 60 hour week is only more effective if you actually spend the 60 hours doing work, having children has a focussing effect on the mind – if you know you have 10 vital things to do before 5 pm you are much more likely to do them than if you have 5 things to do but have until 10pm – I may no longer be as up to date with what the latest vacuous celebrity clothes horse du jour is doing or what animal I would be on buzzfeed, but I probably get more done these days.

Most of all I would like to thank my family

So how did my children help me get ahead in science? Beyond focussing the mind, my son directly contributed to me getting my lectureship. I work on severe respiratory infections in children and when he was 6 months old, my son decided that the way to celebrate our first holiday would be to get a severe respiratory infection. Now it would be nice to claim that this inspired me, seeing the impact on the infant and the emotional stress to the parents. The truth, however, is a bit more prosaic. As normal when going on holiday I had brought with me some token work to pretend I am going to get some done, in this case, a talk for my lectureship interview. Normally, this would sit quietly in my bag, in the boot of the car for the whole time, untouched. This time because we were stuck in a hospital room for 5 days (and once the very worst had passed – I am not a total monster), I ended up practicing and re-practicing my presentation in front of my wife. This was a tough crowd as my wife is the person I find it hardest to take work criticism from (I avoid drilling down too far into what that says about my fragile ego). But at the end of the hospital-room presentation boot camp I delivered my most polished talk, I actually knew what slides were coming next and for once didn’t have a slight feeling of surprise as to the order the talk was in. I don’t know how much this contributed to me getting the job, but it probably didn’t hurt matters.

Everyone has bad days

The other issue around timing is that children or not, life will occasionally give you a bum deal and certainly when these times occur on the back of the chronic sleep deprivation that is a cornerstone of parenting they can feel insurmountable. But not talking about them and stoically suffering on is not the solution. We had our year with 2 job changes, 2 house moves, cancer, new school, new nanny and 3 months of a recurring sleep disrupting staph infection during the worst winter for 15 years. I put this in not as a one-downmanship/ Monty Python you were lucky I had to sleep on street and eat nowt but coal tale, but rather to show that everyone has bad times and everyone comes through the other side more or less unscathed. I accept this is a bit preachy – but I am lifting this from a ‘motivational’ talk I had to give at work: do you feel motivated?

We want to be together

There are a huge number of considerations the parent staying at home has to weigh up. It is a sad but true to say that as a society we are not at the stage where the father has to make the decision whether to stay home. The single piece of dialogue directed at me in the course of an hour during a library stay and play when my son was young was: “Ooh , hairy knees we don’t often see those, thus reaffirming this gender bias and confirming my lack of desire to be a stay at home dad. The decision for my wife to continue working was down to her but fully supported by me, fortunately it was also my preference. My personal experience therefore comes from how to best manage parenthood as an equal partnership. We think we have some tips that have helped:       

1. Compartmentalise. Guilt is a wasted emotion. To quote a senior professor – you’ll end up feeling guilty when you’re at home for not doing enough work and feeling guilty at work for not being at home enough. However, this guilt gets you nowhere. I am lucky, most of the time I am totally absorbed in the present so when I shut the door the children cease to exist to me until the walk home from the station.
2. Who is doing the most important/ client facing work right now? Children get sick. Often. At these times one of you has to drop everything and go and get them. We have borrowed a friend’s model of whoever is earning the most money/ business that minute gets to stay at work. (Though you can game this a bit by keeping your phone off – don’t tell my wife!). 
3. Be a kept man. Having 2 full salaries is amazing, even with the massive childcare bills. The peace of mind that if it all goes tits up the other person can pay the mortgage takes a lot of the stress of the job away allowing more creative thinking. Furthermore, we have noticed that after taking a dip during the early years, my wife’s salary is now (very nearly) exceeding mine.
4. Outsource. The majority of child raising is boring and repetitive. I thoroughly recommend working hard to pay for someone else to do this. No one will ever remember how well you did or didn’t do the washing up or how clean the toilet was. 168 hours is a life changing book and we invest some of the time we get back from not cleaning in being better parents, scientists and people, admittedly some of it goes into binge watching the wire. We also get to congratulate ourselves for contributing to the economy, reinvesting our earnings in someone else’s salary (and tax)!

Vague take home message

Children are a fun, dynamic force for change in your life, each year will be nothing like the last and the future is unpredictable. Yes, you occasionally have to sit through class 3S performing a cover of cotton eyed Joe and sit there watching the clock as you have a grants meeting in 60 minutes time for which you have done no preparation. But I think I am (probably) a better, happier, more empathetic boss for having children and a wife who works full time.

#whywedoresearch

#whyweREALLYdoresearch

The combination of too much time spent alone in dark cold rooms watching colourless liquids dripping into other colourless liquids, a strongly developed sense of cynicism and access to the internet has led to an explosion of tweets that puncture the veil of scientists being aesthetes pursuing the truth. One of my favourite hashtags is #overlyhonestmethods and @AcademicsSay reposts many of these, I would thoroughly recommend reading them, though maybe after you have read this. Another science hashtag that is doing the rounds is #whywedoresearch. I suspect we also need an alternative #whyweREALLYdoresearch, some of them being:

I was rubbish at sport at school

It’s indoors work with no heavy lifting

Because in science I appear normal

Maybe next time will be the leap home

How Did I end up Here?

But then I thought a bit more about it and wondered why I actually do research and “How did I end up here?” There is a certain waking-up-in-a-cold-sweat/take the red pill feeling to the phrase How did I get here and there are times when I do ask myself this question with more stress on the Here than the How. But focussing on the how and stretching a bit the answer is: Johnny Ball, Tomorrow’s world, an aptitude for numbers and factual recall, a primary school science teacher who let us burn, explode and investigate our way through the chemical store once a term, a secondary school teacher with a love of wine and another who challenged the widely held assertion of students that it was only interesting or of value if on the curriculum, a professor who stored his cheese in different temperature controlled labs throughout the university for optimum maturation and a moment of clarity in the woods in northern New Jersey.

Why I do research

As to the why, science is cool, landing a washing machine on a comet, splitting the atom, eradicating small pox, solving the structure of DNA, glow in the dark jellyfish cool. Science is infinite, there is no solution to any of the problems, with each answer spinning off another series of deeper more fascinating questions. You never have to grow out of the “yes but why” stage of toddlerhood and get to ask questions about everything. It also impresses my son, I may not be able to kick a ball in a straight line, but I am a white coat wearing, Scientist and when he grows up he wants to be a professional footballer who does research – the mind boggles as to what the redtops would make of that! Finally, there is (arguably) some value to the work, though it is a bit of stretch sometimes to see how my pipetting miniscule volumes of colourless (not clear) liquid will change the world/ save lives/ rebalance the global economy, there is always a just maybe feeling to it, which I arrogantly like to tell myself you wouldn’t necessarily get by being a tax accountant – though in part this is just self-justification to make up for the lack of salary. Whilst what we do most days does not tick all of the above boxes we do slowly chisel away at the rockface allowing these glimpses to be seen.

Tools of the trade

After working away from the office all day I thought I would take stock of what I had felt to be the essentials and carried around with me all day. Not sure what this says about me really, but was amused by the things that I think are ‘essential’.

One man bag

Headphones

Spare headphones

Laptop and charger, mouse

2 pens and One broken pencil

Imperial College branded Notepad and spare notepad

Scientific papers to review (unread)

Students exam papers (unmarked)

Highbrow science journal (unopened)

Some work to do (undone)

Less highbrow news magazine (gossip and entertainment sections read)

Nerdy sci-fi book (reading whilst feeling guilty about not doing work on commute)

Gloves and My granny’s scarf

Glasses case

Waterproof map cases (large and small)

Glasses case

Running things, trainers, socks etc

Shampoo, shower gel and towel

iPhone and charger

Wallet, keys, swipe card

High vis arm band? Purpose unknown

Lunch

Snack