5. Mindfulness: not some 'Buddhist chant' | Daniel Ranson

Emily chats with Ph.D. Research Fellow, Daniel Ranson (@mrdanielranson), who is now a convert to mindfulness as a coping mechanism for anxiety, in addition to therapy, medication, and insight from a mental health practitioner. Dan opened up previously, in episode 4, about perfectionism and OCD tendencies that progressively worsened from his undergraduate degree, onwards.

TW: Anxiety and a suicide attempt

This episode touches on medication and its side effects, the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and how Dan found his therapist, how to get past the negative connotations of ‘therapy’ eg. treating CBT as a gym for your mind, insight from having a mental health practitioner in the home, helping Dan’s family understand how to interact with someone who is mentally ill, the power of company, taking charge and making decisions for someone that is mentally ill and struggling to make their own eg. Let’s go get a coffee, breaking down the barriers to embracing mindfulness – Dan never thought he would use this approach. He used to see it as some form of ‘Buddhist chanting’, not opening up to anyone in academia, we are the next generation – we should model it for the way we want, what we think a PhD is going to be like and what it is are often very different things. 

Resources:

There are a variety of apps (often free!) available to help people manage mental health. Dan recommends Headspace, Calm, Buddhify

Matt Haig books ie. ‘Reasons to stay alive’

PhD: Addicted to Research podcast (available on iTunes, Spotify, Acast etc). Daniel is part of his own podcast! He describes it as a 'hand holding' podcast to support people through their PhD and help those applying. General wellbeing support for all stages of the academic journey.

UK Samaritans call line

Mental health nurse

The full transcript of the podcast is available here.

For mental health support, please contact your GP or use the appropriate support for your country at https://checkpointorg.com/global/

Recorded 03/12/2020.

Sound: Mindset by Ketsa is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, available through Free Music Archive.

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