by Brianna Cheney, M.A.
As the academic year comes to a close, May and June are often coupled with change for students – whether it be the transition from one school to another or from academic life to a job (or job searching!). As a doctoral student who will soon be transitioning to my internship year, I have been thinking quite a bit about managing the emotions that come with transition. Based on informal discussion with fellow doctoral students, I have come to the conclusion that while transitions continue to be inherently stressful, we tend to get better at managing transition as we become more experienced with them.
A unanimous observation was that expecting to be nervous and accepting this often helps us to feel less anxious about change! This is consistent with research findings on experiential avoidance. Specifically, when we are anxious about an upcoming transition and we try to avoid feeling anxious, we tend to avoid thinking about the transition altogether. This can be problematic in a couple of ways. First, when we avoid thinking about stressful situations, we tend to catastrophize by asking ourselves a lot of “What if?” questions but to never answer the “what if?” Many times, the answer to the “what if?” is that a given outcome would be unpleasant, but manageable! Second, while we are so busy awfulizing and avoiding thinking about the stressful parts of the transition, we often fail to think about the exciting aspects of it! This negative mental filter can lead us to feel depressed on top of our existing feelings of anxiety.
If we can accept and tolerate our anxiety about transition, we may be less likely to avoid thinking about the change and –ultimately- more prepared for it. Allowing ourselves to think about stressful aspects of the change enables us to think about whether or not we can tolerate the stress (we most likely can!) and to problem-solve around challenges.
