Have you developed bad habits that deteriorate your performance and motivation? Find out how you can ditch bad habits and become motivated academic!
Did you know that the habits you develop at the early stage of your development as an academic can make or break your academic career?
Why?
It’s because it’s relatively easy to pick up bad habits, while it’s substantially more challenging to ditch them.
And I don’t need to tell you how bad habits may affect your life as a PhD student – bad habits can drain your energy, diminish your productivity, and prevent you from staying motivated to solve the challenges, especially when you hit an obstacle in your research degree.
But what is bad habits definition? Broadly speaking, bad habits can be defined as negative behaviour. A common bad habits synonym is a weakness or a shortcoming.
There are many types of bad habits. But here is one of many unhealthy habits examples that you need to be particularly aware of as a researcher.
At the early stage of my formation as a researcher, I became an email slave. It wasn’t just a tool. I become obsessed with checking my email and was responding to every email right after it arrived in my mailbox. And I was doing this 24/7…
The result?
I got distracted from my research and had to stay up late to complete all my tasks. A not really great example of the work-life balance, and something that led to unhealthy sleeping habits.
Sometimes you may pick up a bad habit because you don’t really know it’s bad or it may have bad consequences in the long term.
But the great thing is that you aren’t alone with this and you may have picked up a bad habit because you weren’t shown otherwise.
Wondering how to improve studying habits, how to overcome bad habits and what are the examples of bad habits among PhDs? Look no further. I reflected on my good and bad habits to prepare the list of bad habits that are the most common and unhealthy that you should avoid so that you could become motivated academic and succeed in your career.
I also share ways to change them and succeed in your academic career. I hope this will give you an idea on how to stop bad habits and excel in your academic career!
Table of Contents
Bad habit to break for academic success #1: Procrastination
Do you always stick to your plan or do you delay your activities? Procrastination can be a number one enemy of every researcher, as you may struggle to get yourself motivated enough to get the work done. Procrastination can be seen as the bad habits definition for researchers and PhD students!
As a result, you may feel anxious because of the lack of progress. This may further deteriorate your motivation so that you keep delaying your work.
How to overcome a bad habit like this? To stop procrastinating and stay motivated, you need to understand that there’s a fine line between procrastination, motivation and burnout. To replace this bad habit with good ones, here is what you need to do:
- Take care of your wellbeing
- Plan for breaks and allow yourself some free time
- Don’t push yourself too hard to avoid anxiety and burnout
From my experience, the best way to break bad habits like procrastination is efficient planning and having a clear definition for WHY in your research.
Bad habit to break for academic success #2: Distractions cause lack of focus
Distractions kill your productivity. It’s as simple as that.
You won’t be able to properly focus on doing your research or writing your work.
Such distractions can include innocent things like having your phone close to you, having your email switched on, working with the TV on, working in a cluttered and untidy environment or in a noisy environment. Lack of focus is one of the worst habits to have as a researcher. It kills our productivity, results in long work hours, bad sleep hygiene, bad time management, and promotes negative work habits.
How to overcome a bad habit like this? Well, it’s relatively simple. Focus on replacing bad habits with good ones! Here’s how you can do it:
- take care of your working environment, especially if you work from home
- switch your phone to silent or use focus mode
- plan your focus and relax time in your daily schedule
Bad habit to break for academic success #3: Being addicted to email
If we’re talking about examples of unhealthy habits in academia, being addicted to email is number one! I am guilty of this one myself, as I mentioned in the introduction.
Having your email open and replying to messages 24/7 is one of the key researcher’s sins, leading to bad productivity, unhealthy sleeping habits and other types of bad habits. After all, if you reply to your email at 3am, you’re giving others a message that you’re constantly on, keep working, and have no other life.
Moreover, this is one of the worst habits to have. It not only distracts you and prevents you from completing your daily tasks on time. It also can have a destructive influence on your health and wellbeing, as you’ll be more and more anxious about respon