These days I am struggling with my thesis. It’s a race against time, as the submission deadline is fast approaching. I literally have to work round the clock to finish writing a perfect thesis. It really is tiring and hectic.

Poor me, I am forced to spend nearly 14 hours trying to tie loose ends and give final touches to my research work. At the end of a day’s task, I am supposed to send the work to the proofreader. The most dreadful stage is the one that follows these two steps. Since the time I started my Ph.D. I always felt butterflies in my stomach on the slightest mention of this stage. People gone through the ordeal must be aware of the stage. Yes, you guessed it right. I am talking about formatting the thesis.

This phase get even more difficult for a person like myself. I am not a visual person. I don’t have the penchant for fine-tuning minor details. Trust me, nothing ever works for me when it comes to the visual stuff. I don’t even see margins; I seldom notice the difference in fonts. Due to this very reason, whenever my supervisor sees my work, he wastes no time in pointing out all those flaws.

Sometimes, I used to swear to him that somebody was hatching a conspiracy against me by installing a bug in university computers. I fix stuff but they could not be saved, and needless to say, he never bought my story. He used to send me back to get the entire chapter reprinted just because of a few typos and formatting mistakes. Believe me, life of a scholar is not a bed of roses.

This phase is indeed stressful. At the end of this phase, however, you get to see the fruit of all your hard work in one single document.

To deal with that stress, people follow different strategies. I see people at my office constantly munching on various snacks or eating chocolates. I see many experiencing nervous breakdowns on and off. The worst kind of person in our fraternity is the one who never stops complaining, as if the rest of us are having a field day.

I follow different strategies in order to beat stress. I am a social person and being locked in an office for the entire day is just too much for me. So I make it a point of going to the gym regularly. I have been following a strict fitness regime for a while now.

I found it to be a very effective strategy to keep stress at bay. In addition to that, it makes me feel that I am being good to myself, so I work harder. I also manage to meet friends for a quick coffee break so I am not alone all the time.

I also try to eat healthy. It’s very tempting to keep all sorts of snacks in the office, and sometimes you just want to nibble on something. I don’t keep snacks in the office. When I feel hungry, I decide to take a break and walk to the nearest supermarket and buy something to eat. This way I get fresh air as well.

My biggest stress actually comes from my children. They always remain unsatisfied and complain that I return home late these days. In the beginning, I used to feel really guilty, but then I sat with them and told them that we were a family and needed to support each other. Truth be told, I need their support the most these days. I assured them that this situation was temporary and that I would make up for these days in future. Now I am guilt free and feel less stressed. However, sometimes I cook their favorite meal or bake them their favorite cake, and we spend quality time in the morning before we leave. Life sometimes needs compromise.

All of this will come to an end and we will look back and laugh.