Towards the end of my PhD journey, when I ran out of energy, I was left with probably the last leg of the PhD- a few experiments and then thewriting up. The experiments were done in a month, but the paper writing seemed like never ending. It started to stress me out and I became veryanxious as to when it will finish.

I sat down to ask myself what is going on. I got it this sudden realisation (of course, not instantly. It was after a few weeks) that worrying aboutsomething is not going to help me solve the problem. The paper will finish when it has to, and my worrying about it will harm me mentally andphysically and not help me in anyway.? World began to look beautiful again, until I was in for a stressful journey again.

The next thing I did was talk to the student counsellor Tagare Ma'am.. you SHOULD talk to such people about your issues... they have seen many suchcases that they can detach from the situation and tell you what to do.? She told me - "The world is perfect the way it is, and you just have to dropoff all the stress causing things, it is not worth it. This has to be practised using your will power". She identified a few of my natural tendencies, which had started to hurt me. I tried to follow her advise. The problem in not outside, it it is one's own mind and it has to be solved using one's own will power and intellect. Take the positives, forget the rest. Accept things, and the rest will fall in place. ?And I met her again, with a more detailed list of my own observations about my personality- such as trying to do things in a hurry, being too much ontime etc., She identified that the stress causing factor was that I was trying to be too much of a perfectionist and pressurizing myselfunnecessarily. No one was expecting me to be so perfect, and it was not needed. It was hard, but I slowly started to practise it.. It is a changeof personality and it takes time. But it can be done. The key thing is in accepting and identifying the factors, and those meetings with TagareMa'am, who was available all the time to help me out, was extremely useful.