I feel a little guilty for starting off this blog post on a negative note, but now that I’ve had time to slow down, be a slob in the comfort of mum’s home, and copious time to allow my brain to just reflect on and process things (with the help of kava), the overbearing feeling is:

“I really fucking hate my brain.”

I hate that I can’t just do things. I hate that I can’t consistently sit down and bash out the most important thing to do on my to-do list whenever I want to. Everything I want to do needs to be triaged appropriately and then a combination of factors (including the all-so-random intrinsic motivation) all need to line up perfectly for me to comfortably ‘just’ do it. If not, then my brain will churn (sometimes far too much) additional mental energy to just push through it. Thankfully I’m better at picking up on moments where I know I don’t even have the mental gas to begin with!
(If you don’t know me already, then it’s worth mentioning here that I do possess traits and behaviours similar to those with ADHD and autism. At some point I’ll get a proper diagnosis, but the last sentence was a commentary on executive dysfunction, if you didn’t pick it.)

And I knew going in that this PhD topic was not something I could see myself be intrinsically passionate about, but it certainly is consistent with my personal values: it’s in mathematical biology with an end-goal of benefiting wound healing treatments, so it benefits humans; not oil/mining companies; not anything in economics/finance/money (which to me is a very arbitrary human construction – one can argue the same about mathematics, but that’s a different conversation that needs some nuance-exploring). An acceptable alternative would be something that contributes towards environmental conservation, much like what a significant proportion of the mathematical biology community does.

But what does it mean if I’m not intrinsically motivated? It means that I have to set up a system where I’m regularly disciplined enough to do PhD things, even if they’re things that I don’t want to do. And one of the good things for me this year has been being able to figure out such a system that makes sense to my otherwise occasionally chaotic brain.

My current work/productivity system (for when I have too much autonomy)

We start with the assumption that the average adult has 4 hours per day where they can do their “most creative focused work”, “deep thinking”, whatever you want to call it. For me, this is consistently true, except sometimes it’s 3 hours (or less) because I consciously have to think about non-PhD stuff. And for me this includes stuff that I just have to push myself to do.

To an outside observer it seems that I work in bursts (or sprints) of roughly 1.5-2 hours each, so it follows that in a typical productive work day I should have on average, two of these bursts that is consciously directed towards work.

This does not necessarily mean I’m visibly 100% productive within those bursts. Sometimes it looks like I’m doomscrolling or playing games on my phone, procrastinating on getting a task done. I’ve come to accept that, at least consistent with the observation that phrase transitions (and more generally speaking, change) can be mentally difficult for neurodivergent people, this behaviour happens because my brain has not yet mentally prepared to do the things that I’m planning to do. After experimenting with leaning into it more, I’d say roughly 75% of the time I’m able to do the pre-planned task after said procrastination, but 25% of the time it’s because I actually just do not have gas in the tank and my brain hadn’t caught up to that realisation yet.

Sometimes what happens is that I know what I want to do but it feels so much easier to knock out all the less important things on my to-do list (cleaning up my email inbox is a common recurring one). And I’ve found it easier to just lean into it, because it’s like a form of mental decluttering. Now the clutter’s gone, and I have the clarity I needed to execute what I originally wanted to do! Yay!

What could go wrong?

Post-food-sleepiness – this has proven exceptionally frustrating in the last few months because generally I like to eat big meals so I have less meals to think about preparing. However in the last few months, eating one means I’m pretty much mentally knocked out for the next ~1.5 hours or so, meaning that I have to properly time what I eat. My current go-to meal prep is white rice + brown rice + chickpeas, frozen vegetables, and some meat on top, and the portion size is such that it sufficiently keeps me full for a good 6-8 hours. The plan next year is to experiment with smaller portion sizes and trying to keep myself topped off between meals with liquids or snacks.
MY MAIN POINT IS that when I’m sleepy I can’t work.

Afternoon slumps – At this stage I’m very certain this comes from after eating a heavier meal for lunch. Because sometimes I’ll purposely eat a big meal in the morning expecting it to last me the whole day, supplement with coffee/stimulant drink at lunch, and usually that means I’m sufficiently awake in the afternoon to do things. But not necessarily with the right executive function to actually do work things. More experimenting to come.

Strategically timing breaks – If I work two straight days in a row, I need at least half a day off on the third day. So after working Mon/Tues, I’ll need at least a half-day off on Wednesday where I’ll only get one burst session done. Otherwise if I work all day on Wednesday I need to take all of either Thursday or Friday off.
In addition, at least once a week (usually Saturdays) I designate a day where I intentionally “let my brain do whatever it wants”. If my brain wants to work because I’ve got a rare burst of intrinsic motivation, then I’ll go do that, but otherwise, it’s pretty obvious that my brain is like a stubborn kid that needs its own “wandering around” time to expend its own energy.

(Sometimes unexpected) external influences/commitments e.g. supervisor meetings, teaching, emotional whiplashes – Scheduled events are generally easy to organise around. Teaching is something that I don’t have to consciously think about or prepare anymore unless it’s a new subject area and/or I’m not familiar with the content. Supervisor meetings definitely require a bit of preparation, at least one burst’s worth, but some weeks I’m lazy and end up doing it last minute.
Unexpected emotional whiplashes are an interesting one. One of the more obvious ones is perhaps I’m spending a little too much time on social media, and I randomly see/read something that upsets me, and generally I’ll need to put aside time to emotionally recover. This one is controllable to an extent – as I write, in the surrounding days I’m intending to remove social media apps from my primary phone and only access them on my secondary device (that cannot be a phone because of the stupid 3G-being-disabled-for-emergency-calls thingy, and I’d bought this one first before I learnt of the news). The other major one that caught me out of the blue was imposter syndrome – all 4 of my maths supervisors were willing to come together on a Friday morning to listen me practise a talk over Zoom, and that emotionally knocked me out for the next two hours.

The constant yearning of wanting life to be easier

Casual tutoring was easy in comparison. I’d be assigned classes, tutorial sheets, curriculum, negotiate timetabling between 2-3 universities, and once the semester got going all I had to do was just turn up and expend a predictable amount of energy every week. Students would come to me with questions, and I could easily pull from my bank of knowledge and/or figure out an answer.

But I do know at some point when it was all getting a little too predictable and ‘more of the same’, especially towards the end of my last job. If I had continued to stay my full term I would have went part time in my final semester, because there was kind of a long term burnout happening in terms of no longer being excited about the work anymore. And I imagine very quickly afterwards I would have gotten very sick of teaching, so this PhD opportunity came at a very opportune time.

In comparison, in this PhD, I have to self-direct a lot more and I still feel like even though I’m closer to figuring out a system that works for me it feels like I still struggle against it. I suspect it’s probably because my ideal ratio of full-time work that I’d like to feasibly commit to is more of a 0.7-0.8-ish rather than full time. Indeed, as I work through this PhD there has been a constant feeling of “Ugh I need something easy and physical and repetitive to do” of which the crocheting is definitely one source of comfort, but it’d be nicer if it was something I could make a bit of cash from as well!

More normal things people usually reflect on

Starting out in a new area and building relationships from scratch; relationship status

I’d known theoretically that building good relationships (in general, not necessarily only with respect to work colleagues) is really contingent on common, consistent, small, intentional and ideally meaningful interactions, and this year has had many opportunities for me to try and commit to that.

The first one I remember was realising that at work, there’s a regular habit in my building for people to eat lunch together at the (single) communal lunch table, so it made sense for me to try and commit to being part of the group, even if I couldn’t follow the conversation or wasn’t hungry.

There’s many other examples that’ve happened, but I wanted to fast forward to what I’m trying to figure out now: joining some kind of activity where I don’t know anyone, or maybe have one friend along, and striking up a conversation with someone I don’t know. This is still a very big mental block for me personally, and one that I’m hoping to work on next year.

In terms of close friends, I do have friends where I’m more willing to divulge more personal matters to, but what’s especially been missing is people whose company I could enjoy in person in a much more passive way. The notion of people getting together to ‘hang out’ at the local mall/shopping centre, or to just go to one’s house and veg together in the living room doing whatever, somehow that notion had never occurred to me for a long time. I’d always thought that doing things with close friends had to be organised and intentional events, so in attempting to chip away at this notion I do hope to do something more regular and casual with….people, that’s like, going to a third place (pub, shopping mall) and just shooting the shit, so to speak.

The implication of all of the above with respect to my relationship status should be pretty obvious: I’m still single. But there’s nonetheless a growing feeling of wanting to settle down somewhere, put down roots and start a family. I realised this when my landlady was babysat a friend’s dogs for a week. When I’d come home I’d be greeted by loud barking, and these two dogs were just very happy to see me. It doesn’t have to be pets necessarily, it’s like when a father comes home and his children are excited to see him. It’s the feeling of coming home and knowing that someone’s excited to see you, and I hope to have that at some point in my life as well.
I’m still sworn off dating apps, and I think improving in-person social skills is important, but I can’t deny that it’s difficult. My primary mistake in assuming dating apps were viable to begin with was assuming that I’d be able to find similarly internet-brained people that I could talk more openly with from the get go, but this has very much not been the case.

Career progression

It doesn’t feel like there should be much to say on this point, but as I’ve been saying to others, a lot of new opportunities have really opened up for me this past year now that I have a lot more autonomy and mobility.

The should-have-been-predictable thing is that since I have to consciously direct my working energy towards my PhD work, the creative side of my brain has been springing off in random directions. Crochet + other crafting activities have kept the leisure side occupied on that front, but on the academic side…

• The more I’ve been talking about maths accessibility, the more maths educators/academics are coming to me with very specific stories of helping specific students with certain disabilities of which they figured out a good-enough solution, and in the accessibility industry it seems like a handful of people have had to randomly consider small cases of making maths accessible on the internet. Have I chanced upon something? Is there something here that I could turn into a part-time consulting gig? I’m going to keep trying at this but I honestly don’t know what can/would come out of this.
• I’ve found a local maths education academic who’s also hard-of-hearing, like me! Her focus is on primary/secondary maths education, so while my experience in tertiary is obviously not the same I’d posit there’s at least overarching themes and similarities.
• In one of my supervisor meetings an innocuous question I asked one of my biology supervisors has led to something that might be a potential grant opportunity for one of my maths supervisors. I’m not going to make any assumptions about what that means for me personally – the dream scenario is that some additional grant comes by meaning they can offer me a postdoc, but I think it’s safest to assume that after this PhD I’ll have to find an opportunity elsewhere. So in my usual “grossly overpreparing for an uncertain future” state I’m putting out feelers in different directions (as implied by the last two points).

There are also various personal projects (making music, Youtube videos, etc.) that I’m slowly inching forwards on that could turn into other opportunities, but given the advent of AI slop I think content creation is not likely going to be a stable paying career for me in the long run. However given that I do see individual creators spin up a Patreon, and I know some others do spin up and maintain micro-businesses (the sheer domination of Shopify is very noticeable), there’s no denying that I could probably figure out something on that front.

Hobbies

Crochet while catching on anime, movies and TV shows has dominated hobby-times. I’ve been chipping away at various crochet projects throughout the year, and it’s been fun. It’s also nice that I can just take a crochet project along with me and ‘just do it’ in some random public place. I also don’t have any fear of judgement about doing it.

Cello playing is still happening, but I’ve hit a mental roadblock in terms of making progress on the projects that I want to do, which is making song covers for more structurally complex pieces (arrangements of classical music pieces is easy for me, it’s really more transcribing and distilling even just relatively simple pop songs). I think next year I’ll bite the bullet and experiment with commissioning a transcription/arrangement, and ideally I’ll land someone (who’s also a cellist ) that I can comfortably pay privately to do more of those.

Cooking is going. I’m still occasionally trying to make new and different things and striking a balance between “Oooh let’s make something new!” vs “Okay let’s just have a week where I throw things into the airfryer.”

Mental health

I think for the most part I’ve managed to keep it in check fairly well, in the sense that I’m very aware of the actions I take and how they impact on my mental health, as well as being aware of my body’s warning signs and when I was consciously pushing my limits. I’d read plenty of bad PhD experiences (mostly on /r/PhD) to know that staying on top of one’s mental health is pretty important. Having been through the trenches of poor mental health and burnout, it’s safe to say that being older has its advantages here!

That’s not to say the PhD itself wasn’t without its challenges to my mental health. There’s a temptation to panic and overwork and guilt trip oneself, especially when I have shitty weeks with low productivity. Approaching (higher ranked) academics for help is getting easier; I’ve figured out my imposter syndrome is linked to my perception of how senior I see these academics and making assumptions on how busy they are and devaluing myself in comparison to their perceived activities. Dealing with PhD-related administration (at this stage, student grants, conferences, travel, pre-approvals, etc.) is surprisingly difficult at times – they’re very straightforward tasks to do but my brain views them as especially mundane and tedious, so they’re usually either best done first-thing in the morning or when I’m in an adrenaline-fueled last-minute panic rush.

There was one time that I willingly and consciously pushed myself beyond my body’s warning limits and definitely experienced a bit of burnout. In my defence I was preparing for some 4-5 talks and I knew this extended Christmas break was coming up, so I knew I’d have ample time afterwards to recover.

Undeniably there’s a buzzing undercurrent of “Ugh, I wish I was capable of doing more because I feel so slow” which for the most part I’m able to just push aside and focus on meaningfully doing tasks. Treating things more on a day-to-day or short-term weekly/monthly basis rather than trying to assess a project from above, essentially.

Imposter syndrome hasn’t been as bad as some people might describe it to be (there have been one or two very dramatic postings on /r/PhD). Probably the main part of it is because having been in academia and teaching it’s easy to casually chat with the staff about various ongoings, and for the most part I feel I can talk to the fellow academics in my building as if they were equals. As mentioned earlier, I did have a particular bad imposter syndrome whiplash recently, so it’s not all completely gone.

Social media quality has definitely dipped over the past year or so, I’ve removed social media apps on my primary phone, still browsing on secondary phone (which cannot use a SIM because the 3G-emergency thing doesn’t work) and home PC, but generally not checking on work PC. At the same time I’m also consciously unfollowing people who regularly (re)post about politics and stuff – it’s ironic that I did grumble earlier in this year that I wish I had a “Turn off US politics” button instead of consciously putting in the time to properly curate my following. Let’s hope this results in improved mental health next year with less time wasted on doomscrolling!

Zooming out…

I’m definitely in a better place than last year, except in terms of living situation given that I’m back to being in a sharehouse as opposed to living on my own.

2025 has been challenging in various ways, but I know I’ve been making steady progress on figuring a lot of things out.

There’s a lot to be grumpy about; there’s lots of times I want to be a grandpa yelling at the kids to get off my lawn (especially since I have to teach uni kids and watch wistfully as their reliance on AI nukes their thinking capabilities) and a lot of times where I just want to retreat out to somewhere remote, take care of my mum and live a boring day-to-day life.

But there’s also a lot to look forward to and be optimisic about. Some of my friends pointed out what I’d been doing is pretty normal for first-year PhDs: an explosion of activity, and within these I’ve had the time and autonomy to figure out and discover other things that I’m also passionate about that can also lead into other opportunities.

Something that’s been new to me this year is people coming up to me individually and taking me, and/or sharing their stories. This is mostly on the maths accessibility side of things, but has also happened in various spots here and there. It’s strange. I’m not used to being appreciated. People usually just tend to leave me alone. I haven’t figured out how to internalise it, but if I go by the mantra “Encourage behaviour you want to keep seeing”, then these are all undeniably useful data points to keep in mind.

That said, I’d theorised that it takes me 1 year to properly settle into a new place. Or at least, after the 1 year mark it feels like I have more confidence in being more adventurous. I first felt this with my place back in Melbourne, and now I’m feeling the same here in Adelaide, so hopefully more new and interesting things to come in 2026!