A lot of this is eerily similar to what happens to many PhD students once they finish coursework and start prepping for comps and then writing their dissertation: independent work can be overwhelming & isolating. So, FWIW, here's what I tell my PhD students: a short thread. 1/6 https://twitter.com/DalGazette/status/1322209979516870661

1. You know yourself best. Which are your best thinking hours? Are you a morning person, or a night person? Schedule academic work for those best thinking hours, to the degree you can. 2/6

2. What are your worst thinking hours? Don't use them for academic stuff. Protect them for downtime. Talk to your friends, go for a walk, watch a movie, whatever. Do it guilt-free, because these are NO-academic-work hours. 3/6

3. Academic work is intense & often creative, in the broadest sense. Poets have complained for centuries that they can't control creativity, & neither can we. Do non-creative stuff instead: read, transfer duedates to a calendar, plan out your time for next week. 4/6

Respect your brain & what your brain needs. Give it guilt-free non-work hours. Give it mundane tasks when it's too tired to do the intensive stuff, so that you still get the sense of accomplishment and avoid the frustration of trying to start a car that's out of gas. 5/6

We all have bad-brain days, even weeks. But if the bad days start to pile up, talk to someone--your instructor, counselling services, a friend--before they start to look like a wall you can't climb over. We'll try to find you a ladder. :-) 6/6