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#88 Ben Hartwig on how to stay resilient and deal with stress: Tips and Tricks

Dr. Ben Hartwig is a German scientist, entrepreneur and actor that founded his own company. This is the second episode featuring Dr. Hartwig, and in today's episode he will talk about resilience and will share tips on how to stay resilient and how to deal with stress.

Published onDec 06, 2019
#88 Ben Hartwig on how to stay resilient and deal with stress: Tips and Tricks
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This is the second episode of Dr. Ben Hartwig, in which he will talk about resilience and will share tips on how to stay resilient and how to deal with stress.

In his first podcast (#85) Hartwig shared his story and the lessons he learned during his PhD.  So if you have not listened to his first podcast, don’t hesitate to do so.

Ben is a German scientist, entrepreneur and actor. He studied genetics at the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne, specialized in Epigenetics and toured with Germany’s biggest improv theater, Springmaus, for the past six years. He has performed, directed and created close to a thousand shows on five continents. Three years ago, he founded his own company Neuroblitz to combine science and applied improvisation in workshops, speeches and seminars.

In this episode, he shares four relevant tips.

The first tip is to surround ourselves with people who believe in us. The second one is to ask better questions. The third tip is to see the things for what they really are and the last one is Ecotherapy and to be our own doctor.

“To become more resilient we can make changes on three different levels – environmental changes, cognitive changes and habitual changes”.

Ben Hartwig

To learn more about Ben’s tips, please listen to this episode. If you also have a story to be told or if you know someone, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Enjoy Listening!

#PhdCareerStories #Entrepreneur #Resilience #Tips


Hello and welcome to PhD career stories, the podcast about career path inside and outside academia. I’m Viral Panchal and it is my pleasure to introduce Ben Hartwig. Ben is a German scientist, entrepreneur and actor. He studied genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, specialized in epigenetics and toured with Germany’s biggest improv theater, Springmaus, for the past six years. He has performed, directed and created close to a thousand shows on five continents. Three years ago, he founded his own company Neuroblitz to combine science and applied improvisation in workshops, speeches and seminars. I hope you will enjoy this episode of PhD career stories.

Worried, overwhelmed, not sure if the struggle will pay off? 

Here, I want to introduce you to the topic of resilience. It is a quality that you can train and grow over time. Resilience helps in dealing with stress and overwhelm to bounce back to a happier and healthier pursuit of your goals in science. 

Being in science can be demanding. Stress and overwhelm are very common amongst PhDs, Post-Docs and PIs. The latest big PhD survey in Nature in 2017 and in the Paper of Katja Levecque et al. about work organization and mental health problems of PhD students paint a fairly clear picture. 

PhD students are 2.4 times more likely to get mental health problems than the highly educated in the general population. The main predictors for that are job demands, your family-work relationship, job control and inspirational leadership (Levecque et al., 2017). 

If there are constant high demands, an unbalanced family-work relationship, the lack of control for what you do at work and a lack of inspirational leadership, your nervous system will be challenged. After a while, you’re at risk of losing control. Each of us has a different tolerance for stress, but even the strongest tree will fall, if the storms are too strong. 

Instead of just dealing with the stress and resisting as much as possible there is another way. Storms might break trees, but they’ll have a harder time with bamboo or grass. Resilience is the power to bounce back from adversity. You feel the stress, but it does not break you, instead, you learn to let it pass. What makes us resilient and how can we use it in science?

To become more resilient we can make changes on three different levels – environmental changes, cognitive changes and habitual changes. Meaning, how we prepare ourselves to feel less stress, how we think about our challenges and how we regenerate and recharge after a period of stress. 

One thing we can do is to work on our networks and connections to other people. The truth is that PhD students are hired to become experts. To become the person that knows the most in the world about a particular niche of a subject. Specialization creates loneliness, if the wrong system is in place. Studies such as the one conducted by Emmy Werner on the Hawaiian island Kauai show that we need at least one person in our network that tells us that we’re good enough and that we’re able when things are not going well. 

We need to remember that great discoveries are rarely achieved alone. And we all depended on the help of others to get where we are now. Watson had his Crick, Daniel Kahneman had his friend Amos Tversky and Einstein was lucky to have a wife smarter than him. So, my first tip is to surround yourself with people who believe in you, even though your work might not be successful yet. 

You can find those people and change your environment by asking better questions. 

This is my second suggestion, seriously, ask better questions. A lot of people told me that it wouldn’t be possible to reduce my working hours as a Postdoc to pursue a second career. But simple questions and a boss, who was willing to listen and saw the benefits instead of the problems helped. I could reduce my hours to 50 %, then 40 % and finally a B.Sc. student helped me in the lab before I decided to found my own company. 

There are three secrets to asking. First, observe if the person you’re asking is ready to receive your question. Second, be specific and only ask for one thing at a time and third stop talking after you’ve asked your question and wait for the response. You might not always get what you want, but then you have at least as much as you had in the first place. If you hear a no, you haven’t lost an opportunity, you’ve gained some experience. 

The third tip is about surprises. We don’t like all the surprises we encounter during our PhD. The ones we like are called gifts and the ones we don’t like are called problems. My advice to become more resilient is to not confuse a gift or a problem with your personality. This either leads to entitlement or to depression. Instead, see the things for what they really are. This way you’ll learn to develop realistic optimism instead of blind optimism or pessimism. 

My last tip is ecotherapy, which is essentially going outside to relax and recharge. I’ve met a doctor who has founded a successful burn-out clinic. He said that sometimes, when people came to him with feelings of overwhelm and worry, he would see that and he would suggest that they don’t need to take any pills. He was convinced that all the patients needed was to take a break or walk through the forest an hour a day. Research should later prove him right, but his patients just wouldn’t follow his advice.

He realized that they would take the pills though, when he wrote it on a receipt. So, he decided to change the things he would write on the receipt. He wrote things like: “Take a break 3 times a day for 10 minutes during working hours ” or “Have lunch in a park.” And when he handed the receipt to people they would start doing it. All they needed was the permission. So, my last tip is to be your own doctor and give yourself permission to relax.

Thank you very much for listening.

And that is it for another episode of PhD Career Stories. As always, you can find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram as well as on our webpage phdcareerstories.com.

If you like what we do please subscribe to our show on iTunes or Spotify we would love to hear from you.

Good-bye for now, we will be back with a new story in 2 weeks time.

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