stress management phd thesis

Management of Stress and Anxiety Among PhD Students During Thesis Writing: A Qualitative Study

Affiliation.

• 1 Author Affiliations: Department of Medical Education, Medical Education Research Center, University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan (Drs Bazrafkan, Yousefi, and Yamani); and Applied Linguistics, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (Dr Shokrpour), Shiraz, Iran.
• PMID: 27455365
• DOI: 10.1097/HCM.0000000000000120

Today, postgraduate students experience a variety of stresses and anxiety in different situations of academic cycle. Stress and anxiety have been defined as a syndrome shown by emotional exhaustion and reduced personal goal achievement. This article addresses the causes and different strategies of coping with this phenomena by PhD students at Iranian Universities of Medical Sciences. The study was conducted by a qualitative method using conventional content analysis approach. Through purposive sampling, 16 postgraduate medical sciences PhD students were selected on the basis of theoretical sampling. Data were gathered through semistructured interviews and field observations. Six hundred fifty-four initial codes were summarized and classified into 4 main categories and 11 subcategories on the thematic coding stage dependent on conceptual similarities and differences. The obtained codes were categorized under 4 themes including "thesis as a major source of stress," "supervisor relationship," "socioeconomic problem," and "coping with stress and anxiety." It was concluded that PhD students experience stress and anxiety from a variety of sources and apply different methods of coping in effective and ineffective ways. Purposeful supervision and guidance can reduce the cause of stress and anxiety; in addition, coping strategy must be in a thoughtful approach, as recommended in this study.

• Academic Dissertations as Topic*
• Adaptation, Psychological
• Anxiety / psychology*
• Education, Graduate
• Interviews as Topic
• Qualitative Research
• Stress, Psychological / psychology*
• Students, Medical / psychology*

The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

PhDs are renowned for being stressful and when you add a global pandemic into the mix it’s no surprise that many students are struggling with their mental health. 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.

Please note that I am by no means an expert in this area. I’ve worked in seven different labs before, during and after my PhD so I have a fair idea of research stress but even so, I don’t have all the answers.

If you’re feeling burnt out or depressed and finding the pressure too much, please reach out to friends and family or give the Samaritans a call to talk things through.

Note – This post, and its follow on about maintaining PhD motivation were inspired by a reader who asked for recommendations on dealing with PhD fatigue. I love hearing from all of you, so if you have any ideas for topics which you, or others, could find useful please do let me know either in the comments section below or by getting in contact . Or just pop me a message to say hi. 🙂

This post is part of my PhD mindset series, you can check out the full series below:

• PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health (this part!)
• PhD Motivation: How to Stay Driven From Cover Letter to Completion
• How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Studying

What is PhD Burnout?

Whenever I’ve gone anywhere near social media relating to PhDs I see overwhelmed PhD students who are some combination of overwhelmed, de-energised or depressed.

Specifically I often see Americans talking about the importance of talking through their PhD difficulties with a therapist, which I find a little alarming. It’s great to seek help but even better to avoid the need in the first place.

Sadly, none of this is unusual. As this survey shows, depression is common for PhD students and of note: at higher levels than for working professionals.

All of these feelings can be connected to academic burnout.

The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of:

– Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; – Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; – Reduced professional efficacy. Symptoms of burnout as classified by the WHO. Source .

This often leads to students falling completely out of love with the topic they decided to spend years of their life researching!

The pandemic has added extra pressures and constraints which can make it even more difficult to have a well balanced and positive PhD experience. Therefore it is more important than ever to take care of yourself, so that not only can you continue to make progress in your project but also ensure you stay healthy.

What are the Stages of Burnout?

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North developed a 12 stage model of burnout. The following graphic by The Present Psychologist does a great job at conveying each of these.

I don’t know about you, but I can personally identify with several of the stages and it’s scary to see how they can potentially lead down a path to complete mental and physical burnout. I also think it’s interesting that neglecting needs (stage 3) happens so early on. If you check in with yourself regularly you can hopefully halt your burnout journey at that point.

PhDs can be tough but burnout isn’t an inevitability. Here are a few suggestions for how you can look after your mental health and avoid academic burnout.

Overcoming PhD Burnout

Manage your energy levels, maintaining energy levels day to day.

• Eat well and eat regularly. Try to avoid nutritionless high sugar foods which can play havoc with your energy levels. Instead aim for low GI food . Maybe I’m just getting old but I really do recommend eating some fruit and veg. My favourite book of 2021, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reduce Disease , is well worth a read. Not a fan of veggies? Either disguise them or at least eat some fruit such as apples and bananas. Sliced apple with some peanut butter is a delicious and nutritious low GI snack. Check out my series of posts on cooking nutritious meals on a budget.
• Get enough sleep. It doesn’t take PhD-level research to realise that you need to rest properly if you want to avoid becoming exhausted! How much sleep someone needs to feel well-rested varies person to person, so I won’t prescribe that you get a specific amount, but 6-9 hours is the range typically recommended. Personally, I take getting enough sleep very seriously and try to get a minimum of 8 hours.

A side note on caffeine consumption: Do PhD students need caffeine to survive?

In a word, no!

Although a culture of caffeine consumption goes hand in hand with intense work, PhD students certainly don’t need caffeine to survive. How do I know? I didn’t have any at all during my own PhD. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it .

By all means consume as much caffeine as you want, just know that it doesn’t have to be a prerequisite for successfully completing a PhD.

Maintaining energy throughout your whole PhD

• Pace yourself. As I mention later in the post I strongly recommend treating your PhD like a normal full-time job. This means only working 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday. Doing so could help realign your stress, anxiety and depression levels with comparatively less-depressed professional workers . There will of course be times when this isn’t possible and you’ll need to work longer hours to make a certain deadline. But working long hours should not be the norm. It’s good to try and balance the workload as best you can across the whole of your PhD. For instance, I often encourage people to start writing papers earlier than they think as these can later become chapters in your thesis. It’s things like this that can help you avoid excess stress in your final year.
• Take time off to recharge. All work and no play makes for an exhausted PhD student! Make the most of opportunities to get involved with extracurricular activities (often at a discount!). I wrote a whole post about making the most of opportunities during your PhD . PhD students should have time for a social life, again I’ve written about that . Also give yourself permission to take time-off day to day for self care, whether that’s to go for a walk in nature, meet friends or binge-watch a show on Netflix. Even within a single working day I often find I’m far more efficient when I break up my work into chunks and allow myself to take time off in-between. This is also a good way to avoid procrastination!

Reduce Stress and Anxiety

During your PhD there will inevitably be times of stress. Your experiments may not be going as planned, deadlines may be coming up fast or you may find yourself pushed too far outside of your comfort zone. But if you manage your response well you’ll hopefully be able to avoid PhD burnout. I’ll say it again: stress does not need to lead to burnout!

Everyone is unique in terms of what works for them so I’d recommend writing down a list of what you find helpful when you feel stressed, anxious or sad and then you can refer to it when you next experience that feeling.

I’ve created a mental health reminders print-out to refer to when times get tough. It’s available now in the resources library (subscribe for free to get the password!).

Below are a few general suggestions to avoid PhD burnout which work for me and you may find helpful.

• Exercise. When you’re feeling down it can be tough to motivate yourself to go and exercise but I always feel much better for it afterwards. When we exercise it helps our body to adapt at dealing with stress, so getting into a good habit can work wonders for both your mental and physical health. Why not see if your uni has any unusual sports or activities you could try? I tried scuba diving and surfing while at Imperial! But remember, exercise doesn’t need to be difficult. It could just involve going for a walk around the block at lunch or taking the stairs rather than the lift.
• Cook / Bake. I appreciate that for many people cooking can be anything but relaxing, so if you don’t enjoy the pressure of cooking an actual meal perhaps give baking a go. Personally I really enjoy putting a podcast on and making food. Pinterest and Youtube can be great visual places to find new recipes.
• Let your mind relax. Switching off is a skill and I’ve found meditation a great way to help clear my mind. It’s amazing how noticeably different I can feel afterwards, having not previously been aware of how many thoughts were buzzing around! Yoga can also be another good way to relax and be present in the moment. My partner and I have been working our way through 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene on Youtube and I’d recommend it as a good way to ease yourself in. As well as being great for your mind, yoga also ticks the box for exercise!
• Read a book. I’ve previously written about the benefits of reading fiction * and I still believe it’s one of the best ways to relax. Reading allows you to immerse yourself in a different world and it’s a great way to entertain yourself during a commute.

* Wondering how I got something published in Science ? Read my guide here .

Talk It Through

• Meet with your supervisor. Don’t suffer in silence, if you’re finding yourself struggling or burned out raise this with your supervisor and they should be able to work with you to find ways to reduce the pressure. This may involve you taking some time off, delegating some of your workload, suggesting an alternative course of action or signposting you to services your university offers.

Also remember that facing PhD-related challenges can be common. I wrote a whole post about mine in case you want to cheer yourself up! We can’t control everything we encounter, but we can control our response.

A free self-care checklist is also now available in the resources library , providing ideas to stay healthy and avoid PhD burnout.

Top Tips for Avoiding PhD Burnout

On top of everything we’ve covered in the sections above, here are a few overarching tips which I think could help you to avoid PhD burnout:

• Work sensible hours . You shouldn’t feel under pressure from your supervisor or anyone else to be pulling crazy hours on a regular basis. Even if you adore your project it isn’t healthy to be forfeiting other aspects of your life such as food, sleep and friends. As a starting point I suggest treating your PhD as a 9-5 job. About a year into my PhD I shared how many hours I was working .
• Reduce your use of social media. If you feel like social media could be having a negative impact on your mental health, why not try having a break from it?
• Do things outside of your PhD . Bonus points if this includes spending time outdoors, getting exercise or spending time with friends. Basically, make sure the PhD isn’t the only thing occupying both your mental and physical ife.
• Regularly check in on how you’re feeling. If you wait until you’re truly burnt out before seeking help, it is likely to take you a long time to recover and you may even feel that dropping out is your only option. While that can be a completely valid choice I would strongly suggest to check in with yourself on a regular basis and speak to someone early on (be that your supervisor, or a friend or family member) if you find yourself struggling.

I really hope that this post has been useful for you. Nothing is more important than your mental health and PhD burnout can really disrupt that. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions which you think other PhD scholars could find useful please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students: Promises, Challenges, Innovations

• Clinical Psychology
• APH - Mental Health

Research output : PhD Thesis › PhD-Thesis - Research and graduation internal

• stress management
• university students
• higher education
• meta-analysis
• internet-based interventions

Access to Document

• 10.5463/thesis.316 Licence: CC BY-ND
• Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students - cover Final published version, 54.2 KB
• Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students - toc Final published version, 43.2 KB
• Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students - title_page Final published version, 114 KB
• Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students - thesis_redacted Final published version, 3.2 MB

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Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students

Final published version, 6.05 MB

Embargo ends: 3/04/25

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• Meta-Analysis Psychology 100%
• Higher Education Psychology 100%
• Stress Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 100%
• Stress Management Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 100%
• Health Psychology 75%
• Systematic Review Psychology 75%
• Anxiety Psychology 50%
• Depression Psychology 50%

T1 - Stress and stress management interventions in higher education students

T2 - Promises, Challenges, Innovations

AU - Amanvermez, Yaǧmur

PY - 2023/10/11

Y1 - 2023/10/11

N2 - Stress is becoming a growing concern among young adults. Students in higher education are particularly at risk as they encounter several stressors such as academic pressure, financial adversity, and study/life imbalance. When the demands exceed one`s coping capacity, it can negatively influence mental and physical health. Therefore, this thesis is conducted to investigate stress and stress management interventions in higher education students. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the concepts of this thesis namely stress, sources of stress in university students, stress management interventions, and Interned-based interventions. Chapter 2 investigates the sources of stress (i.e., financial, health, love life, relationship with family, relationship with people at work/ school, the health of loved ones, other problems of loved ones, and life in general) among students from two universities in the Netherlands, and examines the associations between student status (i.e., international vs. domestic students) and sources of stress. The results of this chapter showed that international students were more likely to experience financial stress and stress related to the health of their loved ones. Chapter 3 presents the findings of the systematic review and meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) investigating the effects of stress management interventions involving a care provider for college students. Results yielded that stress management interventions had moderate effects on stress, depression, and anxiety. Chapter 4 reports the results of a systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs of self-guided stress management interventions for university students. The overall effects were low-to-moderate. Chapter 5 represents the findings of the systematic review and meta-analysis of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness interventions in university students for stress, depression, and anxiety. Meta-analysis findings yielded moderate effects. Chapter 6 introduces a guided Internet-based stress management intervention (Rel@x) developed for university students with elevated levels of stress and describes the protocol study investigating the feasibility and acceptability of this intervention. Chapter 7 presents the quantitative and qualitative findings of this trial. As a result, students evaluated the intervention as feasible and acceptable. However, high attrition rates and findings from the semi-structured interviews pointed out that intervention should be refined before conducting a large-scale RCT. Lastly, Chapter 8 provides the overarching findings of this thesis alongside clinical and research implications.

AB - Stress is becoming a growing concern among young adults. Students in higher education are particularly at risk as they encounter several stressors such as academic pressure, financial adversity, and study/life imbalance. When the demands exceed one`s coping capacity, it can negatively influence mental and physical health. Therefore, this thesis is conducted to investigate stress and stress management interventions in higher education students. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the concepts of this thesis namely stress, sources of stress in university students, stress management interventions, and Interned-based interventions. Chapter 2 investigates the sources of stress (i.e., financial, health, love life, relationship with family, relationship with people at work/ school, the health of loved ones, other problems of loved ones, and life in general) among students from two universities in the Netherlands, and examines the associations between student status (i.e., international vs. domestic students) and sources of stress. The results of this chapter showed that international students were more likely to experience financial stress and stress related to the health of their loved ones. Chapter 3 presents the findings of the systematic review and meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) investigating the effects of stress management interventions involving a care provider for college students. Results yielded that stress management interventions had moderate effects on stress, depression, and anxiety. Chapter 4 reports the results of a systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs of self-guided stress management interventions for university students. The overall effects were low-to-moderate. Chapter 5 represents the findings of the systematic review and meta-analysis of yoga, meditation, and mindfulness interventions in university students for stress, depression, and anxiety. Meta-analysis findings yielded moderate effects. Chapter 6 introduces a guided Internet-based stress management intervention (Rel@x) developed for university students with elevated levels of stress and describes the protocol study investigating the feasibility and acceptability of this intervention. Chapter 7 presents the quantitative and qualitative findings of this trial. As a result, students evaluated the intervention as feasible and acceptable. However, high attrition rates and findings from the semi-structured interviews pointed out that intervention should be refined before conducting a large-scale RCT. Lastly, Chapter 8 provides the overarching findings of this thesis alongside clinical and research implications.

KW - stress, stressmanagement, universiteitsstudenten, hoger onderwijs, internet interventies

KW - stress

KW - stress management

KW - university students

KW - higher education

KW - meta-analysis

KW - internet-based interventions

U2 - 10.5463/thesis.316

DO - 10.5463/thesis.316

M3 - PhD-Thesis - Research and graduation internal

SN - 9789464731651

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• 13 November 2019

The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Performance management — captured here in photographs from Frank Gilbreth — has long contributed to ill health in researchers. Credit: Kheel Centre

Two years ago, a student responding to Nature ’s biennial PhD survey called on universities to provide a quiet room for “crying time” when the pressures caused by graduate study become overwhelming. At that time , 29% of 5,700 respondents listed their mental health as an area of concern — and just under half of those had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD study.

Things seem to be getting worse.

Respondents to our latest survey of 6,300 graduate students from around the world, published this week, revealed that 71% are generally satisfied with their experience of research, but that some 36% had sought help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD.

These findings echo those of a survey of 50,000 graduate students in the United Kingdom also published this week. Respondents to this survey, carried out by Advance HE, a higher-education management training organization based in York, UK, were similarly positive about their research experiences, but 86% report marked levels of anxiety — a much higher percentage than in the general population. Similar data helped to prompt the first international conference dedicated to the mental health and well-being of early-career researchers in May. Tellingly, the event sold out .

How can graduate students be both broadly satisfied, but also — and increasingly — unwell? One clue can be found elsewhere in our survey. One-fifth of respondents reported being bullied; and one-fifth also reported experiencing harassment or discrimination.

Could universities be taking more effective action? Undoubtedly. Are they? Not enough. Of the respondents who reported concerns, one-quarter said that their institution had provided support, but one-third said that they had had to seek help elsewhere.

There’s another, and probably overarching, reason for otherwise satisfied students to be stressed to the point of ill health. Increasingly, in many countries, career success is gauge by a spectrum of measurements that include publications, citations, funding, contributions to conferences and, now, whether a person’s research has a positive impact on people, the economy or the environment. Early-career jobs tend to be precarious. To progress, a researcher needs to be hitting the right notes in regard to the measures listed above in addition to learning the nuts and bolts of their research topics — concerns articulated in a series of columns and blog posts from the research community published last month.

Most students embark on a PhD as the foundation of an academic career. They choose such careers partly because of the freedom and autonomy to discover and invent. But problems can arise when autonomy in such matters is reduced or removed — which is what happens when targets for funding, impact and publications become part of universities’ formal monitoring and evaluation systems. Moreover, when a student’s supervisor is also the judge of their success or failure, it’s no surprise that many students feel unable to open up to them about vulnerabilities or mental-health concerns.

The solution to this emerging crisis does not lie solely in institutions doing more to provide on-campus mental-health support and more training for supervisors — essential though such actions are. It also lies in recognizing that mental ill-health is, at least in part, a consequence of an excessive focus on measuring performance — something that funders, academic institutions, journals and publishers must all take responsibility for.

Much has been written about how to overhaul the system and find a better way to define success in research, including promoting the many non-academic careers that are open to researchers. But on the ground, the truth is that the system is making young people ill and they need our help. The research community needs to be protecting and empowering the next generation of researchers. Without systemic change to research cultures, we will otherwise drive them away.

Nature 575 , 257-258 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03489-1

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Understanding stress management intervention success: A case study-based analysis of what works and why

--> Boulos, Marina Wasfy Aziz (2019) Understanding stress management intervention success: A case study-based analysis of what works and why. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.

This thesis investigates the process behind stress management interventions (SMIs). This includes the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions (both formative and summative), along with exploring the roles of involved stakeholders. Although there exists a plethora of studies around work-related stress across several disciplines, they are predominantly focused on the effects of stress on individuals, organisations and society, highlighting the various costs which are associated with it. However, studies on SMIs are less common, particularly ones with detailed accounts of the SMI process. As a result, this hinders our understanding of which SMIs work for whom in what context (Biron, 2012), making it difficult for forthcoming studies to benefit from the results. A multiple case study research, of a higher education institute (Russell University) and an Arm’s Length (ALMO) housing association (Bravo City Homes), was conducted to address what the literature has neglected. Specifically, it examined the various steps of the SMI process, highlighting the key roles of the involved stakeholders, while contrasting the effects that context had across two different sectors. This was done through forty semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders from both organisations to gain retrospective insight into the SMI processes, understand their role and what they perceived it to be, and to evaluate what helped and hindered the success of SMIs. It was found that giving each step of the research process sufficient attention from each of the relevant stakeholders was key. The lack of communication around who the relevant stakeholders were significantly hindered the interventions. Managers, in particular, were found to be crucial to SMI success by supporting the interventions and enhancing communication. Other stakeholders whose roles were found to be vital were Human Resources and trade unions, which have also been neglected in the literature.

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Research Article

“How is your thesis going?”–Ph.D. students’ perspectives on mental health and stress in academia

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, sustainAbility Ph.D. Initiative at the Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

• Julian Friedrich, 
• Anna Bareis, 
• Moritz Bross, 
• Zoé Bürger, 
• Álvaro Cortés Rodríguez, 
• Nina Effenberger, 
• Markus Kleinhansl, 
• Fabienne Kremer, 
• Cornelius Schröder

• Published: July 3, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Mental health issues among Ph.D. students are prevalent and on the rise, with multiple studies showing that Ph.D. students are more likely to experience symptoms of mental health-related issues than the general population. However, the data is still sparse. This study aims to investigate the mental health of 589 Ph.D. students at a public university in Germany using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach. We administered a web-based self-report questionnaire to gather data on the mental health status, investigated mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and potential areas for improvement of the mental health and well-being of Ph.D. students. Our results revealed that one-third of the participants were above the cut-off for depression and that factors such as perceived stress and self-doubt were prominent predictors of the mental health status of Ph.D. students. Additionally, we found job insecurity and low job satisfaction to be predictors of stress and anxiety. Many participants in our study reported working more than full-time while being employed part-time. Importantly, deficient supervision was found to have a negative effect on Ph.D. students’ mental health. The study’s results are in line with those of earlier investigations of mental health in academia, which likewise reveal significant levels of depression and anxiety among Ph.D. students. Overall, the findings provide a greater knowledge of the underlying reasons and potential interventions required for advancing the mental health problems experienced by Ph.D. students. The results of this research can guide the development of effective strategies to support the mental health of Ph.D. students.

Citation: Friedrich J, Bareis A, Bross M, Bürger Z, Cortés Rodríguez Á, Effenberger N, et al. (2023) “How is your thesis going?”–Ph.D. students’ perspectives on mental health and stress in academia. PLoS ONE 18(7): e0288103. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103

Editor: Khader Ahmad Almhdawi, Jordan University of Science and Technology Faculty of Applied Medical Science, JORDAN

Received: March 23, 2023; Accepted: June 20, 2023; Published: July 3, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Friedrich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The anonymized data set is available at https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.12914 . All code for the analysis can be found at https://github.com/coschroeder/mental_health_analysis .

Funding: We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publishing Fund of University of Tübingen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Work situations can be demanding and have a profound influence on employees’ mental health and well-being across different sectors and disciplines [ 1 ]. Multiple studies show that the mental health status of people working in academia and especially that of Ph.D. students seems to be particularly detrimental when compared to the public [e.g., 2 , 3 ]. Disorders such as anxiety and depression are on the rise in the general population [ 4 , 5 ]. Multiple studies show that this is even more severe in academia [ 6 – 10 ] and in particular Ph.D. students are affected by mental health problems [ 11 , 12 ]. Worldwide surveys grant support for Ph.D. students’ suboptimal and alarming mental health situations [ 13 , 14 ].

A comprehensive study with more than 2000 participants (90% Ph.D. students, 10% Master students) from over 200 institutions across different countries showed that graduate students were more than six times more likely to experience symptoms of depression and anxiety than the general public [ 2 ]. Furthermore, a global-scale meta-analysis [ 3 ] and several other studies concerned with the mental health of Ph.D. students in different countries, e.g., the United States [ 7 , 9 ], the United Kingdom [ 6 ], France [ 15 ], Poland [ 8 ], Belgium [ 16 ] or Germany [ 11 , 12 ] voice concerns about the mental health situation of Ph.D. students. Recent research conducted in Belgium has consistently found a higher prevalence of mental health problems among Ph.D. students compared to different groups of other highly educated individuals [ 16 ]. In the same study, 50% of the Ph.D. students reported that they suffer from some form of mental health problem, and every third is at risk of a common psychiatric disorder [ 16 ]. A similar picture is forming in Germany. For example, the prevalence of at least moderate depression among doctoral researchers at the Max Planck Society, one of the biggest academic societies in Germany, was between 9.6% and 11.6% higher than in the age-related general population [ 11 ].

Increasing numbers of anxiety and depression among Ph.D. students

Recent studies describe not only a high prevalence but also a rising tendency of mental health issues among Ph.D. students. In a study from 2017, 12% of the respondents reported seeking help for depression or anxiety related to their Ph.D. [ 13 ], while in 2019, the result was even more drastic, as 36% of the respondents reported that having searched for help for those same reasons [ 14 ]. Several studies among doctoral researchers within the Max Planck Society show similar results. For instance, a survey in 2019 showed that the average of the Ph.D. students were at risk for an anxiety disorder and another sample from 2020 provided even more robust support for this claim [ 11 , 12 ]. Furthermore, the mean depression score increased from 2019 to 2020 in both samples [ 11 ].

Risk factors and resources

Given these alarming statistics, several studies addressed risks and resources for increased mental health issues. Other studies have revealed that gender, perceived work-life balance, and mentorship quality are correlated with mental health issues [ 2 , 17 ]. Specifically, female gender [ 17 ] and transgender/gender-nonconforming Ph.D. students are, on average, more likely to suffer from mental health issues [ 2 ]. In contrast, a positive and supportive mentoring relationship or a supervisor’s leadership style, and a good work-life balance are positively associated with better mental health [ 2 , 16 ]. While some authors [ 18 ] reported a negative correlation between the Ph.D. stage and mental health, with students at later stages disclosing greater levels of distress, others [ 16 ] did not find significant differences in this regard. Moreover, another report identified that Ph.D. students’ satisfaction levels strongly correlate with their relationship with their supervisors, number of publications, hours worked, and received guidance from advisors [ 19 ]. Furthermore, several studies showed a positive correlation between job satisfaction [ 20 , 21 ] as well as a negative correlation between job insecurity [ 22 ] and mental health or perceived stress, also in Ph.D. students.

Aim and research questions

Taken together, the alarming findings on the psychological status of Ph.D. students around the globe cannot be denied. However, data on the situation of Ph.D. students in Germany are scarce [ 11 , 12 , 23 ]; thus, comparisons of different universities within a country can hardly be made. However, addressing those differences is particularly relevant since the working conditions, concerning contract types, financial situations or supervision vary strongly among different countries, geographical regions and universities or institutions [ 24 ]. Furthermore, little is known about the reasons for this precarious situation and where exactly the need for action lies [ 25 ]. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a survey among Ph.D. students at a university in the southwest of Germany to assess Ph.D. students’ mental health status. Additionally, the present study also reveals information on the extent of the need for additional support services and pinpoints the specific areas where these services ought to be emphasized. In order to help identify relevant indicators, this investigation provides empirically sound findings on the mental health situation of Ph.D. students in Germany.

Materials and methods

Sample and procedure.

Overall, 589 participants (60.3% female, 0.8% of diverse gender, M Age = 28.8, SD Age = 3.48, range 17–48 years) out of a total of enrolled 2552 Ph.D. students (response rate: 23.1%; actual numbers of Ph.D. students at the University of Tübingen higher as some Ph.D. students are not enrolled) took part in an online survey from October to December 2021. Instructions, items, and scales were all presented in English. Participants could answer the open questions in German or English and were comprised of Ph.D. students across various stages of their Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen without further exclusion criteria. The online questionnaire was sent to Ph.D. students’ email addresses via mailing distribution lists in cooperation with the central institution for strategic researcher development (Graduate Academy) of the University of Tübingen and with Ph.D. representatives of different faculties. Ethics approval was obtained by the “Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Economics and Social Science of the University of Tübingen” and written informed consent was given by the participants.

The distribution of faculty affiliation of the participants was heterogeneous with shares of 61.8% Science, 12.4% Humanities, 11.7% Economics and Social Sciences. These numbers reflect the different sizes of faculties and are roughly aligned with the relative numbers of students (41.7% Science, 24.8% Medicine, 16.2% Humanities, 7.5% Economics and Social Sciences), with a clear underrepresentation of the Medical Faculty. Faculties with less than 20 participants or participants with multiple answers were grouped into one category for further analysis (Others 14.1%, see S1 Table ). 67.9% of the participants were German and in total, 82.9% came from European countries. During data collection, the participants were at different stages of their Ph.D. ranging from 0 to over 130 months with a mean time of two and a half years (30.0 months) of Ph.D. progress.

First, demographic data and background information on the current Ph.D. situation were collected. In a second part, to get a differentiated view, we included different measures to operationalize the mental health status of Ph.D. students. The quantitative questionnaire assessed 1) general health, generalized anxiety disorder, as well as internally reviewed self-generated questions, 2) life and job satisfaction, and quantitative job insecurity, and 3) stressors (institutional and systemic), causes of stress and potential solutions. This study also collected information regarding the degree of participants’ familiarity with the mental health resources available at the university, e.g., points of contacts for counseling, in order to evaluate whether Ph.D. students make use of these services. Moreover, participants were asked to name additional services that they may consider necessary.

General health and stressors.

General health was assessed by two items of the Perceived Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2) [ 26 ]. Participants were asked to indicate how frequently they had experienced depressed moods and anhedonia over the past four weeks on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (nearly every day). Additionally, they were presented with seven items of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) [ 27 ] capturing the severity of various anxiety signs like nervousness, restlessness, and easy irritation on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (nearly every day). Both scales were used in this combination in a previous study in German higher education [ 28 ]. Furthermore, we included two binary questions on whether the participants are currently in psychotherapy and if they have ever been diagnosed with a mental disorder.

The condensed version of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) [ 29 ] was used to get the degree of stressful situations in life in the last twelve months or since the start of the Ph.D. [ 30 ]. The response scale ranged from 0 (never) to 4 (very often), the following being a sample item: “… how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?” To check the internal consistency of the four items, we calculated Cronbach’s alpha which was .79.

Job satisfaction and life satisfaction.

Three items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) were used to measure job satisfaction [ 31 ], where a higher mean score indicated higher job satisfaction. A sample item is: “I am satisfied with my job.” Cronbach’s alpha was .86. Additionally, we added one item concerning general life satisfaction [adapted from 32 ] with the same response categories to get a more holistic insight.

Job insecurity.

To assess the fear of losing the job itself, quantitative job insecurity was measured with three items (e.g., “I am worried about having to leave my job before I would like to.”) [ 33 ] on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). We calculated a mean score with higher scores indicating higher job insecurity. Cronbach’s alpha was .80.

Institutional and systemic stressors.

For institutional stressors, we focused mainly on the role of supervision and included eight questions, four were framed using positive wording and four with negative wording, each with a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (all of the time). We summarized these questions in two constructs (positive support/negative support) which had Cronbach’s alphas of .85 and .76, respectively. As for systemic stressors, we included two questions on long-term contracts and on future perspectives, again using a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

To cover the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implemented regulations, we included two questions to evaluate whether the pandemic affected the students’ general situation. On the one hand, participants were asked to pick the statement that best describes the effects of the pandemic in general (“yes, it improved my general situation”, “yes, it worsened my general situation”, “yes, but it neither worsened nor improved my general situation”, “no”), and on the other hand, they were asked to evaluate whether the particular answers provided in this survey had been affected by the pandemic from 1 (very likely) to 5 (very unlikely).

Rating procedure and open answers

Causes of stress and potential solutions..

We included three open-ended questions in the questionnaire to get a deeper understanding of the perceived causes of stress, potential ways to improve mental health, and ways to improve the overall situation of Ph.D. students. The questions were: (1) “What is/are the cause(s) of your stress?” (2) “What would need to change to improve your mental health status?” (3) “What could be done to improve your situation?” Participants could mention as many points as they wanted (without any word limit). To analyze these questions, we built categories by following the model of inductive category development [ 34 ]. Two raters screened the first and last 20 responses in the data set and created categories for reoccurring topics (for a list containing all categories see S5 – S7 Tables). In the next steps, two new raters rated all open answers with the developed categories and added additional categories if needed. Applicable categories were rated with 1 (“category was mentioned”) or 0 (“category was not mentioned”). For example, the following response to question (1) “[My] supervisor is on maternity leave with open end, i.e. I have no one to talk to about my topic and have almost nothing so far […] I feel like I’m not good enough at this, not sure I will be able to succeed–everyone else has other projects and publications except me–no topic-related network” was rated with 1 in the following four categories: supervision (quality & quantity), social integration & interactions (private & professional), self-perception (internal factors), and perceived lack of relevant competences & experience–(sense) of progress and success. The full list of categories and inter-rater reliability as measured by Krippendorf’s Alpha is reported in Table 3 [ 35 ].

Descriptive statistics of work environment and workload

The largest part of the participants (65.5%) was temporarily employed, 12.1% got a scholarship, 7.6% were permanently employed, and 6.5% were not employed at all. The mean for total contract length was 34.3 months, with a range between two and 72 months. About 10.5% of the participants had a contract for only 12 months or shorter. A similar large variation was found in the percentage of employment with a mean of 63%, ranging from 10% to 100% of employment. For workload, we found a mean of 36.0 hours of Ph.D.-related work per week with a standard deviation of 15.6 hours. After taking a closer look at high workloads, we found that 31.3% of the participants work 45 hours or more (21.5% work 50 hours and more) per week. On top of their Ph.D. work, many Ph.D. students work in other jobs, which combined with the hours spent for Ph.D.-related work, summed up to the mean of 44.1 overall working hours per week. A detailed description can be found in S1 Table .

Faculty-wise comparison

In an explorative manner, we compared the mean differences of the most important variables between different faculties. Most of the analyzed variables did not show significant differences. Still, we want to stress that the highly imbalanced sample sizes (see S3 Table ) could lead to false negative outcomes due to the small numbers of participants in some groups. However, we found that the mean job insecurity was significantly different between faculties ( p < .001, Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test) with comparable low job insecurity in the faculties of law ( M = 2.10, SD = 1.22) and theology ( M = 2.38, SD = 1.19) and high insecurity in the faculty of humanities ( M = 3.32, SD = 0.91).

In total, 41.9% of the participants stated that their general situation worsened due to the pandemic, while 28.5% stated that the pandemic affected but it neither worsened nor improved their general situation. 33.5% of the participants stated that their responses in this study were “very likely” or “likely” to be affected by the pandemic, with a mean of 2.97 ( SD = 1.26).

General health and stressors

The mean of the sum score for PHQ-2 in our study was 2.32 which is below the cut-off of three for major depression [ 26 ]. Yet, 33.1% of the participants were above the cut-off. For the GAD-7, the sum score for the study’s sample was 8.49. Cut points of 5 might be interpreted as mild, cut points of 10 as moderate and 15 as severe levels of anxiety [ 27 ], which implies a mild risk level for generalized anxiety with the suggestion of a follow-up examination in this sample. When asking for mental disorders, we found that 19.9% of the participants ( n = 99) have already been diagnosed with a mental disorder and 15.5% ( n = 77) are currently in psychotherapy. The sum score for the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) of 7.79 (with Min = 0, Max = 15) was above the total sum score compared to a representative British sample (6.11) [ 36 ] and a representative German community sample (4.79 for PSS-4) [ 37 ]. Job satisfaction of our participants with a total sum score of 10.06 was lower compared to a sum score of 12.79 in a German sample of workers in small- and medium sized enterprises [ 38 ]. The mean score for job satisfaction was 3.35, also lower than in a sample of Ph.D. students in Belgium (3.9) [ 39 ]. Job insecurity was with a total sum score of 8.76 higher compared to the German small- and medium sized enterprises sample (5.67) [ 38 ]. Consistently, more than 80% of the Ph.D. students in our study were worried about the lack of permanent or long-term contracts in academia ( M = 4.25, SD = 1.09; 5 indicating a strong agreement). Nevertheless, around half of the participants (54.5%) believed that having a Ph.D. would help them find a good job ( M = 3.49, SD = 0.97). We found a mean score of 3.48 ( SD = 0.98) for the positive support questions which is above average over response levels. Around 57.1% of the Ph.D. students felt supported by their supervisor “most” or “all of the time”. Around 55.7% felt comfortable when contacting the supervisor for support. The negative support construct was with a mean score of 2.18 below average: 46.7% of the participants had never felt looked down, and 62.6% had never felt mistreated by their supervisor. Nevertheless, 28.6% of the Ph.D. students answered feelings of degradation and 19.1% felt mistreated more than “some of the time”. When it comes to the frequency of the meetings with the supervisor, the mean reported a value of 2.4 laying somewhere between having meetings once a month (2) and at least every three months (3). However, 18.2% reported meeting their supervisor only once every six months or less. For sample items and detailed values see S2 Table .

When we analyzed the relationship between the studied outcomes, we found that all major constructs correlated significantly (see Table 1 ). High correlations occurred between the items of the related PHQ-2 and GAD-7 as well as their connections to the PSS. Understandably, the two institutional support dimensions were highly correlated ( r = -.69).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.t001

Regression for perceived stress, depression, and anxiety

To predict potential driving factors for the two more direct mental health measurements, namely depression and anxiety, and for perceived stress, we employed linear regression models with these three constructs as response variables controlling for age and gender. We included relevant risk factors and stressors such as job insecurity, perceived stress, negative support and resources such as job and life satisfaction, and positive support to get a comprehensible overview over predictors. All analyses were carried out in R statistics version 4.1.3.

For depression, significant predictors were job satisfaction (β = -0.1, SE = 0.04, p < .05), life satisfaction (β = -0.3, SE = 0.04, p < .001), perceived stress (β = 0.4, SE = 0.05, p < .001) and negative institutional support (β = 0.11, SE = 0.05, p < .05, see Table 2 ). The model explained 46.7% of the variance, F (8, 482) = 54.5, p < .01.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.t002

For anxiety, all studied variables except job satisfaction and positive support were significant predictors with a variance explanation of 36.0%, F (8, 392) = 29.5, p < .01 (see Table 2 ). Noticeable was the strong influence of perceived stress on anxiety. Specifically, we observed that with an increase of one unit in perceived stress, the level of GAD-7 increased by 2.02 units and was in line with the high correlation ( r = .52, p < .01, Table 2 ).

For perceived stress, we found that job insecurity (β = 0.15, SE = 0.02, p < .01), life satisfaction (β = -0.32, SE = 0.03, p < .01) as well as negative institutional support (β = 0.13, SE = 0.04, p < .01) were significant predictors with a model variance explanation of 42.7%, F (4, 486) = 53.5, p < .01. The detailed results for this regression analysis can be found in S4 Table .

Qualitative answers

In the following, we report the main categories with short sample quotes as well as the mean frequency of the two raters (see Table 3 ; details in S5 – S7 Tables). The inter-rater reliability as indicated by Krippendorff’s alpha for the top five categories of all questions was above α ≥ .67, except for the category Manageable Workload for question MH06_1 (see Table 3 ) with α = .62; CI [0.50; 0.74]. A threshold of .67 is commonly considered as the lower conceivable limit that still allows tentative conclusions [ 40 ].

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.t003

Causes of stress.

The question “What is/are the cause(s) of your stress?” was answered by n = 446 participants. To cover the breadth of the responses, we built 18 categories. The most frequently mentioned categories were Workload & Time Pressure (mean rating frequency = 211), Self-Perception ( M = 132.5), Job-Insecurity ( M = 93), Social Integration & Interactions ( M = 91), and Supervision Quality & Quantity ( M = 88.5). The category Workload & Time Pressure includes all responses referring to the amount of work and/or deadlines. The category Self-Perception includes responses that indicate a perceived lack of competences or other personal doubts, concerns, and worries (e.g., “Since I started my Ph.D. I have almost constantly felt stupid”, “feeling like not belonging in academia, lack of self-confidence, feeling of making too little progress”). The category Job Insecurity reflects responses regarding contract length and general uncertainty about future employment (e.g., “scholarship is to be ended”, “Not knowing how things will work out after the PhD”, “Hopelessness of scientific career because there are too few full-time positions”). The category Social Integration & Interactions covers responses regarding the integration and sense of belonging in the work environment (e.g., “not valued by colleagues”, “being socially isolated at work”) as well as social issues in the private life (e.g., “Mostly my personal life, or often the lack thereof”, “problems with parents”). The category Supervision Quality & Quantity was used to capture all supervision-related responses including comments about the lack of support, feedback, frequency of meetings, or supervisors’ interest in the topics (e.g., “no clear communication with supervisor”, “lack of support from supervisor, even gossiping about me behind my back”).

Potential ways to improve the mental health status.

When asked “What would need to change to improve your mental health status?”, the Ph.D. students’ responses ( n = 307) included various topics, some addressing compensation and income-related aspects, others highlighting supportive supervision. Overall, the responses lead to twelve different categories. Most answers referred to Supportive Supervision ( M = 98.5), followed by Job Security/Contract ( M = 59). Sample quotes with respect to supervision are e.g., “more feedback from supervisor or even more interest in my topic” or “more regular support by supervisor”. The category Job Security/Contract contains comments with respect to contract length and aspects for future employment (e.g., “no more worries about not being able to get my contract renewed”). The category Manageable Workload ( M = 56.5) includes all responses around work-life balance (e.g., “having also activities beside work”, “clear work hours”). The fourth category was Compensation & Financial Security ( M = 35) and included all income- and compensation-related aspects of the job (e.g., “Be paid 100% would be a start”, “Get paid for all the time at work”). The category Less Additional Tasks ( M = 27.5) was used to specifically cover responses mentioning the number of additional tasks within the job (“Less work in teaching/work unrelated to PhD”).

Ways to improve the personal situation.

In addition to the previous question, which focused on general ways to improve the mental health status, we asked the Ph.D. students the following question: “What could be done to improve your situation?” Based on the themes and topics mentioned in the responses ( n = 281) we built eleven categories. The categories mentioned the most were Job-Security & Compensation ( M = 85.5), followed by Supportive Supervision ( M = 68), Services and Support System ( M = 39.5), Decrease Pressure to Perform ( M = 39.5), and Manageable Workload ( M = 36). The category Job-Security & Compensation includes responses like “chances of getting a long-term job in academia, not just the three-year programs” or “Fair payment (half of students get 50% others 65% even at the same institute)”. For the category Supportive Supervision “Regular meetings with people who are supportive & have an expertise in my research topic” can serve as a sample quote. The category Services and Support System was built to cover the responses named a solution outside the working group and team, such as “it would be helpful to see a university-based psychologist outside of the regular working hours” or “more courses (or better communications about them) about stress management”. The next category was labeled Decrease Pressure to Perform and included all responses that highlighted a high level of perceived pressure, such as “the performance pressure (every talk at a seminar is a job talk) is a big problem” or “Instead of pressuring academics to publish as much as possible, there should be more focus on the quality instead of the quantity of their articles/publication”. The last category, Manageable Workload , contained answers with respect to the amount of work (e.g., “Normal working hours, having really free-time without having the feeling that I should be working, it should be normal to take all vacation days”).

Summary of the qualitative answers.

With respect to the open answers, it can be summarized that the factors named as causes for stress and the possible solutions cover a wide range of topics. However, there are reoccurring topics across all three questions, such as supervision, workload, and job security. The role of supervision is a reemerging motif in the qualitative content analysis. While the quality and quantity of supervision were seen as a cause of stress, supportive supervision has a positive impact on the mental health status as well as the whole situation of the Ph.D. students. Furthermore, job insecurity was mentioned as an important stressor, while stable contracts and appropriate compensation for the work and fewer extra tasks were also added for improvement. Workload and time pressure were the most often stated causes of stress, followed by self-doubts and worries about not having enough competencies for the job. A manageable workload, fewer additional tasks, and a lower pressure to perform were indicated by the participants as valuable improvements.

Summary of the main findings

The conducted survey investigates the mental health of Ph.D. students at a university in the southwest of Germany and gives insights into what causes stress and mental health disorders and where there is a need for further support services. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed interesting and consistent results on the alarming situation of the mental health of Ph.D. students.

First, our quantitative results revealed that one-third of the participants were above the cut-off for depression which is an indicator of a high risk of depression that should be checked by a health professional. On average, the surveyed Ph.D. students were at a mild risk level for an anxiety disorder. While our study design does not allow us to diagnose mental illnesses, it identifies problems that need to be pursued further. It reveals some unhealthy working conditions and increased risks for mental illnesses. Our qualitative and quantitative results showed consistently that many of the most prominent issues for our study’s participants are personal factors such as perceived stress, life satisfaction and self-doubt, but modulated by structural deficits such as financial and job security as well as workload and time pressure. The quantitative analyses revealed that life satisfaction, perceived stress and negative support are the main predictors for anxiety disorders as well as depression. Additionally, low job satisfaction was a significant predictor of depression and job insecurity for anxiety. Furthermore, we identified job insecurity, life satisfaction as well as negative institutional support as predictors for perceived stress.

Second and besides mental health problems, our quantitative analyses showed how supervision and the work environment played a role in the mental health and general well-being of Ph.D. students. Deficient supervision could affect Ph.D. students’ perceived job insecurity and job dissatisfaction. Although good supervision was not a predictor for satisfaction, being comfortable with contacting the supervisor could lower the perceived stress. This shows the importance of the supervisor-student relationship and highlights the importance of the social work environment, which was also mentioned by study participants in the open-end questions. While the categories in the qualitative analyses mainly served to find recurring themes, they can also be used to distinguish between different levels. Some participants reflected causes of stress on a personal level (e.g., self-perception). In contrast, others set the focus on the supervisor level or working group level, or even on the more structural abstract level of the academic system.

Third, our study does not only investigate the mental health situation of Ph.D. students, but we also analyze how the situation and mental health status could be improved. Many suggestions were straightforward given the results of the causes of stress, i.e., bad supervision should be improved, and a secure income should be guaranteed. However, we were also able to show that Ph.D. students wish to make use of services and support systems that could be provided by the university. Furthermore, less pressure to perform and a manageable workload with fewer additional tasks besides the Ph.D. project might decrease the stress level and improve mental health status.

Overall, detrimental mental health is a known problem in academia, and we show another example of its extent as well as opportunities for improvement at a German university.

Comparison to other studies

Data on Ph.D. students’ situation in Germany are scarce, and we, therefore, perform a broader comparison with Ph.D. students around the world. However, the results of this comparison should be taken with caution as our questionnaire and time of survey conduction are unique. We focus mainly on PHQ-2 [ 26 ] and GAD-7 [ 27 ], for which other studies in Germany during the pandemic showed that–compared to pre-COVID-19 reference values–these measurements were significantly increased [ 41 ]. Two studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic include the same scales [ 41 , 42 ] and reveal similar results for the general population in Germany, while in our later study from October to December 2021, the risk for anxiety and depression is slightly higher. In our study, one-third of the participants (33.1%) was above the cut-off for major depression, compared to the studies in a 1.5-year earlier timeframe, where 14.1% (March to May 2020; n = 15704, 70.7% female gender; 42.6% university education) [ 42 ] and 21.4% (March to July 2020; n = 16918; 69.7% female gender; 42.4% university education [ 41 ] of the participants with diverse occupations were above the cut-off. Furthermore, in our study, 39.2% of the participants were at the mild risk level for anxiety compared to 27.4% of the participants in an earlier study [ 41 ]. This shows the increase in depression and anxiety during the pandemic and even higher numbers in our study compared with the German general population. Nevertheless, compared to a survey at public research universities in the United States from May to July 2020, the number of doctoral students screened for major depressive disorder symptoms with the same measurements PHQ-2 was higher with 36% [ 43 ], indicating high numbers of mental issues in academia in several countries.

While using the same scales and items for job satisfaction and job insecurity, our study showed worse sum scores compared to a sample of employers and employees in small- and medium sized enterprises in Germany (December 2020 to May 2021; n = 828; 53.7% female gender, M = 41.5 years; 38.8% higher education entrance qualification) [ 38 ]. It seems that Ph.D. students have higher job insecurity and job dissatisfaction compared to workers in diverse branches and occupations. This may result from different contract types, as workers, especially in industrial sectors, have long-term contracts. The recurrent factor of time pressure and workload, also mentioned in the open-end questions, is backed up by the raw numbers of the contract types and working hours, which may also lead to job dissatisfaction. Although the mean contract type in our study is 63%, the mean number of hours dedicated to Ph.D. work ( M = 36.0, SD = 15.6 hours) is almost in the range of a full-time position. What is more, the participants reported a total weekly workload ( M = 44.1, SD = 11.4 hours) that exceeds a typical full-time position in Germany [ 44 ]. The discrepancy between Ph.D. work and corresponding contract types results in a mean of 12.1 hours of overwork per week (based on a 38.5-hour full-time contract, which is the standard contract for Ph.D. students in Germany). This is in line with previous studies where the authors found a mean of 12.6 hours of overwork per week for Ph.D. students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines in Germany [ 45 ]. However, the authors did not include any further work obligations and corrected for contract types with low percentages, and thus the results are difficult to compare directly. Furthermore, we used gender as a control variable, which turned out to be statistically significant for anxiety and stress. This is in line with related work where the female gender was reported to be higher correlated with mental disorders [ 2 , 17 , 46 , 47 ].

Strengths and limitations

Generalization..

While we aimed for our study to reflect the current situation for Ph.D. students as best as possible, there are points that are limiting the generalization of the results or are beyond the scope of this survey. First, we collected the data between October and December 2021, a time at which the ordinance on protection against risks of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus (“Coronavirus-Schutzverordnung”) [ 48 ] was still in place in Germany and influenced private and working life. About one-third (33.5%) of our study population stated that it is very likely or likely that the pandemic affected their answers. Nonetheless, a pandemic is a situation that can reoccur and is only one more reason to proactively set up a resilient Ph.D. graduation system. Another research group [ 49 ] investigated how mental health care should change as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and concluded that the pandemic could even be seen as a chance to improve mental health services [ 49 ]. Nevertheless, we would like to point out that generalizing from a mental health study conducted during a pandemic may be difficult.

Overall, around 23% of all Ph.D. students at the University of Tübingen [ 50 ] participated in our study, which is slightly below the response rate in other similar studies [e.g., 16 ]. Considering that university students are very frequently invited to various questionnaires and studies, and given that our survey lasted approximately 20 minutes, it can be argued that the participants were motivated to invest time into their responses. However, our study population remains small compared to the total number of Ph.D. students in Germany. Moreover, we want to emphasize the likely sample bias in our data. We recruited participants mainly via mailing lists and our project therefore probably has especially appealed to people who are already interested in health or aware of mental health issues. However, given our relatively large coverage of almost a quarter of all Ph.D. students at the University of Tübingen, even a selective sample can give us insights into overall tendencies. The transferability of our results to other German universities or even universities in other countries is also not guaranteed as the academic systems can largely differ. Additionally, the results of this study are influenced by the overall living conditions the Ph.D. students experience. As Tübingen is a small town in the southwest of Germany, a comparison to larger cities or other countries might not be viable as the conditions probably differ largely.

Finally, even within one university, the generalization of our results is further limited by the uneven distribution of the participants across faculties. Most participants (61.8%) were from the Science Faculty, which is also the largest department (in terms of the highest total number of students) at the University of Tübingen. This skewness limits the faculty-wise comparisons, and we would expect to find interesting insights into the different graduate programs by conducting detailed comparisons. These differences could not only arise from different academic traditions but also from the highly varying expectations on the scope of a Ph.D. thesis. It follows that more detailed and systematic monitoring and data collection in national and international surveys are needed.

Methodology.

In a cross-sectional study, we investigate the current situation of Ph.D. students. While this is a valid and important instrument to access the current state, it cannot give us information about the dynamic changes in the transition phase between undergraduate studies and the Ph.D. as well as across the Ph.D. [ 51 ]. To track these changes or make comparisons over time, a longitudinal study design or propensity score matching procedures [ 52 ] could give further insights. It is therefore desirable to establish regular surveys and monitoring systems either on a university level or in a national survey to provide information on the impact of undertaken actions and implemented changes. We used a mixed quantitative and qualitative research approach. While this provides information on distinct levels, there are some pitfalls. For example, the open answer categories were defined post-hoc. While this gives the possibility for the participants to express their thoughts freely, it makes a systematic analysis more difficult, and the analysis might be biased by the evaluators. Overall, it is important to summarize and statistically analyze our study results on an overall level, but it must not be forgotten that every person and Ph.D. project is individual.

Implications for research and practice

The overall scarce data, paired with worrisome flashlights on the mental health situation of Ph.D. students in different countries, highlights the need for more systematic monitoring of mental health in academia. For this purpose, standardized as well as domain-specific scales for Ph.D. students need to be established and longitudinal data needs to be collected. This would enable researchers to measure the effect of larger environmental changes (such as the COVID-19 pandemic or economic developments) and to measure the impact of interventions targeted to improve the situation. At the same time, we propose including qualitative measurements to assess unknown variables and the unique situation each Ph.D. student faces. These could also inform the development of additional quantitative measurable constructs to reflect the dynamic situation in academia. Such monitoring systems can either be implemented at the university level to give detailed insights into the situation at a specific university or on a national level to get an overall impression of Ph.D. students’ health issues. Optimally, a survey should be promoted from an independent self-governing institution dedicated to advancing science and research. While the demands for a better mental health situation for Ph.D. students are obvious, systematical and political changes need to be addressed in the research community and in academia.

Our mixed methods research approach allows us not only to find out more about the issues of Ph.D. students but also to draw conclusions about what is needed to improve their situation. However, finding solutions to a recognized problem is not a straightforward task, and complex problems often require a step-by-step solution. Therefore, we assume that more practical implications, which could be indicated by an established monitoring system, will be necessary once the first steps have been taken.

In general, we can group interventions into at least four levels that can influence each other: the Ph.D. students themselves, the supervisors, the universities or research institutions, and the greater political context and academic culture. Building on the responses about potential improvements and additional services, we identified the following practical implications:

On an individual level, the main interventions could happen in capacity building (e.g., in time/project management, self-reflection or mental health awareness) but also by being more proactive about changing working modes (e.g., establishing collaborations or a peer counseling system) or by improving the social environment. This could additionally lead to a change in self-perception, for which direct interventions might be more difficult. At this point, we want to highlight that changes on the individual level aim to prevent the development of mental health problems and strengthen the resilience of Ph.D. students. They can at no point replace professional support once such problems have been manifested.

The level of supervision seems to be the most urgent and promising target for an improvement of Ph.D. students’ situation. As supervisors are usually defining a project and its goals, but also additional teaching or other tasks, they are responsible for setting the workload and time constraints. Not only the hard constraints of the working conditions but also the quality of supervision was often mentioned to be highly deficient. Possible interventions could target improving the skills in personnel management of supervisors. But also, clear supervision requirements and guidelines could be imposed by the university. Such agreements (including expectations on the thesis, supervision times and conciliation mechanisms) might be an option to enhance the agreements in a supervisor-student relationship. While these suggestions are not new, and some of them are theoretically established in some university departments, our study results suggest that they are often ignored or not properly implemented, and more binding agreements and control mechanisms need to be made. Establishing additional external supervision, where for example the personnel management is reflected, might also give new perspectives and enhance demanding situations. At this point, it has to be considered that there are strong dependencies between Ph.D. students and their supervisors since, in many cases, it is the supervisors who have a major impact on the outcome of a Ph.D. thesis, such as the final grade. It remains challenging how Ph.D. students can criticize the supervising situation without negatively impacting the personal relationship with their supervisors.

Further interventions on the level of universities and research institutions might include support in bureaucratic processes and providing more information on different contact points (e.g., for mental health services). It is obvious that the aforementioned interventions (such as capacity building courses for Ph.D. students and supervisors) are dependent on the support of the central facilities of the research institution. Furthermore, highlighting the high prevalence of mental health problems, for example, at mandatory introductory sessions for Ph.D. students, might help to raise awareness about this topic. This could help unexperienced young researchers to notice signs of anxiety and depression early on before these mental disorders manifest. Finally, public events on this topic could reduce the stigma associated with it, making it easier for affected Ph.D. students to seek help. Such events might also be used to remind the students that it is important to take care not only of their physical but also mental health, for instance, by strengthening social relationships and pursuing hobbies which are not work-related.

Lastly, there are also changes in the political setting and academic culture needed. This includes a fair payment system, reasonable control of contract lengths and extensions, and more perspectives for long-term positions in academia. Considering that the vast majority of Ph.D. students will end up in positions outside of academia, it could be beneficial to better prepare students for careers in alternative job markets, such as industry. Such interventions might directly influence the job insecurity and job dissatisfaction of Ph.D. students. In Germany, the current regulations for temporary academic employment are being evaluated [ 53 ], but even propositions from the conference of university rectors [ 54 ] seem not to be sufficient for fundamental changes. These changes would also need a shift in the academic culture [ 55 ], in which “publish or perish” is still a guiding theme leading to high pressure to perform. Working on a cultural shift is a task for all scientists. This will lead to a more sustainable work culture from which all stakeholders might benefit.

All in all, there is an interplay and dependence of all mentioned levels. Importantly, most problems mentioned in the survey can result from shortcomings on multiple levels, and therefore interventions on more than one level are needed for a satisfying solution. For example, changes to improve the mental health situation on an individual level can be dependent on the consent of the supervisor and can also be negatively impacted by already existing mental health issues. In addition to individual responsibility for health, it is important to systematically target prevention and change the system on the aforementioned levels so that Ph.D. students are better and more quickly supported when mental health problems arise.

This study shows once again the detrimental mental health situation of Ph.D. students in academia. By analyzing the mental health of Ph.D. students at a German university, we found alarming hints of depressive and anxious tendencies that are in line with other comparable studies. Furthermore, we have identified main stressors, such as perceived stress or self-doubts, and resources, such as a positive student-supervisor relationship. Understanding conditional factors and being able to improve the situation depend on such identifications. With our study, we provide first insights of the status quo for the University chair, the Graduate Academy, and other stakeholders in the academic system. We invite them to inspect the results and suggestions responsibly so that actions to assess and improve the conditions for Ph.D. students’ mental health and well-being can be taken in the future. Based on our data, additional offers for Ph.D. students, as well as their supervisors, should be created and existing ones sustainably modified. Positive conditions and resources for mental health and well-being will not restrict to academia but will affect all areas of life. While an increased mental health state is an indispensable value on its own, additional benefits can be created for research, teaching, practice, and society. As such, mental health is a big part of sustainable living and should have a high priority for all people. While this is already acknowledged in the sustainable development goals, further steps need to be taken to raise awareness and provide support throughout society.

Supporting information

S1 table. sample items and descriptives of ph.d. students ( n = 589): percentage (%), mean ( m ), standard deviation ( sd ), minimum and maximum ( min - max )..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s001

S2 Table. Used scales and items with percentage (%), mean ( M ), standard deviation ( SD ), minimum and maximum ( Min - Max ), median , Cronbach’s alpha .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s002

S3 Table. Faculty wise mean comparison on the job insecurity scale.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s003

S4 Table. Linear regression model for perceived stress and the predictors.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s004

S5 Table. Categories and ratings for the causes of stress.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s005

S6 Table. Categories and ratings for an improvement of mental health.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s006

S7 Table. Categories and ratings for an improvement of the situation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288103.s007

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to all participants of the survey as well to the sustainAbility Ph.D. initiative at the University of Tübingen. We thank Dr. Stephanie Rosenstiel for support with the ethics approval and Prof. Dr. Birgit Derntl and Prof. Dr. Andreas Fallgatter for their helpful feedback on the conception of the questionnaire. We thank Mumina Javed and Monja Neuser for their support in the early phase of the project.

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10 Effective Stress Management Tips for Ph.D. Students

Did you embark on a PhD with a preconceived notion that it’s going to be a stressful journey? If your answer to that was a resounding yes, then you are not alone and definitely not wrong about it either! Sailing through a PhD can be quite daunting. As revealed by a survey conducted by  Nature , over 36% of the total researchers seek help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD. Although these results come from a small sample of around 6300 PhD students worldwide, the results are significant enough to address the prevalence of mental health issues in academia. Stress management is imperative for a smoother and tension-free research outcome.

With passing years, the stress levels among PhD students is worsening. Much has been spoken and written about how to overhaul the system and help students in their battle of coping with stress. However, in reality, the advice to PhD students is just a concept that’s heard and read about.

This article will guide PhD students and will discuss various factors that trigger stress levels at different stages in the life of a researcher. The tips for new PhD students will help them to combat stress and preserve your mental health.

Factors Causing Stress and Depression in PhD Students

Stress management of next generation researchers needs a systematic approach . However, before finding solutions, knowing the root cause is necessary to avoid similar situations in the future.

1. Growing Competition in Your Field

Students often get intimidated by the ongoing research in their field and compare the progress and status of their work with other researchers’ work.

2. Work Overload

Excessive work pressure and relentless overtime working induces anxiety and increases stress levels amongst PhD students.

3. Role Ambiguity

It is often seen that a candidate is unaware about their role in the study and what the supervisor or the Principal Investigator (P.I.) expects out of them as a peer.

4. Physiological Factors

While embarking on a PhD., students often take time to adapt to the physiological changes that come along. Dealing with physical health issues diverts your mind from focusing on your research work.

5. Behavioral Approach

Researchers tend to follow a fixed framework to complete their experiments. When unexpected results are derived, finding an alternative solution to obtain conclusions and scheduling a proper action plan encroaches the minds of a PhD student.

6. Performance Pressure

Most Ph.D students also work while pursuing their research. Hence, maintaining regular attendance, achieving goals, keeping the grades high, and completing assignments while adhering to deadlines can take a toll on their mental health.

7. Relationship with Supervisor

Working in isolation will not take you a long way. Not maintaining a healthy work-relationship with your supervisor affects the research outcome and by extension affects your mental health.

Tips for PhD Students to Overcome Anxiety

The solution to the  rising stress levels and mental health issues  faced by PhD researchers does not solely lie in the institutions providing on-campus mental-health support. Furthermore, it also does not depend on the institutions providing training for supervisors to deal with their group of students in coping with the stress. It also lies in understanding that stress is a consequence of an excessive focus on measuring performance. In addition, other entities such as the funders, academic institutions, journals, and publishers must also take responsibility of the mental health of researchers in a way that is feasible and within their limits.

The late nights and early mornings spent within four walls while completing your PhD, juggling between work and study, papers to publish, supervisors to please, and perhaps also living up to your family’s expectations takes a toll on you.These are some common instances where most Ph.D students are taken aback and left clueless.

The first step in fixing the problem is acknowledging it!

1. Finding an Credible Supervisor

As your supervisor is someone who will guide you throughout your program and help you face challenges, it is imperative to select your supervisor carefully. This process of identifying an incredible supervisor could get difficult and leave you confused. But a trick to deal with this is identifying a supervisor who is supportive, actively working in your field, has a strong publication record, and can give you sufficient time for mentoring.

2. Find the Right Research Funding Body

High rates of stress and depression arises at this stage of your PhD Strategizing your path into  choosing the right funding body for your research  is very important. Focus on maximizing the value of your research rather than just looking for monetary support.

3. Time Management

As a researcher, the key to a  stress-free research workflow is effective time management . Prioritize your tasks and plan your day based on the same. Set realistic and achievable goals. Do not overwhelm yourself with too many tasks to be done on a single day. Online project management tools such as Asana, Trello, ProofHub, etc. will help you to be on the top of your tasks.

4. Maintain a Healthy and Professional Supervisor‒Student Relationship

Finding yourself alone is quite normal for most people. Try building new connections with your colleagues and be affable to everyone. Maintaining a healthy and professional supervisor-student relationship is critical for the success of any research work.  Good communication will give you and the supervisor a clearer picture of your work. Share your honest concerns with your colleagues and supervisor in the most respectful way. If there is minimal response, reach out to the mental health team of your institution to resolve any conflicts amicably.

5. Presenting Negative or In-conclusive Results

There’s nothing to be ashamed of if your experiment does not deliver the expected results. Honest presentation of results is what makes you an ethical and respected researcher in the community,  irrespective of the results being positive, negative, or mixed . Compare your results and review them using tables or charts for effective presentation.

6. Writing Your Thesis

Here’s when you are one step closer to completing your PhD! The journey from here on is only uphill. So don’t push yourself back now. Start with planning your writing activities with a fresh mind. Furthermore, define sections of your thesis and focus on one section at a time. Don’t bother yourself with editing and formatting of the thesis. Complete the writing part first. Work on editing and finally  proofreading  your article to refurbish it in the next stage.

7. Select the Right Journal

Now that the writing process is completed, there’s no looking back from here. But the threat of falling prey to predatory journals cannot be unseen. Make this process easier by finding a journal that is related to your discipline. Consider the impact factor of the journal. Use journal finder tools such as  Enago’s Open Access Journal Finder , Elsevier Journal Finder , Springer Journal Suggester, Manuscript Matcher Tool in Web of Science Master List, etc. Once you have a list of journals, check their aims and scope to ensure your article fits their criteria.

Stress Management Tips for PhD Students and Early Career Researchers

Researchers must understand that completing their PhD is a part of their life and that it will come to an end someday. Whilst pursuing PhD  neglecting your mental health will eventually affect your research outcomes  in future. Therefore, stress management is very crucial to preserve your mental health and lead a peaceful life.

Follow these tips to maintain a work­‒life balance and preserve your mental health:

1. Acknowledging the Problem

We often deny that our mental health is affected by an external factor. It is important to understand what is bothering you and keeping you from achieving your goals. Therefore, once you are aware of the cause, accept it and work in a way to combat it.

2. Talk About the Problem

Being negligent and keeping those bothersome thoughts to yourself will only worsen the situation. Talk about your concerns with people who would care about it and help you deal with your anxiety.

3. Improve Your Organizational Skills

Your  key to successfully completing your PhD  is by managing your tasks efficiently without over-committing. Hence, maintaining a balance between professional and personal work is crucial.

4. Social Involvement

Engage yourself in social activities to keep your mind from spiraling in the pool of negative thoughts. Additionally, join groups that are not related to your domain. Learn to make connections with new people and get to know them better.

5. Rekindle Long Lost Hobbies

Get that old sketch book you left in the groove! Reembrace hobbies you haven’t been able to catch up with for a really long time. In addition, engage in fun activities or games that make you happy.

6. Practice Mindfulness

Try the 2-step exercise called “ The Mindful Pause ”. In this, you pause before or during a stressor and attentively breathe for 15 seconds, followed by one question for yourself — how might I use one of my character strengths right now? Take positive action with any character strength that pops up.

7. Meditate as a Relaxation Response

Spare 10-20 minutes a day, preferably in the morning to meditate. This involves silent repetition of a word, sound, or phrase while sitting quietly with a good posture and eyes closed.

8. Get Involved in Any Form of Physical Activity

Implement any form of physical activity in your daily routine to improve your cognitive and physical abilities. Consequently, the release of endorphins whilst exercising acts as a catalyst in keeping your spirits high.

9. Be Grateful

Acknowledge and appreciate the gift of life. Unleash your gratitude for being able to fulfil your dreams. Furthermore, remember every positive thing that has ever happened to you and express gratitude for having made things possible.

How often have you been stressed out while pursuing your PhD? Have you ever followed any stress management tricks? What are your thoughts on these advices to PhD students? What was your move in coping with stress associated to your research? Has maintaining proper work-life balance been easy for you? Let us know about your and your colleagues’ experiences in combating stress in the comments section below!

I have faced stress and maintaining balance in my life. Working full-time while pursuing a Ph.D. full-time with a family has been challenging thus far. I am going to try utilizing these tips to see how they help.

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3 tips for managing thesis writing stress

9 August 2019

Writing your thesis can be a stressful experience. Here, Dr Sonia Greenidge from UCL's Student Psychological and Counselling Services gives you her top tips to manage this stress.

The process of writing your thesis is a long one and the stress that can build up over this period of time can lead to writer's block and worryingly long periods of unproductiveness. Here are my top three tips to help you lower your stress levels allowing you to progress with your thesis.

Break it down

Rather than thinking that you have to dedicate lengthy periods each day to writing up, a helpful method to manage the stress of thesis writing is to break the day into small bite-sized pieces. Even if you dedicate a whole day to your write up, this should still be broken down into bite-sized periods.

Make sure that alongside your work times you also schedule in some break times. For example, work for 45 minutes and then break for 15 minutes, continue this until breaking for lunch for an hour then continue the 45-minute work and 15-minute break routine.

Be specific

Assign a specific task to do for each study period. Having a clear idea of what you are doing can alleviate the ‘so much to do, how am I going to do it?!’ stress. For example, plan to specifically ‘finish discussion paragraph on self-reflection’ not generally ‘write some more of the discussion’.

Assigning specific things to do in your break times can also help manage the stress that comes from feeling you have so much to do and so little time to do it all. Have a break for checking emails, a break for making calls, a break for making lunch etc. This way you still get all your 'life admin' done alongside getting that all important thesis written up!

Free writing

Experiencing writer’s block and feeling that you are not progressing as you would like to can be a huge trigger for stress. With free writing, you write whatever comes to mind on a topic without stopping to censor or make corrections.

Do this for a while until you feel yourself in the flow and then…keep going! You will probably have a lot of useful material from your free writing time that you can go back and tidy up later.

Dr Sonia Greenidge, UCL Student Psychological and Counselling Services (SPCS)

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• Open access
• Published: 05 June 2024

Stress management: how does the academic staff cope with it? a cross-sectional study at the university of Udine

• Olivia Giulia Bianca Vacchi   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0007-6429-9434 1 ,
• Diana Menis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9175-8831 1 ,
• Enrico Scarpis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1471-486X 1 ,
• Annarita Tullio   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3332-7459 2 ,
• Benedetta Piciocchi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4918-697X 1 ,
• Silvia Gazzetta   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0001-2445-9217 1 ,
• Massimo Del Pin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2666-8853 1 ,
• Edoardo Ruscio   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1688-1637 1 ,
• Silvio Brusaferro   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1018-7094 1 &
• Laura Brunelli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5475-0021 1 , 3  

BMC Public Health volume  24 , Article number:  1509 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Increasing work-related stress in academia can have an impact on physical and mental health. The aim of this study was to analyse the coping strategies of staff employed at the University of Udine and to verify whether sociodemographic data, professional position, and the presence of anxiety or depression symptoms are related to the use of different coping strategies.

We conducted a cross-sectional study between June and December 2020 using the Brief COPE questionnaire. We correlated coping strategies with professional position, sociodemographic data, and the presence of anxiety or depressive symptoms measured with the Patient Health Questionnaire–9 and the General Anxiety Disorder–7.

A total of 366 people participated in the study, including 109 junior academics, 146 senior academics, and 111 administrative staff (response rate 23.6%). The three most frequently used coping strategies in terms of approach coping style were planning (6.77 ± 1.41), active coping (6.58 ± 1.45) and acceptance (6.23 ± 1.44). Women were more likely than men to report using approach and avoidant coping strategies ( p  < 0.001). Positive reframing and religion were most commonly used by administrative staff ( p  < 0.05), in contrast to junior academics, who were more likely to use substances and self-blame ( p  < 0.05). Anxiety was found to correlate with self-blame (OR 1.94) as a coping strategy, while depression was associated with venting (OR 2.83), self-blame (OR 3.27), and humor (OR 3.02).

Identifying profiles of coping strategies can help higher education institutions to implement support strategies for the academic community, ultimately promoting healthier lives and more effective teaching and research. Our study has shown that women and junior academics among staff at the Udine University would benefit from a tailored health promotion intervention that encourages the use of approach coping styles to reduce their risk of developing anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

Stress is commonly described as the perception of an imbalance between the demands and the individual’s ability to respond to a situation with their resources [ 1 ]. However, stress can be divided into two different types and, according to Seyle’s definition (cited in Bienternova-Vascu et al., 2020), there is a “distress”, i.e. when the stress response is triggered by negative stressors, and a “eustress”, when the stress response is triggered by stimulating factors. In addition, the author emphasizes that stress is not what happens to someone, but how that person reacts to it [ 2 ].

When chronic stress is inadequately managed, it leads to burnout, which in turn is a risk factor for anxiety and depression [ 3 ].

The consequences of stress affect people’s health, their personal lives, and cause direct and indirect costs to the economy [ 4 , 5 ], estimated by the American Psychological Association at 500 billion dollars and 550 million workdays per year in the United States [ 6 ].

Traditionally, the academic category has been characterized by low levels of stress [ 7 ], which may be related in part to the notion that autonomous/self-managed work, such as that of an academic, is less stressful because one has direct control over one’s activities, which act as a buffer against work stress [ 8 ]. However, in the last decade, academics in Italy have been given a variety of tasks related to bureaucratic and social issues as part of a national reform. The former is related to the increasing popularity of temporary contracts, management tasks [ 9 ], and financial pressures as academics are expected to attract external funding [ 10 , 11 ]. Social issues include the competitive climate [ 5 ], loss of collegiality and support among colleagues [ 9 ], and lack of recognition [ 12 ].

In studies conducted at New Zealand and Australian universities, academics reported stress in up to 40% of respondents, more than general university staff [ 10 , 12 ]. Some authors believe that there is a link between stress and seniority in academics [ 13 ], while others found that stress is more common in younger academics [ 5 , 7 , 14 ], a category that typically has job instability [ 15 ]. Considering that temporary employment is one of the main causes of stress among academics [ 5 , 9 ], this issue is of great importance as PhD students, who are typically the youngest category of academics, are an important source of scientific progress [ 16 ]. The causes of stress in younger academics can also be seen in other aspects, such as lack of skills or experience in performing their own tasks and in leadership and management roles [ 9 ]. In addition, academics report the pursuit of publications [ 11 ], too much paperwork [ 5 ], inadequate salary [ 11 ], lack of promotion [ 5 , 9 ], and the competing demands of career and family life [ 11 ].

Stress management interventions can be categorized as primary (i.e., to prevent stress), secondary (i.e., to reduce the severity and duration of stress), or tertiary (i.e., to rehabilitate people already suffering from a mental illness) [ 17 ]. This classification can be made at both the individual and organizational level. Some authors also refer to a third intermediate category, the individual-organizational level, which aims to change the relationship between the individual and the organization [ 17 ].

At the organizational level, interventions should focus on job redesign, which aims to change the characteristics of the workplace to improve employee well-being (e.g., workplace discretion, workload, ergonomic design) [ 17 ], or to reduce role ambiguity by creating laws and regulations that define the expectations of a particular job [ 18 ].

On an individual level, some examples are cognitive-behavioural techniques [ 3 , 17 ], mindfulness [ 17 ], relaxation techniques (e.g., yoga, massage) [ 3 , 9 , 17 ], leisure activities [ 3 ], biofeedback [ 19 , 20 ], talking to colleagues [ 9 ], and flexible working conditions (e.g., part-time work and working from home one day a week) [ 9 , 20 ]. These various techniques for coping with stress at an individual level are referred to as coping strategies.

Individual ability to cope with stress also depends on personality [ 21 ], but there is a lack of systematic and comprehensive assessment of these aspects [ 22 ].

Coping strategies are indeed broad and refer to a variety of efforts to minimize the stress associated with negative life experiences (adaptive vs. maladaptive, active vs. passive, positive vs. negative, problem-oriented vs. emotion-oriented), and each of these strategies can be examined using specific questionnaires. Only a few studies have investigated coping strategies within the university [ 22 ], but most of them investigated coping strategies in a qualitative way using interviews [ 8 , 14 , 23 , 24 , 25 ], without applying an instrument with specific psychometric properties. This also makes it difficult to compare coping strategies between different studies.

As a result, there is still a lack of knowledge about the current use of coping strategies in the academic community. No data is available for the University of Udine. As this category of staff is crucial in terms of educating the new generations and for the creation of new knowledge, we can say that in universities progress and our future are being pursued and therefore studying and tracking the well-being of university staff is a priority.

Given the lack of specific quantitative data on coping with stress in the academic context, the present study therefore aimed primarily to analyse the coping strategies used by professionals in academia to deal with the main stressors they are exposed.

An accurate assessment of the coping strategies used by academic staff could be useful to implement targeted interventions to increase the resilience of the most vulnerable categories among academic staff (e.g., those who use maladaptive coping strategies).

Based on the hypothesis that age, type of employment contract, and different types of responsibilities may influence the use of specific coping strategies, we also wanted to investigate whether there was a relationship between coping style and occupational role (junior academics, senior academics and administrative staff). Referring to the literature, we wanted to confirm that age, sex, marital status, education, academic department, years of work experience, and symptoms of anxiety and depression could influence the use of different coping strategies.

This study wanted to obtain data for targeting interventions to provide prevention and support strategies for university members to increase their resilience to stress, to prevent burnout and improve psychosocial wellbeing. These data could also be useful for pursuing psychosocial well-being of academic staff in order to target interventions situated at a more organizational level.

Study design and setting

This was a cross-sectional study conducted at the University of Udine to investigate the coping styles of academics. The study was conducted between June and December 2020. The data on coping strategies were collected as part of a cross-sectional study (UN-SAD: Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression within the UNiversity community) conducted at the University of Udine, with the aim of investigating the mental health of academics [ 26 ]. This university is attended by approximately 15,000 students annually. The university was founded in 1978 and currently (in 2023) has 692 professors and researchers, 477 technical and administrative staff. The university is located in Northeastern Italy in a region called Friuli Venezia Giulia which has about 1.000.000 inhabitants. The region borders with Austria and Slovenia and the Italian region of Veneto. The main location of the university is set in the city of Udine which counts about 98.000 inhabitants, but there are branches in Pordenone, Gemona del Friuli and Gorizia.

Participants

All academic and administrative staff, assistants, fellows and short-term employees in all academic departments (Business and Economics, Life Sciences and Medicine, Basic Sciences and Engineering, Humanities, Political Sciences) with a total of about 1,500 eligible participants, were included in the study; only visiting professors were excluded.

Recruitment

We sent invitations through internal academic mailing list to all institutional email addresses to participate in the survey and reminders shortly before the deadline.

Data collection

Data collection took place between June and December 2020 via an anonymous online survey with a total of 69 items. The survey was conducted as a part of a broader study (the original UN-SAD study) [ 26 ], which aimed to identify the prevalence of depressive and anxiety symptoms among academic professionals, considering three groups: junior academics (i.e., on fixed-term contracts: researchers, post-doctoral researchers, PhD students), senior academics (i.e., on tenured contracts: full professors, associate professors, and researchers with tenured contracts), and administrative staff. It included a sociodemographic data section (age, sex, occupation, education, academic department, marital status, years of work experience and commuting distance) and two validated psychological assessment tests: Patient Health Questionnaire–9 (PHQ-9) [ 27 ] for depressive symptoms and General Anxiety Disorder–7 (GAD-7) [ 28 ] for anxiety symptoms. A special part of the survey examined coping styles using the Brief COPE (Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced) questionnaire [ 29 ]. The survey was conducted in Italian.

Research instruments

Questionnaire on coping orientation to problems experienced (brief cope).

The Brief COPE is a widely used instrument for investigating effective and ineffective coping styles in response to stressful life events. This questionnaire has been used in different countries [ 24 , 25 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ], including Italy [ 38 ], on different population groups, which is why we chose this questionnaire to ensure cross-cultural applicability and comparison with previous literature. The scale also has good psychometric properties for the Italian sample [ 39 ]. This instrument consists of 28 items divided into 14 scales. The questionnaire divides the coping strategies into denial, substance use, venting, behavioural disengagement, self-distraction, self-blame, active coping, positive reframing, planning, acceptance, seeking emotional support, seeking information support, religion, and humor. Each scale is represented by a score, which is the sum of the two items measured on a 4-point Likert scale. The scales range from two to eight: the higher the score, the more the specific coping strategy examined on the scale is used. The instrument does not offer the possibility of calculating an overall score.

The coping strategies can be divided into two large groups: the first six coping styles can be classified as avoidant coping and the second six as approach coping. Humor and religion are neither approach nor avoidant coping styles [ 40 ]. The first group includes coping styles in which the person approaches a stressor to seek information or social support, plan ahead, and try to solve the problems. The second group describes a passive strategy of moving away from a stressor, or an active strategy of moving away from or trying to escape from the stressor [ 40 ]. Specifically, six scales of the Brief COPE questionnaire address approach coping strategies (active coping, positive reframing, planning, acceptance, seeking emotional support, and seeking information support), while the other six scales examine avoidant coping strategies (denial, substance use, venting, behavioural disengagement, self-distraction, and self-blame); the two additional scales address the use of religion and humour, which are neither approach nor avoidant styles.

Patient Health Questionnaire–9 (PHQ-9)

This test was selected for psychological assessment because it has good sensitivity and specificity for the presence of depressive symptoms [ 27 ]. The scale has also good psychometric properties for the Italian sample [ 41 ]. The PHQ-9 is the 9-item depression module of the full PHQ. If five or more of the nine criteria for depressive symptoms were present on at least “more than half of the days” in the last two weeks and one of the symptoms is depressed mood or anhedonia, major depression can be diagnosed. If two, three, or four depressive symptoms have been present on at least “more than half of the days” in the past two weeks and one of the symptoms is depressed mood or anhedonia, other types of depression can be diagnosed. If the symptom “thoughts that you would be better off dead or thoughts about hurting yourself in some way” is present, it counts regardless of duration. Responses to the questionnaire are reported on a 3-point Likert scale, so the PHQ-9 score can range from 0 to 27, as each item can be scored from 0 (not at all) to 3 (almost every day) [ 27 ].

General anxiety Disorder–7 (GAD-7)

The GAD-7 is a validated test for the psychological assessment of anxiety symptoms [ 28 ]. This test was selected for psychological assessment because it has good sensitivity and specificity for the presence of anxiety symptoms. The scale has also good psychometric properties for the Italian sample [ 41 ].

The questionnaire consists of seven items asking about anxiety related problems in the last two weeks. The answers are given on a 4-point Likert scale, so that the questionnaire can range from 0 to 21 points. It serves as a screening tool for anxiety symptoms, so scores of five, 10, and 15 are considered to be the cut-off points for mild, moderate and severe anxiety, respectively. If the score is 10 or higher, further testing is recommended [ 28 ].

Sample size

The sample size was calculated for the original UN-SAD study with a 95% confidence level and based on the hypothesis of a different prevalence of minor psychiatric disorders in the three groups (junior academics, senior academics and administrative staff) [ 26 ]. The same individuals were interviewed using the Brief COPE questionnaire, which was also included in the original UN-SAD questionnaire.

We could find no previous data on the coping strategies used by academics at the University of Udine, so we hypotized that avoidant and approach coping styles might be evenly distributed in this population. Assuming that the prevalence of approach and avoidant coping styles was 50% in each group, and using the same 95% confidence level, we calculated an accuracy of 9% with the collected UN-SAD questionnaires. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Broad of the University of Udine, Italy.

Data analysis

Descriptive analyses were carried out for all variables. Data were presented as frequencies and percentages for categorical variables and as means ± standard deviations or median ± interquartile range (IQR) and minimum and maximum values for continuous variables. Results were presented as both categorical (values from two to eight) and dichotomous variables (avoidant or approach coping style). Chi-square tests and Fisher’s Exact tests were used where appropriate to assess the possible association between categorised variables. Student’s t-test, Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test, or Kruskal-Wallis test were used to compare continuous variables based on the Kolmogorov–Smirnov normality test. Binary univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to assess the association with dichotomous outcomes. Regression results were expressed as raw and adjusted ORs with 95% CI and p -values. The significance level was set at 0.05. All statistical analyses were performed using R. software, version 3.4.2 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) [R: The R Project for Statistical Computing. Available at: https://www.r-project.org/ . [Last accessed 2022 Aug 13]].

A total of 366 academic professionals responded to our survey, which corresponds to a response rate of 23.6% (366/1,550). The professional groups were evenly distributed between senior academics (N. 145; 39.9%), administrative staff (N. 111; 30.3%), and junior academics (N. 109; 29.8%). The majority of respondents in the groups of junior academics and administrative staff were women, namely 53.2% (N. 58) and 77.5% (N. 86), respectively, while the senior academics were predominantly men (N. 86; 58.9%). The mean age of the participants was 47.9 ± 12.0 years, with the junior academics being younger than the others (33.2 ± 6.4 years). The majority of respondents among senior academics and administrative staff were married/cohabiting (79.5% and 78.0%, respectively), while most junior academics (61.5%) were single. Thirty-three (9%) of respondents were divorced/separated or widowed. The most common position among senior academics was associate professor (N. 70; 47.9%), while junior academics were mostly fellows (N. 55; 50.5%). The sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents are presented in Table 1 . The full description of the characteristics of the respondents is included in the original article by Scarpis et al. [ 26 ].

As shown in Table  2 , the three most frequently used coping strategies in terms of approach coping style were planning (mean ± SD, 6.77 ± 1.41), active coping (6.58 ± 1.45), and acceptance (6.23 ± 1.44). The least used strategies related to avoidant coping styles included behavioural disengagement (2.90 ± 1.19), denial (2.49 ± 0.93), and substance use (2.20 ± 0.78). Overall, all other coping styles belonging to the approach and avoidant groups were used about equally often. Humour and religion were also in the middle range, although they were among the three least common. Women were more likely than men to use approach coping strategies based on external support - informational support (5.31 ± 1.54) and emotional support (5.09 ± 1.57), positive reframing (5.51 ± 1.63), and planning (6.88 ± 1.40), and avoidant coping styles such as self-distraction (5.28 ± 1.57), venting (5.10 ± 1.53), and self-blame (5.88 ± 1.38). Women were also more inclined to use religion than men (3.64 ± 1.91). In terms of occupational groups, positive reframing (5.59 ± 1.73) and religion (4.05 ± 2.03) were most frequently used by administrative staff compared to junior and senior academics. In contrast, junior academics were less likely than others to use acceptance (5.89 ± 1.43) and planning (6.48 ± 1.44), while they were more likely to use substances (2.46 ± 1.24) and self-blame (5.92 ± 1.58). Finally, senior academics were found to be less likely to use the denial strategy (2.35 ± 0.78) than younger colleagues and administrative staff.

Multivariate analysis revealed, in a statistically significant manner, that men were less likely than women to use positive reframing (OR 0.47), information support (OR 0.34), emotional support (OR 0.3), self-distraction (OR 0.53) and self-blame (OR 0.33). The presence of anxiety, as measured by the GAD-7, was statistically significantly negatively correlated with the use of positive reframing (OR 0.45) and positively correlated with self-blame (OR 1.94) as a coping strategy. The presence of depression assessed with the PHQ-9 was statistically significantly negatively associated with the use of active coping (OR 0.32) and planning (OR 0.46), whereas there was a positive correlation with the use of venting (OR 2.83), self-blame (OR 3.27), and humor (OR 3.02). The results of the multivariate analysis are shown in Table  3 . No significant association was found for age, occupation, education, academic department, years of work experience, and commuting distance. The only significant association was found with marital status: married individuals used humor less often than unmarried individuals, separated/divorced individuals used acceptance less often than unmarried individuals, and married and separated/divorced individuals used positive reframing less often than unmarried individuals.

The aim of our study was to investigate the use of different coping strategies to deal with stress in academia and to examine whether there is an association with professional position, sociodemographic data, and the presence of anxiety/depressive symptoms, as reported in the original paper [ 26 ].

The distribution of the study participants’ characteristics was close to the available data on Italian administrative staff, junior and senior academics [ 42 ].

Our results showed that the three most frequently used coping strategies in terms of approach coping style included planning, active coping and acceptance. The least used strategies related to avoidant coping styles included behavioural disengagement, denial, and substance use. Overall, all other coping styles belonging to the approach and avoidant groups were about equally used.

Humour and religion were also in the middle range. Similarly, adaptive coping strategies (acceptance, active coping, positive reframing) were most frequently used in the Lee et al.’s study involving students and university employees (i.e., academics and administrative) [ 8 ]. This study differs from our study in that it included both staff and students as participants. However, in a subgroup analysis, the only two coping strategies that were used more frequently among academic staff than students were positive reframing and religion. On the other hand, the study has similarities in that it was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an important factor when considering that the use of a particular coping style is influenced by both the predisposition of the individual and the context in which it is used (e.g., social context, duration, and exposure to the stressor).

However, in a study conducted among academics at universities in Malaysia, maladaptive coping strategies were more prevalent than adaptive ones [ 43 ]. The author’s interpretation was that the stress load was so high that the assumption of an adaptive coping pattern did not work. In another recent study, the two most prevalent coping strategies among academic staff at a Northern Irish university were substance use and behavioural disengagement (both of which are avoidant strategies) [ 34 ].

However, it should be noted that these data [ 8 , 34 , 43 ] should be interpreted with caution as the Brief COPE questionnaire was used in different ways: some authors calculated the total score for each participant [ 8 ], others used a shortened version [ 34 ], and still others used a modified Likert scale [ 43 ].

Differences in the coping strategy used can affect people’s ability to manage problems in an effective way, leading to different individual and collective outcomes. For example, people who use active coping strategies have been found to have higher self-esteem and attempt to purposefully cope with problems by seeking social support, whereas those with passive coping strategies have lower self-esteem and seek self-imposed social isolation [ 37 , 44 ]. In addition, the problem-oriented coper with active coping and planning aims to eliminate the stressor, whereas the emotion-oriented coper with venting, positive reappraisal, rumination, and self-blame aims to change their emotional response to the stressor [ 45 ].

Gender and coping styles

Overall, we found in this study that women reported coping strategies more frequently than men. This was particularly true for some approach coping styles (i.e. positive reframing, use of informational support, emotional support, and planning), as well as for avoidant coping styles (i.e. self-distraction, venting, and self-blame). Women were also more likely to use religion to cope with stress.

In our study, we found that women were more likely than men to use external support-based approach coping strategies (i.e., informational support, and emotional support, positive reframing, and planning), and avoidant coping styles (i.e., self-distraction, venting, and self-blame), and that, they generally tended to use more coping styles than men.

Conversely, Darabi et al. found no statistically significant differences in coping strategies between men and women in British academics [ 30 ].

Likewise to our findings, Kataoka et al.’s study of gender differences found that women employed at a Japanese university were significantly more likely to use self-distraction, emotional support, informational support, behavioural disengagement, venting, and self-blame [ 25 ].

Similarly, we reported that women were generally more likely to use coping strategies than men, not only those they mentioned, but also positive reframing and planning. In contrast, we found no gender differences in behavioural disengagement.

The cluster analysis conducted by Doron et al. revealed that individuals typically fall into four subgroups [ 36 ]. The first group includes individuals who frequently seek external support and distraction (high-copers); the second group consists of participants characterized by high use of problem solving and moderate cognitive restructuring (adaptive copers); the third group is represented by individuals with high avoidance (avoidant copers); and the fourth group includes individuals with high cognitive restructuring (low-copers). Their results seem to confirm the existing difference between men and women in coping styles, as women were overrepresented in the high copers and avoidant copers groups, while men were mainly represented in the low copers group [ 36 ].

Zehra et al. investigated the coping strategies of residents in an emergency department in Pakistan [ 31 ]. Similar to our results, they found that all coping strategies, except for substance use, were predominantly chosen by women.

Our observation that women are more likely than men to use coping strategies related to emotional support confirms what Marinaki et al. found at Greek universities [ 46 ]. The study by Marinaki et al. included academic staff at Greek public universities and found that female academics were more likely to seek social support than their male counterparts. However, they did not use the same instrument to assess coping styles, which makes it difficult to compare their results with ours.

The greater use of some coping strategies by women may be related to the greater burden of mental health problems [ 47 ] and stress [ 37 ] reported to affect them.

Another reason for stress in female academics could be job role: a recent study showed that female employees at a university in gender-incongruent roles reported higher levels of stress than men in a gender-incongruent role [ 23 ].

As mentioned earlier, these differences between men and women could be due to differences in exposure to stress triggers, but also to differences in perception or reporting. Although it could be argued that women’s stress levels may be higher, the observed tendency to rely more on emotions could mean that they are more sensitive to external or internal stressors that have been reported to affect academics, such as excessive workload, job insecurity, and lack of support [ 22 ]. In addition, the fact that they seek external support to a high degree could be the reason for the increased reporting of this phenomenon. Our study did not focus on issues of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI issues), we did not investigate whether participants felt part of a marginalized group. Unfortunately, data collected by the Equal Opportunities Committee of the University of Udine, published in their annual report [ 48 ], still confirms an important gender gap in the roles of professors and researchers (e.g., only 25% of full professors are women, and there is also a glass ceiling, as women are mainly represented at the base of the pyramid as students, and become fewer and fewer towards the top as full professors and the management levels). Consequently, it is possible that some of the stress faced by female academic staff is related to the gender gap, but since we did not investigate feelings of the marginalization, we could not relate coping style to EDI issues.

Occupational role and coping styles

In terms of occupational groups, positive reframing and religion were most frequently used by administrative staff compared to junior and senior academics, while junior academics resorted to substances and self-blame more frequently than others. Finally, senior academics were found to use the denial strategy less frequently than junior colleagues and administrative staff.

In contrast to the reports of Marinaki et al. [ 46 ], we found different patterns of coping styles among administrative staff, junior and senior academics. To some extent, the differences between junior and senior academics may also be considered as differences in experience, as senior academic positions are often given to more experienced professionals. Some studies suggest that coping strategies may change over the course of a career, shifting from a problem-oriented coping strategy to an emotion-oriented coping strategy [ 49 , 50 ]. This could be due to different problems that a person faces at different stages of their career, e.g., decisions in the early career years that may be crucial for the development of the young academic, while activities in the late career years are more routine. Some authors argue that this difference is related to age, as younger people experience life-changing events (e.g., marriage, birth of children), whereas older people mostly experience routine or loss events (e.g., loss of health or loved ones) [ 49 ]. Another study conducted in an academic setting that indirectly examined the differences between the coping strategies of different age groups is that of Lee et al. In their case, the older group of administrative and academic staff used positive reframing and religion more frequently than the younger group of students [ 8 ]. Similarly, we showed that positive reframing and religion were most frequently used by administrative staff compared to junior and senior academics.

In addition, our study showed that junior academics were less likely than others to use acceptance and planning, whereas they were more likely to use substances and self-blame. A higher prevalence of stress [ 5 ] and depression [ 26 ] has already been reported in younger academics. In addition, a worrying overlap has been found between burnout, depression, and substance abuse [ 51 ] and between feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, and self-blame associated with depressed mood [ 52 ].

To cite the Lee et al. article again, we must consider that the context of the COVID-19 pandemic may have influenced the results of the study. Positions associated with a stable job that provided income during lockdown may have led to less frequent use of avoidant coping strategies such as substance use and self-blame compared to more unstable positions, such as those held by junior academics [ 8 ].

Mental health and coping styles

Our findings suggest that there is some association between mental health status (anxious or depressed) and the coping strategies that individuals typically use, as was also the case in the study by Kataoka et al. [ 24 ]. In both studies, an association was found between mental health problems and the use of avoidant coping styles, although not in relation to the same strategies, with the exception of self-blame. As in our study, Kataoka et al. also found a significant correlation between anxiety and self-blame [ 24 ]. Although coping styles were measured with the same instrument, the limitation of this comparison is that anxiety symptoms were assessed with different questionnaires.

On the other hand, our results differ from those previously reported in the study by Batsikoura et al. [ 35 ]. In their case, the use of denial, behavioural disengagement, and substances were positively correlated with anxiety scores, whereas humor, acceptance, and planning were negatively associated with anxiety. In the Greek general population over the age of 18, the use of self-blame was positively correlated with anxiety, similar to our results, and the risk of anxiety when using positive reframing was lower in the same group. However, as the questionnaire used to assess anxiety in the study by Batzikoura et al. differs from the questionnaire used in our study, a true comparison is not possible [ 35 ].

Other studies in Italian and Australian populations, confirmed that approach coping styles were associated with lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and added that avoidant coping strategies were significantly associated with higher levels of anxiety and depression [ 38 , 53 ].

Also, in the study by Agha et al. in which the 28 items of the Brief COPE were categorized into four subscales (i.e., active avoidance, problem-focused, positive coping, religious/denial), there is a significant association between anxiety and depression and the subscales with avoidant coping strategies: active avoidance and religious/denial [ 54 ].

It is important to consider the social and cultural context as it may lead to relevant differences in the results. For example, in Muslim cultures, the two most commonly used coping styles were religion and acceptance, both in the general population [ 55 ] and among university students [ 56 ] and in a population with anxiety and depressive symptoms [ 33 ].

Limitations and strengths of the study

Although the use of a validated instrument is a methodological strength, it made it difficult to compare our results with other studies conducted in academia using other instruments. In addition, we found some heterogeneity in the use of terms and classifications to describe the different coping styles (e.g., approach/avoidant, active/passive, positive/negative, adaptive/maladaptive, problem/emotion-oriented), which made such comparisons difficult. The design of our study, which was cross-sectional and involved only one academic centre, certainly represents a limitation, as the representativeness of our results may have been influenced by this choice. Furthermore, as participation in the study was voluntary, it may have been influenced by some selection bias. Nonetheless, the sample size was adequate and the results were representative of our academic community, including senior and junior academics as well as administrative staff.

Another critical aspect is that our survey did not investigate whether participants felt they belonged to a marginalized group, so we cannot assess whether academic staff belonging marginalized groups (i.e. women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, etc.) have different coping styles from the rest of the academic staff. In addition, when interpreting the results, we must bear in mind that the data was collected during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the reported increase in anxiety and depression during the pandemic, both nationally [ 57 ] and internationally [ 58 ], this may have influenced our results. Finally, contextual considerations regarding differences in cultural coping with stress across countries need to be made before our findings can be generalized.

Conclusions

Coping styles remain largely unexplored in academia, but further studies such as the present one would facilitate the identification of links with risk or protective factors so that higher education institutions could be informed about what can be done to support their community. Such support is necessary to improve both the personal and professional lives of academic staff, ultimately leading to healthier lives and more effective teaching and research. Our study showed that the use of the coping style self-blame was positively related to anxiety symptoms and the use of venting and self-blame was positively related to depression symptoms. In our population, women used self-distraction, venting, and self-blame more frequently than men, whereas junior academics used substance use and self-blame more frequently than senior academics and administrative staff. This suggests that women and junior academics would benefit from a tailored health promotion and prevention intervention to encourage these populations to use more approach coping styles such as active coping and planning. Examining the complexity of coping can help identify individuals at increased risk for stress and unhealthy behaviours and develop health promotion and prevention interventions that enable people to use the most effective coping methods. Such interventions should be implemented at the organizational level with laws and regulations to improve working conditions, at the organizational-individual level with strategies such as peer support groups, and at the individual level with cognitive behavioural techniques.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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The author would thank all professional that participate in the survey.

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Olivia Giulia Bianca Vacchi, Diana Menis, Enrico Scarpis, Benedetta Piciocchi, Silvia Gazzetta, Massimo Del Pin, Edoardo Ruscio, Silvio Brusaferro & Laura Brunelli

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LB, ES, MDP, ER designed the research; ES, ER collected data; ES, MPD, OV, DM, BP, SG, ER, AT, LB discussed the investigation methodology and contributed to result interpretation; AT performed data analysis; LB, SB supervised the study conduction; OV, DM wrote the original draft; LB, ES revised contents. All authors revised the paper and agreed with the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Enrico Scarpis .

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Vacchi, O.B., Menis, D., Scarpis, E. et al. Stress management: how does the academic staff cope with it? a cross-sectional study at the university of Udine. BMC Public Health 24 , 1509 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-18935-7

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Dealing With Stress and Anxiety as a PhD Student

Pursuing a PhD can be both interesting and overwhelming. In the beginning, a majority of the PhD students feel energised to conduct extra-ordinary research and submit a PhD research proposal which is unique and innovative. However, with time the task to balance both personal and academic life becomes difficult. As a result, the students try to isolate themselves to focus on their PhD thesis writing. This isolation often makes students stressed and anxious and even leads them to confusion. So, before you try to isolate yourself to introduce the whole mankind to cutting-edge research, read the below tips which will help you to deal with stress and anxiety as a research student.

Be organised

One of the major sources of stress is the inability to control a situation. As PhD proposal writing or PhD dissertation writing are inevitable parts of a PhD academic life, try to manage your time wisely. To keep control over the deadlines, ensure that you do not leave any academic writing task for the last minute. Experts suggest that breaking a major task into smaller goals is the best way to remain organised and stay on top of your PhD work.

Identify and address your dysfunctional emotions

As a number of thoughts run through a PhD student’s mind, to retain the health of your emotions it is important to stay away from any irrational thoughts. Identifying your dysfunctional feelings is a great way to deal with stress and anxiety. Instead of procrastinating your work due to irrational feelings or feeling embarrassed about your research related problems, try to get professional PhD thesis help . Professional help with PhD thesis writing will guide you in completing your work which might otherwise get affected due to negative feelings.

Being mindful means paying more attention to yourself and your surroundings. This is one of the proven methods of reducing the stress level as the people who practice mindfulness can easily notice any early signs of stress. It is also the best way to reduce any kind of distress in students during examination periods. To practice mindfulness, just sit quietly and pay attention to your body and surroundings. Do some breathing exercises to relax and reduce any negative thoughts.

The PhD students need to spend hours either standing for conducting a research or continuously sitting for reading and writing PhD dissertation. This adds to the physical and mental stress which you might go through. Taking part in any exercise such as walking, running, aerobics or swimming before starting your PhD work will help you improve your mental and physical health.

Look after yourself

Stress and anxiety can either lead to developing habits such as poor eating, emotional eating, drinking or smoking. Although these habits might reduce your stress temporarily, when continued for a long time, these habits can affect your body and immune system. So, be watchful and never fall prey to any habits which might lead you to nowhere. Additionally, get enough sleep to charge yourself up before doing any intellectual activity.

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Dealing with PhD Stress

April 8, 2016 by Dissertation Genius

The entire process of writing a PhD dissertation is a tedious one. From thinking of your research topic, coming up with a research question, and choosing a sample, to testing that sample, selecting a research method, doing a literature review, conducting the actual research, analyzing the results, and putting it all together, all this is not easy to do.

The Importance of Stress Management During PhD Dissertation Work

Compounding the stress of writing a PhD dissertation with the stress of daily life can be overwhelming for any doctoral student. The sad reality is that stress is a huge factor in many unsuccessful PhD dissertation attempts. The fact is that successful doctoral students are those that persevere and know how to deal with stress .

Avoidance as a Stress-Coping Mechanism is All-too Common Among Doctoral Students

When you are working on your doctorate (which is a long process), life will inevitably throws throw other stressors your way. This includes stressors related to financial issues, employment, taking care of family, and daily hassles. Therefore, the easy way out for many doctoral students is simply to postpone writing their next dissertation chapter or avoid conducting their research. This is fine when it’s done in moderation, as everyone needs a little down time to maintain their stamina. If you’re not careful, avoidance can become a primary coping mechanism for your stress and you don’t want that to happen.

But how do you go about dealing with the stress? And what are the best ways to manage it?

“To answer these questions, this article will first define stress. It will then give a list of warning signs for acute stress and, finally, it will offer practical solutions to manage your stress.”

Stressors and Stress – What are They?

To use a common definition, stressors are those people, places, events, or things that put pressure on you (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). These can range from dissertation tasks and financial distress to family and other relationship pressures.

Stress, on the other hand, is internal rather than external, and is a negative physical, mental, and emotional reaction to stressors (Lovallo, 1997). For instance, having an upcoming deadline for a dissertation chapter is a potential stressor that would likely cause stress, a physiological and emotional reaction inside a person who may react with pressure, anxiety, restlessness, etc.

Early Signs of Acute Stress

There are two types of signs for acute (serious) stress: emotional and behavioral.

Emotional Signs of Stress

• Apathy, sadness, not caring
• No longer finding pleasure in activities once found so
• Anxious, easily agitated, restless
• Argumentative, irritable, defensive, angry
• Mentally lazy, difficulty concentrating
• Avoidance of dealing with issues or problems

Behavioral Signs of Stress

• Behavioral avoidance, difficulty accepting things
• Neglecting normal responsibilities
• Compulsive behavior (e.g. indulging in things like overspending, sex, gambling, drugs, etc.)
• Poor caring of the self (in hygiene or appearance for example)
• Chronic tardiness and poor follow-through on tasks
• Legal and financial problems
• Aggressive impulses

Preventative Solutions to Stress Management

The best way to deal with stress is through preventative solutions allowing you to deal much more effectively with potential stressors. These solutions allow you to minimize the negative physiological traits of stress (therefore minimize psychological stress) when they arrive.

These preventative measures include:

• Structure & time management
• Prayer/Meditation
• Support Groups

Preventing Stress: Structure & Time Management

The key to effective structure and time management is to prioritize . When you’re inundated with tasks and the simple pressures of daily life (compounded with your dissertation), it can become difficult to differentiate between what’s important and what’s not.

Here, you may want to reassess your values to analyze what’s truly important to you. Is your PhD degree more important to you than a recent relationship for example? Once you work through your priorities, you can decide what is worth your time and what’s not. Then, based on this, you can develop a time-based schedule according to your priorities.

Preventing Stress: Prayer/Meditation

It first must be mentioned that prayer and meditation work, and are proven to work in minimizing stress (Horowitz, 2010; Hussain, 2010; Ren, Huang, & Zhang, 2013; Seaward, 2009). Regarding prayer, prayer does not need to be religion-affiliated. You don’t need to believe in a religion in order to believe that a power greater than yourself could help with solving your problems. A simple conversation asking for what you want is all that is necessary sometimes.

Furthermore, meditation is an excellent way of relieving stress. The important thing about meditation is to clear your mind of all those racing thoughts. To do this depends really on the person. Some people can achieve a meditative state (a clear mind) by being in a setting with complete silence. Others can achieve a meditative state while in in natural environments with the sounds of nature surrounding them.

If you’re not sure how to meditate, choose a relatively quiet setting and focus on just one particular sound, whether it’s the birds chirping, the wind blowing, the leaves rustling, the rain dropping, or even the fan turning, whatever it may be as long as you focus intensely on it and, thus, clear your mind. When you get used to achieving these meditative states, you will be absolutely amazed at how much more clear, effective, and logical your thinking will become.

Preventing Stress: Academic Support Groups

I define an academic support group broadly; it can include any setting with your peers where the general goal is to support and help one another achieve academic goals. The power of human support is therapeutic and effective. For you, support groups could be study groups, dissertation support groups, online forums, or discussion groups. You must try to take advantage of at least one of these. If you think you’re the only one going through the stress of writing a dissertation and dealing with other particular things in your life, you’re very wrong. You will find others who have gone through similar situations and have worked through them successfully. They can provide guidance, motivation, and a host of strategies to help you through your stress.

Preventing Stress: Exercise

Yes, you may have heard it a thousand times, but exercise as a tool of stress management is way too valuable not to mention. Moreover, doctoral students working on their dissertations tend to sit very long hours doing dissertation work. So they are guilty of shunning exercise. Habitual exercise, whether this means working out, jogging, aerobics, or just plain walking, increases the amounts of endorphins in your body which elevates your mood and energizes you. In addition, and this is absolutely vital, regular exercise decreases the amounts of cortisol in your body, which is the main chemical induced by stress.

Preventing Stress: Diet and Sleep

In addition to regular exercise, diet and sleep are absolutely vital for overall well-being, but especially for stress-prevention. Regarding diet, this means you must apply the well-known maxim “you are what you eat.” If you want your body to feel like junk, then eat all the junk and fast food you want. However, if you want to feel good and feel prepared for whatever life brings at you, then snack on some fruits & vegetables, eat less fried foods, buy a bottle of vitamins and take them instead of leaving them in your kitchen cabinet. Regarding caffeinated beverages, avoid large intakes of caffeine over a stretched period of time. Otherwise, you’re at very high risk of frying your nerves and making yourself more anxious and stressful. Moderation is key.

Next, sleep health is not to be ignored. The latest research suggests that the healthiest amounts of sleep should be at least about 7 hours (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015; Watson et al., 2015). Moreover, it is important for your body’s circadian rhythm sleep around the same time every night. Also, keep in mind that oversleep is just as precarious as the lack sleep.

References Horowitz S. (2010). Health benefits of meditation: What the newest research shows. Alternative and Complementary Therapies.16:2 Hussain, D. (2010).

Psychology of meditation and health: Present status and future directions. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy. 10:439.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York, NY: Springer Publications.

Lovallo, W. R. (1997). Stress & health: Biological and psychological interactions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Ren, J., Huang, L., & Zhang, Z. (2013). Meditation makes a peaceful state of mind: People’s positive and negative emotional response can be reduced by meditation training. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 44(10), 1339-1348. doi:10.3724/sp.j.1041.2012.01339

Seaward, B. L. (2009). Managing stress: Principles and strategies for health and well-being. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al. (2015). Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: a joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep. Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep. 38. 843-844,

US Department of Health and Human Services. (2015). Sleep Health Objectives. Available from: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/public/sleep/healthy_sleep.pdf

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