I had put this in the wrong forum before. But I've completed my PhD and never need to do anymore work on it. But I'm feeling quite bored now that I'm not doing it any more when i come home from work in the evenings. I wanted to give myself a break because i was quite exhausted by it but I think im suffering from PhD withdrawal symptoms. Anyone else have this issue??

You can't have your cake and eat it!

That is what cake is for :-)

Know how you feel mate. I'm surprised anyone picked you up on the wrong forum post.

I found myself realising some two weeks after viva and one week after final hardbond copy submission I had nothing to do. It's then I realised I had to decide what to do next and plenty time on my hands to do nothing. Welcome to the withdrawal (healing) period, where after working months and years on end in hyper mode and for seriously long hours you have to adjust to being a normal person again.

Eventually, everyday life will fill that space and the chance to collapse in front of the television or sink a few pints when you'd have otherwise worked on the thesis wil take over. That said if you want to convert some of your thesis into papers now, that's one way of 1) slowly withdrawing from the 'thesis is everything' mentality, 2) getting your work noticed by journal publication and 3) giving yourself a portfolio you could mention in your CV that may allow you to continue post-doc in research if you wish to do so (depending upon subject and opportunity).

However, do you really want your evenings filled with all that research stuff you've now probably put behind you? I did decide to publish my work and produced enough data (both included and excluded from the thesis) to strangle 10 papers out of it. That said, my tendencies during PhD did tend on workaholic, hence the masses of data - not a healthy situation!!! You can gather what happened to my spare time after the PhD when I decided to write the papers - I'd say not quite back to square one but a good way there.

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)