PhD Lesson #2: Improve yourself through repetition
5 lessons I learned during my PhD
Improving yourself sounds hard. Repetition sounds simple. Both are directly connected: Through healthy habits.
PhD journeys are unstructured: You don’t have a fixed working schedule and no one can tell you how many papers to read, meetings to attend, or analyses to perform until you finish. While this results in tremendous academic freedom, it can also create uncertainty, anxiety, and, in the worst case, burnout or depression.
What helped me was to replace this uncertainty with a strict structure I imposed on myself. I sat down and thought: Which daily behaviors are holding me back? Which daily behaviors are helping me grow?
Despite living in a complex world, the answers to these questions are surprisingly simple. We don’t need more studies to show that we should exercise and sleep well. The real question is: how do we actually adhere to it?
The answer is healthy habits.
The great advantage of habits is that they free us from constant decision-making. During a PhD, our mental energy should be reserved for difficult research problems. In lesson 1, I explained how precise To-Do lists helped me concentrate decision-making into the evening so the next day could simply be executed.
Habits extend the same principle to life outside research. As an example, I find it much easier to exercise every day than to exercise 2–3 times per week. Irregular exercise requires repeated active decisions. Daily exercise, once established, becomes automatic. This provides structure, preserves cognitive resources for research, and prevents the constant internal negotiation between what feels urgent in the moment and what is beneficial in the long term.
Creating healthy habits is a process of getting to know yourself: finding routines and combinations that, once established, become easy to maintain.
My habits aimed to support 1) sleep, 2) exercise, 3) nutrition, 4) continuous learning, and 5) spirituality, and they shaped almost every day of my PhD in this order:
Wake up → meditate → read papers → learn a new skill → work → exercise → protein smoothie → work → free time → meditate → read → sleep.
1) Sleep. Everyone sleeps, but given how crucial it is, I tried to actively support it through my habits. For me, this meant stabilizing my circadian rhythm: waking up and going to bed at the same time every day, including weekends. To prepare for sleep, I wrote in my gratitude journal, meditated, and read until I got sleepy.
2) Exercise. It is as important for our mind as it is for our body. Regular exercise reduces stress, improves mood and well-being, and helps us stay mentally resilient during difficult periods. I also believe that many of my best ideas emerge during or after exercise. When it comes to physical health, it is important to combine cardio exercise with strength training. For me, that means running and weight lifting.
3) Nutrition is not a knowledge problem. We mostly know which foods to avoid and which to favor — the challenge is consistency. My solution was to make healthy eating automatic by always having a complete healthy meal ready to eat. Every two weeks, I prepared and froze large batches of protein smoothies. Whenever I craved unhealthy food, I first drank my satiating smoothie. Often, the craving disappeared afterwards.
4) Continuous learning. In a PhD, it is tempting to prioritize immediate outcomes, such as performing analyses, over long-term investments, such as reading papers.
But the importance of reading papers cannot be overemphasized. I believe PhD researchers should invest even more time in paper reading than professors: they have to catch up with years of accumulated literature while simultaneously learning how to identify important papers and extract information efficiently — a skill that improves over time.
At the beginning of my PhD, I struggled to keep up with my growing to-read list while still accomplishing my weekly analysis goals. I solved this by making paper reading a habit: I would set a timer and read for 30 minutes every morning. Even though my to-read list never stopped growing, after a few months, I increasingly felt up to date with the most important research.
I genuinely enjoyed this routine. I would meditate and read papers in bed in the morning, when my mind was still quiet and undistracted. It almost felt lazy despite being highly productive.
In addition to paper reading, I spent 30 minutes every day learning a new skill. This is so important that I will expand on this in lesson 3.
5) Spirituality. I meditated 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening. While many studies support meditation as an effective tool for well-being, stress reduction, and focus, I experienced it as something much deeper than that. It became the only habit I carried with me wherever I went, even on vacation.
As children, we experience the world with curiosity and attention. As adults, familiarity replaces curiosity and we stop looking closely. Meditation helped me pause each day and become more present again.
Without meditation, I often walk around completely absorbed in superficial thoughts. Meditation did not eliminate these thoughts, but it helped me become aware of them more often, let go of them more easily, and occasionally return my attention to the immediate experience of life itself.
For me, all other habits and achievements lose much of their value if I move through life without truly paying attention to it.
