How to deal with fear of failure as a PhD student?
What you experience is essentially what all grad students feel, though few of them talk about it. I would bet that 3/4 of the full professors on this list felt like that at times when they were grad students, and may still do. I can certainly say that for the first few years of being a professor, I periodically had the thought that I'm just a normal human and that the world would end if my department ever found out -- all while doing, what I believe, good work.
So you're not alone in having these feelings, though you may feel them more severely than others if you find that it occasionally paralyzes your ability to move forward. (Though, even there, I would say that all of us had weeks where we got to work, opened a browser and studied the world wide web for most of the time until it was time to go home.)
The best way to get over it is by talking to others, both your peers and your advisers (including the department's graduate adviser) about these issues. You will find that everyone, even those you think must be sooo much better than you, has these issues. I think it will help you put yourself in perspective. They may also share their own strategies to deal with things.
My strategy if I get stuck on something is to do something else -- work out the part of your thesis for which you already have results, write them up, do the copy editing -- and come back to the open questions when you're in a better place again.
To some degree or another, the feelings you describe are common in graduate students (and other people). Here are some comments from around the Internet, for example:
FEAR !!
I self diagnosed this of myself just this week to explain my behaviour for the last 6 months . I called it boredom, annoying , painful etc but actully I am afraid to progress because someone might say”not good enough”. I am engaged in a systematic review and all I have to do now is read (albeit systematically) but simle right ?
I just applied for some funding and as I drew out my timeline for the project I thought “will I or can I actually do this”? The answer of course is I can but if my will is left up to me I am fearful I’ll self destruct !!!! There I go again fearing!!
(Marese kelly on Thesis Whisperer)
I just can't do it. I've spent the last month rewriting the first paragraph over and over. Yet, it is still not good enough. When I sit in front of my computer I usually feel paralyzed with fear. This might sound bizarre, but it is true. Yesterday I felt more courage than the average day. I worked on my thesis for hours. Yet, at the end of the day, I was still in the first paragraph. I didn't used to be like this. Believe it or not I was an outstanding student. Now I don't even dare to discuss science with my colleagues, I might say something stupid.
(jesuisperdu on reddit)
I have sweated in the fear of failure, and all I can say is that this fear continues even after you have passed the doctorate. In fact, that’s when the fear of failure can be worst! Because now you have to take your research and creative work out of the sheltered workshop of the academy and impress not just a couple of examiners, your supervisor and an academic panel, but people who will put down money (hopefully) into your ideas and research.
(On 100 days to the doctorate & beyond)
Many of the fears described by you and the people I quoted above, are about how you may be perceived by others. One thing that people with this kind of fear sometimes find helpful is to identify when they are feeling fear of being judged, then remind themselves about the realistic standards by which people in their position are judged. In your particular situation:
- Nobody* expects you or others in your position to never say or write something that is mistaken or uninformed.
- Nobody* expects you or others in your position to have a thesis topic that revolutionizes the field, to win a Nobel prize for your thesis.
- Nobody* expects you or others in your position to constantly dazzle with your brilliance.
- Nobody* expects you or others in your position to win every award you are put up for, to rack up hundreds of citations on your published work, to get the highest possible scores on student evaluations of your teaching... you see where I'm going with this.
You may also find some of the material in this Perspectives on Perfectionism series helpful. (Even if your fears are not exactly perfectionism, they are similar in many ways and similar strategies may help you.) In particular, the exercises in Challenging my Perfectionistic Thinking (such as the "Thought Diaries") and Adjusting Unhelpful Rules & Assumptions (especially worksheet on Page 8) may be useful.
* Nobody reasonably expects this. There may be some people with unreasonable expectations, but it's really not worth concerning yourself with what they think :)
In researcher life there is no word like "Research failure". My supervisor told me that if you try to do something with some methods and you become competent in doing so then you can say that:
This thing can be done in this way
but if you can't accomplish it despite using sound methods, then you can say that
This thing cannot be done in this way, most likely due to these reasons.
In both cases, there is good and bad research and but there is no research failure. In both cases you create knowledge and point out the possibilities and results which are worth considering and approving. You should support your findings in both cases, defend them, accept them and own them. This is an easy way to accept "failure" which is actually your part of your learning and success path.