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How to manage your academic stress

31 01 2022

Feeling like the stresses of academic life are getting to you? Here are some handy tips for managing your stress (modified excerpt from The Effective Scientist)

As professions go, being an research scientist probably doesn’t top the list for most stressful, although if you are drilling ice cores in Greenland, photographing deep-sea life from submersibles, setting up seismography equipment on the slopes of active volcanoes, diving with sharks, or scaling 75-metre trees in the Amazon rain forest to collect beetles, then stress is just part of the job. However, I am not going to discuss that kind of stress; rather, I am referring to the day-to-day stress of a demanding academic environment.

‘Relieving Stress’ © René Campbell renecampbellart.com

The stress of the career scientists is insidious and multifaceted. The cumulative stress of academia grows as one progresses from being a student, through postdoctoral life, to early-career lectureship, and all the way to tenured professorship. Will I be awarded that grant? Will the editors accept my manuscript? Will I be promoted? How long will I have a job? How do I make sure my lab members succeed? Will I be invited to that conference? Do my peers respect me? How do I recover from that critique of my research?

If you do not learn how to deal with these stresses along the way, you are likely setting yourself up for a big crisis somewhere down the track. I will provide some tips that my colleagues and I have found to be useful in that regard.

E-mail

In the day-to-day routine of being a scientist, one activity in particular is simultaneous a blessing and a curse — e-mail. E-mail — rather, the messages delivered by it — can be an immense source of stress. There is the stress associated with pressure to respond quickly to urgent requests, the stress arising from e-mails that you really should have responded to weeks ago, but still haven’t yet, and stress from messages that are nasty, vindictive, or even libel received from angry colleagues or misinformed members of the public.

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Tags: academic life, e-mail, exercise, managing stress, meditation, sleep, stress, The Effective Scientist, tips, yoga
Categories : book, coffee, conference

Bee informed: Quick pollination facts about our most important pollinators

27 11 2015

if we die

If bees were to disappear, humans will disappear within a few years.

Albert Einstein

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I find it interesting that so much is said about bees (including here on this blog), yet many of the ‘facts’ that one hears mentioned in any variety of news sources, public presentations and even scientific articles aren’t very well sourced and at times highly suspect.

For your fact-finding benefit then, I present to you some of the established facts about bees: Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories : coffee, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, food, habitat loss, pollination

Australians: out-of-touch, urban squanderers

23 03 2015

There’s a romantic myth surrounding Australia that is pervasive both overseas and within the national psyche: this sun-scorched continent home to stoic bushmen¹ that eek out a frugal, yet satisfying existence in this harsh rural land. Unfortunately that ideal is anathema to almost every Australian alive today.

While some elements of that myth do have a basis in reality – it is indeed a hot, dry, mostly inhospitable place if you count the entire land area (all 7.69 million square kilometres of it), and it does have the dubious honour of being the driest inhabited continent on Earth – most Australians live nowhere near the dry interior or the bush.

Despite our remarkably low average population density (a mere 3.09 people per square kilometre), Australia is in fact one of the most urbanised nations on the planet, with nearly 90% of its citizenry living within a major urban centre. As a result, our largely urban/suburban, latte-sipping, supermarket-shopping population has little, if any, connection to the vast landscape that surrounds its comfortable, built-up environs. There should be little wonder then that Australians are so disconnected from their own ecology, and little surprise that our elected officials (who, after all, represent the values of the majority of the citizens they purport to represent), are doing nothing to slow the rapid flushing of our environment down the toilet. Indeed, the current government is in fact actively encouraging the pace of that destruction. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: carbon, Emissions, greenhouse gases, livestock, meat, urbanisation, waste, water
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, coffee, conservation, deforestation, ecology, economics, environmental policy, food, governance, impact, invasive species, livestock, water

Buzzing to the plate

4 04 2011

Here’s another contribution from my PhD student, Salvador Herrando-Pérez (see his previous ConservationBytes.com post on micro-evolution here).

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Once upon a time at the produce section of a supermarket, a little girl confided to me that she had no idea that little plants could grow on carrots. This sympathetic scene portrays the split between the food we consume and the environments that produce it.

Mediterraneans love their cuisine. In fact, we are fairly proud of all our food. Yet how many of us associate a juicy tomato in our multicoloured salads, the smoothness of a escalibada (grilled veggies) bathed in virgin olive oil, the afternoon’s delicious expresso among friends and colleagues, or the last Christmas’ crunchy nougat shared with our beloved, with an insect that one given day pollinates a flower whose fertilized ovary will reach our dining room in the form of a sweet, infusion, fruit, sauce, soup or veggie.

Biodiversity fuels this relationship between insects and food. A study led by Alexandra Klein on highland coffee (Coffea arabica) from Sulawesi (Indonesia) demonstrates this concept well¹. The German team showed that the amount of coffee beans produced in 24 agro-forestry sites increased with the number of bee species visiting the flowers (Fig. 1). Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: agriculture, bee, ecosystem services, Lore-Lindu National Park, pollination, pollinator
Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, coffee, conservation, ecosystem services, food, habitat loss

Some biodiversity with your coffee, Sir?

7 12 2008

I really like my coffee. I’m sure there are a few billion humans who claim likewise, but I think I could safely categorise myself as a coffee snob. I cannot even contemplate placing powdery crystals into a cup of hot water and calling it ‘coffee’, let alone imbibing the toxic concoction. I spend way too much money on very slow-roasted, dark, oily beans that have to be ground to the exact espresso consistency to use in my Bialetti cafettiera, and I’ll search high and low for the best coffee produced in any city in which I live or to where I travel (N.B. Still haven’t found what I call a ‘great’ coffee in the CBD of Adelaide – suggestions welcome). I really, really like good coffee.

What the hell does all this meandering preamble have to do with biodiversity conservation? I’m happy you asked. With environmentally conscious consumers now demanding some sort of ‘green’ certification for many products (e.g., no palm oil, carbon-neutral, fair trade, etc.), coffee has also been targeted as a good product to certify for harvest and production of lower environmental impact than has been done traditionally. Well, how do you measure ‘green-ness’ in a product? For coffee, there are some good ways.

A recent paper (and candidate for the Potential list) by Aaron Gove and colleagues published in Conservation Letters entitled Ethiopian coffee cultivation – implications for bird conservation and environmental certification demonstrates how the cultivation of this NATIVE Ethiopian plant (Coffea arabica) can enhance or restore the biological value of lowland agricultural areas. This species of ‘highland coffee’ is harvested from forests (where it evolved and now grows naturally) and from more intensive farmland. Interestingly, this species needs some shade to grow, so trees must generally be planted in the agricultural areas to allow this. Result? Gove and colleagues found that birds who otherwise wouldn’t be seen dead in the agricultural areas were attracted there by the maintenance and proliferation of the shade trees, thus reducing regional extinction risk for fragmented populations dependent on forest remnants. The flip side was that coffee cultivation in forest remnants reduced bird diversity because of the obvious trade-off between some native trees and intensive agricultural crops.

So, the next time you’re thinking of buying certified coffee, think of this – the cultivation of INDIGENOUS (did I say that loudly enough?) coffee species requiring shade promotes the proliferation of native forest trees to reduce the extinction risk of threatened birds. The number of boxes to tick on my coffee-snobbery list has just grown by two.

CJA Bradshaw