Hi Everyone, I'm a PhD student from Australia and I have about 9 months left to write up. Although I have been prolific in the past with drafts, I am starting to find it very hard to concentrate, to stay motivated, to clear my brain fog and some days I just want to give up. I have lots of support and my supervisor is great. Just wondering if anyone has any motivational tips, or tips on clearing the brain fog? Thanks so much! Any tips very much appreciated!

It's so difficult to know, because everyone's difficult. Sometimes what you need is a short break from the thesis. Other times, it's best to keep ploughing on. Is there a particular part that you are finding hard-going?

Make sure you get good night sleeps, and not staying up at night because of the stress. Brain fog is just tiredness and bad sleep quality.

Some days during writing up, I was waking up feeling absolutely tired because I had restless nights with stress-induced dreams. I learned to cut my losses: if it was one of those days, just took the day off. Go to the park, read a book, watch a movie. First try to fix your sleep patterns. Going to bed at certain times and waking up with an alarm clock same time everyday helps, also meditation before going to bed was helpful for me. The best was just going to bed thinking how much I don't care about the PhD.

Controlling the stress levels was one of the biggest challenges for me, and my biggest enemy. Just try to write a section a day, don't be too hard on yourself, at the end it is all going to fall together. Just keep going,

Thank you DrJeckyll, and yes, my stress levels are maxed out. I do sleep a lot but I have a thousand things on my mind so I think you're right in that the sleep quality is poor. Meditation before bed sounds like a very good idea, and I keep reading about the benefits of meditation, so I think that should be my next port of call.

Thank you for your response DocInsanity, the part I find hardest is concentrating and keeping my mind focused on any one task at hand. So if I want to concentrate on making a particular point, I start thinking of another point and then it spirals out of control. I've never had this problem before, but I think that DrJeckyll might have the answer in meditation. Perhaps that will clear my mind. Thank you both so much for your input.

And that's what I need to hear most of all :)

Great advice from previous posters. Another useful thing I found was to put chapters I was struggling with to one side and not look at them for a week or more. Often the solution to finishing a difficult section or passage would come to me in the meantime, and I could return to the chapter with confidence.

Thanks Barramack, yes, I've been starting to think of the writing in a less linear way also, and that seems to be opening up some possibilities.

Sure, as long as your chapters and thesis end up linear at the end (i.e. tell a story), it doesn't matter how you get there. Another useful strategy is to extract a particular paragraph from a chapter and to focus on getting it right, before pasting it back in. This allows you to remove much of the background noise in your head.

Yes! This is a big problem for me, isolating thoughts in order to work on one at a time. Thanks!

I second Barramack's suggestion. I also find that listening to white noise through headphones helps me focus.

Ah, yes, I'm going to try this, thank you Kelpie.

Thanks for the reminder on the white noise. I used to have an iPod (free) app that had several different sounds to relax or study to, including white noise, train running over tracks, large airconditioning fan and others. Now I'm going to download that app again for work, it helps to drown out the background noise.