Defensiveness, Deadlines and the Long Game
Anxiety, keep on trying me...
This blog is where psychology meets lived experience, part reflection, part reckoning. I share the messy, meaningful ways psychology shows up in my own life, especially in work, identity, and belonging.
This week, LinkedIn got me again.
I read something, well-meaning I’m sure, although there’s something about the loud broadcast, the digital equivalent of your therapist tilting their head and saying, “Interesting… let’s list ten reasons you might be the problem” that is instantly recognisable as the formula for LinkedIn posts we love to hate.
It starts with a truth bomb followed by a parade of tiny misdemeanours. And we love it. Psychologically, lists are complete catnip for the brain, they let us self-assess from a safe distance. Best of all, they offer just enough structure to feel in control even when the content is gently calling us out.
This one was “10 Problems with PhD Students.”
ouch
I recognised a lot of the behaviours on that list, but one line didn’t just catch my eye, it laughed in my face, and whispered: “This one’s about you.”
It said, and I quote,
"Students who are defensive aren’t ready to be supervised."
And just like that, I was no longer scrolling LinkedIn. I was having a small existential crisis.
To make it worse, it wasn’t even a post from someone I follow. It had been liked, endorsed, even, by an academic I admire deeply. The kind who lifts people up. The kind whose approval, whether I admit it or not, matters.
However, I am sometimes defensive.
Here’s the short version of my PhD story so far: The title of my research is called ‘The Writing is on the Digital Wall’ - but it may as well be ‘I Hit a Brick Wall’.
Photo by Dave Webb on Unsplash
I’m a mature student. I went back to studying during the pandemic, whilst homeschooling and running a business, and I loved every minute of it.
So I went all in on a PhD.
Not because someone told me to. Not because I had a perfectly polished research question or burning theoretical contribution. But because I’d finished my master’s with more questions than answers, especially around imposter phenomenon, something I’d lived and studied. Psychology felt big enough to hold all my curiosities, and, crucially, to hold me.
I drafted a proposal, pitched a project on women’s experiences in online communities, how things like social capital and mindset shape what people get out of those spaces. I got accepted. And in my head, that meant I was good to go.
What I didn’t understand, and I mean really didn’t understand, is that being accepted to study is not the same as having your project accepted. There’s a big gap between “welcome aboard” to “here’s your green light.” For part-time students like me, you’ve got up to 12 months to submit your project for formal approval.
Reader, I took 18.
I didn’t fully understand the system I was entering. I wasn’t on a funded project with a pre-set brief and clear deliverables. I was self-funded. That means juggling paid work to pay the mortgage, losing income to make room for study, and absorbing the cost of tuition without any guaranteed return. (Spoiler: it’s a lot more expensive than it looks on paper.)
And all of that pressure, financial, emotional, existential, made me impatient. Defensive. I was desperate to prove I could get started. The academic world rotates slowly around it’s own sun, marches to it’s own beat of bureaucracy, likes to meander and take time, all in the pursuit of furthering knowledge.
I, on the other hand, like to implement stuff. This has been my whole career: create, solve problems, implement, celebrate, find a harder problem, rinse + repeat. I need purpose, I need meaning.
If I could rewind, I’d love someone on the panel to have said:
“Leila, this proposal is a solid starting point, but you’re going to change about 90% of it over the next year. That’s not a failure. That’s the process. But if you resist that process, if you get too defensive or too proud to pivot, it’s going to take longer and hurt more, ready to sign on the dotted line?”
That conversation didn’t happen. But I wish it had, and I did email that feedback and include it on my request for a two month break.
So what’s going on in psychology terms when we can’t handle the truth? This looks like textbook ego threat. I couldn’t handle not knowing, I couldn’t handle being a beginner.
Except I’ve built a career doing or rather being in rooms where I’m the only one who doesn’t know stuff. Consultancy work is Groundhog Day work. You work with clients; you learn their business you observe how they work and you untangle stuff. If you’re like me, you thrive on variety and pick up work in new sectors for the thrill of it. I’d also recently gone back to uni, I’d started at the beginning then. So why, when I needed the resilience I’d bottled throughout my career, was it so elusive?
Suddenly, starting again, and feeling stupid, slow, or out of my depth felt like a personal failing.
And, it’s because it wasn’t just ego. It was something deeper, more insidious. And that’s anxiety. Telling an anxious person “don’t be defensive” is like telling a drowning person “try relaxing.”
Since 2016, I’ve lived with and been medicated for anxiety. Not just a *bit* of worry. Not some occasional stress. I mean full-body, all-systems-go anxiety. The kind that makes your brain scan every room for exits. That raises your threat level so high it drowns out rational thought. I have the type of anxiety that when paired with peri-menopausal hot flushes - sets off the (LOUD) heart rate alert on my sports watch. My Dr’s advice? turn off the alert, my heart is fine but my body is in flight, sometimes ignorance (and medication) is the bliss you need to get out of that anxiety loop.
And here’s the thing, anxiety doesn’t mean I’m broken. I’ve run ultra-marathons. I’ve built a business. I can stand in front of 300 people and wing a presentation at the last minute when a colleague is ill, I’ve done a lot despite it. But it does mean I react irrationally and strongly to uncertainty, to vague criticism, to situations where I’m not sure what’s expected of me.
So when a supervisor gives feedback, even kindly, I don’t always hear the kindness. I hear threat. I hear “you’re not good enough.”
That’s not their fault. It’s my work to do, to regulate, to recalibrate, to return to safety so I can be curious again. That’s what I spent much of last year learning, (and feeling exhausted by), to the point where the bravest thing I could do was step away and take a few months off.
Defensiveness is often treated like the problem, but more often than not, it’s a symptom, a signal flare, not a flaw. And while we might never know exactly why someone flinches at feedback or bristles at correction, it’s worth holding space for the idea that some of us, especially the different thinkers, who’ve never quite fit into tidy boxes, may have weathered more criticism than most.
There’s evidence to back this up: children with ADHD are more likely to experience negative interactions with teachers and peers, receive more frequent correction, and feel less emotional closeness in learning environments (Kreppner & Rutter, 2024; van den Bergh et al., 2019). That early pattern of feedback can linger, even years later, making adult environments like academic supervision or workplace reviews feel like a threat rather than support.
And it’s not just about receiving criticism, it’s about needing approval, too. When you grow up with a heightened need to please, as so many women are socialised to do, being told to “just drop it” is like asking someone to unlearn their survival strategy overnight. It’s systemic. It’s embodied. And it makes genuine openness to feedback a much more delicate, layered process than it first appears.
I almost quit. I even typed the email.
But blogging helped. Podcasting helped. Reflecting, out loud, imperfectly reminded me that I’m not a quitter. I am, however, great at avoidance, I’m excellent at not starting things, because if you don’t start, you can’t fail? You can, obviously. But we tell ourselves these things, they protect us.
What I do have is stamina. Stubbornness. The long-game mindset that says, “Okay. This is hard. But it’s happening.” And part of it happening is learning how to take feedback when every fibre of your body wants to fight or flee. It’s learning to stay in the room, with the work, with the discomfort, with the people trying to help you grow.
If you’re supervising, coaching, mentoring or know someone like me, driven, anxious, slightly defiant here’s what helps:
Name the mess early. Don’t make them guess.
Validate, then redirect. “I can see you’ve worked hard on this. And, we/you need to rethink the framing.”
Be trauma-informed. Some of us are scanning for shame. Gentle doesn’t mean vague, it means grounded, direct even. Anxiety fills in the gaps, always.
Hold the faith. Remind them that defensiveness is a fear response. And that they’re allowed to feel scared and still be capable.
I’m still learning this. I’ll probably keep learning it the whole way through my PhD journey and beyond.
But today, I’m a relaxing and a little less defensive, I presented my project for approval with a open mind, It’s going to be approved! I’m elated, I can start recruitment.
Mostly, I’m proud of the written and the cognitive work I’ve done just to stay in the PhD.
Leila x
p.s Yes I am listening to this on repeat
This week I launched a paid subscription, free subsribers still get access to my blogs and (for the next few months) Working Theory, where I draw on current studies from psychology, behavioural economics, and identity research to ask: what’s really going on here?, paid access for £4 a month will give you the very practical include Field Notes, which takes what we’ve explored in Working Theory and brings it into the real world - your writing, your practice, your communities. Always grounded and yours to adapt.
I’ve made the first two free for all of my subscribers, and my realistic goal is to get 10 -15 paid subscribers to field notes to cover the cost of the substacks I subscribe to. Circularity/poor student and all that!
Field Note#1: Start Where the Season Starts
Field notes takes what we’ve explored in Working Theory and brings it into the real world , your writing, your practice, your communities. Always grounded and yours to adapt.
References
Kreppner, J. M., & Rutter, M. (2024). Social functioning and peer relationships in children with ADHD: A review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1343314. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1343314
van den Bergh, S. F. W. M., et al. (2019). Teacher–student relationships and ADHD: A systematic literature review. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 24(2), 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2019.1597562