Awareness of the problem can help you to deal with it. Which brings me to the last point.

Make a plan and follow it.

Each day, at the end of the day, write down what you’d like to (need to) accomplish the next day. It should be only two or three things.

You might end up doing more things but keep this list short.

This is your list to get STARTED with your day.

So that you don’t sit there feeling terrible and also unable to shake it off as you don’t know how to get started with the day’s work.

An item in your list could be something like:

Implement the next step in troubleshooting to figure out what the hell is the bug that your code is currently suffering from.

Then, come in the next morning and do the things on your (short) list no matter what.

I used to have a daily morning meeting in graduate school where I basically heard that I couldn’t graduate. Not yet. And what felt like, maybe not ever.

It was really hard to do work right after that. I was so demoralized. I wished my day wouldn’t start like that but I had no choice.

My mind would be clouded by negative things and when working on hard problems, you kind of need to be all there. You need to shake off negativity and get the work DONE.

It helped to acknowledge that I found the meeting demoralizing and then come up with a plan to fight that feeling.

I would have a few things planned out to start doing right after the meeting.

Things that would add up and ultimately lead to graduating no matter how much it felt like that was an impossibility. It’s all about chipping away at it.

So, don’t let any demoralizing forces stop you from chipping away at your goal.

If you detect demoralization, take steps to fight it first, and then continue working.

Full blog post:

https://howtophd.org/2018/11/how-to-fight-demoralization-in-graduate.html