Core Event:

Mental Health Days – Happiness Ahoy - Strengthened and healthy through the doctoral thesis

Aim

Do you have the feeling of being constantly tense, sometimes unable to cope with problems and no longer experiencing any fun in your daily work? This event enables you to better deal with doctoral-related stress, strengthens your psychological resilience and supports you in dealing appropriately with the various challenges in the doctoral phase and in maintaining your mental health.

This workshop supports doctoral students in strengthening their resilience and thus their own inner stability. Together you will work on your personal productive mindset by strengthening your resources and developing helpful perspectives. Their own development potential is strengthened in order to master challenges more calmly and to achieve their own goals.

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Indicative Schedule

The event has three phases: First, in a two-day workshop (no overnight stay), you will learn how to assess symptoms and effectively prevent the development of crises. Second, it is important to actively work on the tasks in order to deepen what has been learned through reflection and exercises. During the three-week consolidation phase you will commit about one hour per week to in-depth assignments. This shall guarantee that your insights from the workshop will be implemented in your everyday doctoral work. Third, a follow-up workshop at the end of the three-week consolidation phase will serve as a final reflection.

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Content

• Identify and develop own energy sources and resources
• Setting up structure, creating rituals and establish good habits
• Mindset work: recognize and change destructive thinking patterns
• Setting work-life boundaries
• Mindfulness and self-compassion in difficult times, dealing with self-doubts
• Take action and successfully counter procrastination
• Social support: Using solidarity and networking
• Dealing with unsolvable problems

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Methods

We would like to give you a look at your own resources, strengths and potentials in short impulse lectures, with creative and varied methods. In the shared exchange of experiences, further helpful hints for dealing with challenges in everyday university life will certainly come to light. The deepening phase of this training gives you the opportunity to independently try out further approaches in the long-term deepening phase.

Relaxation exercises and meditations, a weekly half-hour meeting (in the deepening phase), accompanying peer groups, deepening tasks and a closed room for the participants for (supervised and) joint exchange complete the offer.

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Mental Health Days in the Media

Campus.leben, the online magazine of Freie Universität Berlin, recently published a report about the Mental Health Days. To read the report (in German), go to campus.leben: "Gestärkt und gesund durch die Promotion steuern".

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Registration

For the next Mental Health Days in summer term 2025, dates and registration links will be published on the page of Scientific Continuing Education Cooperation (ZEWK) at Technische Universtiät Berlin.