Having ‘a good brain’ is likely an advantage for most PhDs, but if you ask successful Early Career Researchers what got them through the PhD journey, intelligence rarely tops the list.

Humans are complex beings, and strong academic performance is built on several different elements, such as health, self-efficacy, resilience and support networks. However, when we drill down into the factors most commonly correlated with strong academic performance, the following four interdependent facets tend to appear most often. All of them are linked to taking responsibility for how we think, which then, in turn, supports the quality of our work. They are:

• mental force
• mental presence
• effective prioritisation
• emotional regulation

You’ve rarely heard psychologists or educators talk about these concepts as foundational to academic success, but together they form the architecture of sustained performance. And unlike most advice doing the rounds on productivity forums, each one now has a solid body of peer-reviewed evidence behind it.

Mental force: the muscle behind the work

Mental force is what some psychologists call cognitive control: the ability to hold a goal in mind, resist distraction, and switch gears without losing the thread. But this is a reductive idea, therefore limited. Whether we are neurodivergent or neurotypical, everything we think and do adds to or reduces mental force. Knowing how force is created is central to academic success. Mindtraining uses reliable methods to increase the force available to achieve goals, including academic success.

A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology tested university students on cognitive flexibility and inhibition, then checked the results against their grades. Students who made fewer errors on a standard task-switching test and reported using deliberate strategies to monitor their thinking posted higher GPAs ¹ . Self-control tells a similar story. In a widely cited 2016 study, Stadler and colleagues found that self-control predicted academic achievement even after accounting for cognitive ability —evidence that the capacity to override short-term impulses does real, independent work ². For a doctoral candidate, this is the pillar behind opening the laptop and writing when everything else feels more urgent.

Mental presence: sharper, focused and accountable

Put simply, mental presence is closer to what some contemplative traditions call awareness: being present in the way that you want to be, at any given time. If you generate mental energy but then waste it through poor attention or distraction, the performance loss is significant. The evidence to support this is pretty explicit. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials, published in Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, found that students who completed mindfulness-based interventions had significantly higher GPAs than control groups ³. A separate 2023 review of the university literature reported a small-to-moderate positive correlation between mindfulness and academic performance, with mindfulness linked to stronger exam results and overall academic outcomes ⁴ . Presence, in other words, is not just a wellbeing add-on. It appears to sharpen the mind itself. Mindfulness is not the answer to mental presence per se, but it’s a good entry point for PhDs new to mindtraining.

Effective prioritisation: choosing well, not just working hard

So think about this. You have generated enough mental force to do high-quality work; you have enough mental presence to complete the task, but afterwards you realise you’ve been working on a non-essential activity, leaving the most important job for later, when your time, energy, and motivation are low. This problem is a classic example of poor prioritisation.

Prioritisation sits inside the broader science of self-regulated learning. A 2025 meta-analysis spanning more than 11,000 students in online and blended courses found time management, effort regulation, and metacognitive strategy among the handful of self-regulated learning strategies significantly associated with academic performance ⁵. A 2025 systematic review published in Frontiers in Education went further, synthesising 107 empirical studies and identifying planning, prioritisation, and goal-setting as strategies that consistently boost academic achievement, professional performance, and wellbeing alike ⁶. For a multi-year, largely self-directed project like a doctorate, you can’t ignore that.

Emotional regulation: the pillar that holds the others up

Emotional regulation closes the loop, but is also interconnected to the other three pillars. These elements are called pillars because academic performance, particularly at the doctoral level, becomes more challenging without any of them.

Most of us feel that our emotions just occur: “you made me angry”, and once they manifest, they are somehow concrete and meaningful in their own right. If a doctoral candidate waits for the right emotional state to arise, or to feel in the mood before they start work, chances are they won’t reach their potential. Emotions are also sometimes responsible for anxiety about performance that can lead to becoming burnt out. One of the main takeaways from this presentation is that the Mindtraining Method has a strong track record of training PhDs to regulate their emotions to achieve their academic goals.

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review, synthesising twenty studies of secondary and university students, found that problem-solving as an emotion regulation strategy was positively associated with academic achievement, while avoidance and self-blame were negatively associated with it ⁷. Research with doctoral students specifically tells the same story from the inside. A 2026 interview-based study in Frontiers in Psychology identified distinct strategies—among them reappraising a setback and consciously restraining an impulsive reaction—that PhD candidates use to manage the real emotional volatility of academic writing and supervision relationships ⁸.

We need our emotions, but they are designed largely to work in tandem with our reasoning; if emotions are limiting your progress, act now.

Taken together, these four pillars are not four separate skills to tick off. They are facets of one underlying capacity: a trained mind that can direct itself, stay present, choose well, and metabolise difficulty without being derailed. That, more than any single study habit, is what carries a doctorate to the finish line.

References

1. Musullulu, H., Garcia-Orza, J., Gómez Vázquez, D., & Garcia-Sanz, S. (2025). Cognitive control and metacognitive awareness: Do they shape academic achievement in university students? Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1633996. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1633996
2. Stadler, M., Aust, M., Becker, N., Niepel, C., & Greiff, S. (2016). The choice between what you want now and what you want most: Self-control explains academic achievement beyond cognitive ability. Personality and Individual Differences, 94, 168–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.01.029
3. Ostermann, T., Pawelkiwitz, M., & Cramer, H. (2022). The influence of mindfulness-based interventions on the academic performance of students measured by their GPA: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 16, Article 961070. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.961070
4. Alomari, H. (2023). Mindfulness and its relationship to academic achievement among university students. Frontiers in Education, 8, Article 1179584. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1179584
5. Zhao, Y., Li, Y., Ma, S., Xu, Z., & Zhang, B. (2025). A meta-analysis of the correlation between self-regulated learning strategies and academic performance in online and blended learning environments. Computers & Education, 230, Article 105279.
6. Patzak, A., Zhang, X., & Vytasek, J. (2025). Boosting productivity and wellbeing through time management: Evidence-based strategies for higher education and workforce development. Frontiers in Education, 10, Article 1623228. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1623228
7. Romo, J., Pérez, J. C., Cumsille, P., Hollenstein, T., Olaya-Torres, A., Rodríguez-Rivas, M. E., & Melero, J. (2025). Emotion regulation strategies and academic achievement among secondary and university students: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 37(3).
8. Ji, Y., Gui, Q., Chen, G., Cui, Y., & Chen, S. (2026). In to the feeling: Doctoral students’ academic emotional experiences and regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1724209. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1724209

Share this content with your audience.