PhD Thriving – The Mindtraining Method
Reaching Your Goals With The Mindtraining Method
A coherent system, not random hacks
The Mindtraining Method is a collection of the most effective tools for increasing happiness, wellbeing, and academic success. Although all the components are evidence-led, they differ from other approaches because they address specific causes rather than general effects. Let me explain. If you look at the most common support approaches available for PhD candidates, they tend to fall into one of two camps: productivity hacks that treat the mind like a machine to be optimised, or generalised wellbeing techniques that address effects, not causes. Here are two examples.
Productivity Hacks: Procrastination is one of the biggest wastes of productive time in higher education and wider society. Typically, students at all levels are encouraged to develop improved planning and strategy to counteract the problem, but… There are at least five forms of procrastination. Their underlying causes differ, as do the techniques able to reduce their impact. The Mindtraining Method seeks to understand the type of procrastination and its underlying causes before offering solutions.
Wellbeing Techniques: The widespread use of mindfulness for dozens of conditions such as stress, anxiety, academic burnout, sleep quality, social isolation, self-compassion, and improved concentration reflects an approach that tackles effects rather than understanding causes. Most replicated mindfulness studies focused on university populations show effect sizes equal to or slightly above placebo and rarely establish a link between mindfulness practice and the underlying causes of the conditions.1 2
Evidence suggests a growing gap between where PhD candidates think they should be and what they actually experience on the PhD journey. The Mindtraining Method was built to close that gap. Mindtraining refers to systematic behaviours intentionally used to produce predictable, measurable change in how the mind works, how it regulates emotion, sustains attention, and relates to difficulty. The mindtraining method is designed to make you part of the solution.
Various scientific and contemplative traditions offer pieces of this puzzle. However, what didn’t exist until now was a coherent system built specifically for the pressures of doctoral study. Dr Stephen developed the Method by drawing together the three most reliable strands of mindtraining from three decades of experience in Applied Neuropsychology, Nondual Compassion, and Contemplative Science.
The Mindtraining Method
Pillar One: Applied Neuropsychology
Applied Neuropsychology does the heavy lifting in the Method. It’s the pillar that provides the scientific evidence base for the tools we use, and the framework for evaluating whether they’re actually working for you. Rather than generic advice about “managing stress,” this pillar draws on research into how the brain regulates emotion, sustains focus, and forms habits under pressure — these values are all linked to how you can make the choices that will enable you to reach PhD Thriving. This is where many of the key measurable change happens: better emotional regulation, more reliable focus, and habits that hold up under deadline pressure rather than collapsing the moment things get difficult.
Pillar Two: Nondual Compassion
If Applied Neuropsychology provides the tools, Nondual Compassion is the regulatory mechanism that makes sure those tools are used in a way that actually helps. It’s easy, especially in academic culture, to turn self-improvement into another arena for self-criticism, another set of standards to fall short of. Nondual compassion works against that pull. Rooted in a genuine, millennium-long contemplative practice tradition but taught here in an entirely secular form, it directly targets the self-criticism, anxiety, and imposter syndrome that so many doctoral candidates carry quietly. This pillar is also, in Dr Stephen’s experience, the single most effective element of the Method for helping candidates move from a surviving mental state to a thriving one, not because it’s the most technically sophisticated, but because it changes your relationship with difficulty itself, rather than just your response to it.
Pillar Three: Contemplative Science
When Buddhist meditation methods were converted to secular wellbeing techniques in the 1970s, several key elements were lost. In particular, processes able to deliver emotional regulation. The third pillar offers secular meditation tools, taught wherever they’re appropriate, as a direct regulator of stress and anxiety. These aren’t generic mindfulness exercises borrowed wholesale from a wellness app. They’re drawn from traditional contemplative methods, refined through genuine long-term practice, and adapted specifically for the research-mind: the mind that needs to sustain focus through long, unglamorous stretches of work, tolerate uncertainty, and recover quickly from setbacks that would otherwise spiral into weeks of lost motivation.
Why the Three Pillars Work Together
Each pillar can be practised alone, and each offers real benefit on its own terms. But they were brought together deliberately, because used in isolation, each has a weakness the others compensate for. Neuropsychological technique without compassion can become another performance standard to fail at. Compassion practice without a strong evidence base can drift into vague self-soothing that doesn’t actually shift behaviour. Contemplative tools are central to regulating emotions, so that the mindtraining becomes effective and integrated on the PhD journey.
Together, the pillars form a system: evidence-based technique, delivered with genuine compassion, stabilised by a settled and attentive mind. That combination is what allows the Method to address resilience, focus, and sustainable productivity as a single, connected problem — rather than three separate ones requiring three separate apps, coaches, or New Year’s resolutions.
How it Works in Practice
In one-to-one and group settings, the Method translates into structured sessions: establishing the likely issues keeping you surviving or stopping you from thriving. Where the cause(s) of the limitations have been reliably established, we discuss possible solutions and develop a prioritisation strategy – what are the key priorities – then agree on solutions.
We typically seen Mindtraining improving, happiness, wellbeing and academic success. From the student’s perspective, the process has three main steps, that are:
- Gain, greater clarity regarding what the student’s mental state is and where they want it to be.
- Establish an understanding of which approaches will support their journey.
- Ways of evaluating their progress against specific goals and targets.
The aim throughout is never simply “coping better.” It’s to help you move towards a thriving mindset which will likely benefit different domains.
Built for the PhD, not Adapted from Something Else
The Mindtraining Method can be successfully applied to almost any human context. There are universal ways of being and knowing that humans apply to themselves and the world around them. However the causes and solutions of our mental states are particular to each of us. For example, the reasons why a secondary school student, a pregnant woman, a police officer or an unemployed academic, experience depression or clinical anxiety may be very different. It follows that the solutions may be different
However, the PhD Thriving approach has been specifically developed to support the current challenges faced by most doctoral students. The levels of psychological suffering experienced by PhD candidates, is much higher than the general population, therefore solutions are likely to reflect the needs of the PhD journey.
Generic resilience training rarely accounts for what’s specific about doctoral study: issues such as the isolation of long independent research, the ambiguity of open-ended problems, the challenges of supervisory relationships, financial hardship, social isolation, overwork, and imposter syndrome are among the most common. There is almost no training that can fully prepare a PhD for the challenge of developing new knowledge, challenge the research of other academics and defending a Viva against established and potentially hostile researchers.
The PhD Thriving Mindtraining Method was developed specifically within that context, refined across thousands of hours of one-to-one mentoring and years of group meditation work with PhD communities. It isn’t a general wellbeing framework with “PhD” added to the branding — it’s built from the ground up around what doctoral candidates actually face.
Explore one-to-one support built on the Mindtraining Method here. To learn more about what the The Mindtraining Method can do for you use the contact form below.
Reference:
- Van Dam, N. T., Van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., … & Meyer, D. E. (2018). Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(1), 36-61.
- For a complete exposition of the engagement between science and meditation, see The Scientific History of Meditation and Mindfulness: Morris, Stephen Gene (2024). The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/
