**This is part of a on ADHD and other kinds of neurodiversity in the academy - I am not a medical doctor nor am I a therapist or other mental health practitioner and this is not medical advice. It is PhD advice though!**
Have you ever seen a CV of failures floating around? The idea is that successful people, particularly academics, have a whole list of "secret" or unpublished failures for every accomplishment they seem to have. There's a lot that is normalizing about this - even successful people don't get grants! Princeton professors are just like us! But while it is one thing to be open about failures, and at least some of these conversations are acknowledging the huge privilege and resource drain it takes to produce that much unpaid labor in the hopes of one day getting funding/tenure, there isn't a lot of discussion of the toll the system of repeated failure takes on academics.
Especially if those people happen to also have rejection sensitivity.**
Because I am NOT a qualified medical practitioner, I am going to refrain from diving too deeply into the causes, symptoms, and treatments for rejection sensitivity. But for our purposes, the most important thing to know is that RS:
*can feel like sudden emotional waves after real, implied, or perceived criticism
*can feel like a whole body, whole mind, whole being response - people describe it as "unbearable", "devastating" waves of emotion and negative thoughts that are also hard to describe in words
*is a newer area of study within ADHD and other executive function disorders, as many previous diagnostic criterias do not talk about any emotional consequences or patterns.
This is how I see it play out in my work with grad students:
Grad Student A is working with their supervisor on a paper, and in the course of that conversation, the advisor suggests that the draft is not as developed as they expected. "I thought you'd have a little more done by now," or the like - and Grad Student A says "well, I got a little bit behind because I had to grade 100 midterms in 2 days this week." The meeting goes on, the draft gets discussed, Grad Student A continues to work on the draft. They might make an effort to block out a little more time during high grading seasons, or send an email to delay a meeting if they aren't far enough along the next time.
Grad Student B is working with their supervisor on a a paper, and in the course of that conversation, the advisor suggests that the draft is not as developed as they expected. "I thought you'd have a little more done by now," or the like - and Grad Student B freezes. They feel sick to their stomach, and they are distracted for the rest of the meeting because of how badly they feel for not having done more on the paper. They feel so awful that they avoid looking at the paper again for a few days, and when the time comes for the next meeting, they do not reach out to schedule it. They keep waiting to schedule a meeting until the draft is more developed, and waiting, and eventually the supervisor reaches out, concerned that they haven't heard anything for a few weeks. This is so activating that Grad Student B works on everything else BUT the paper until they finally either: build enough anxiety and shame about it that they tip into "deadline crunch mode" and get it done OR the paper becomes The Big Undone Thing that hangs over everything.
Grad Student C is working with their supervisor on a paper, and in the course of that conversation, the advisor suggests that the draft is not as developed as they expected. "I thought you'd have a little more done by now," or the like - and Grad Student C apologizes profusely. They have the rest of the meeting, and now, whenever any deadline comes up with that supervisor, Grad Student C will do anything to make sure they always, always have high quality work ready to go. They spend hours getting every draft as perfect and polished as they can possibly make it, even when they're sick/tired/busy/teaching/overwhelmed, and is utterly and completely burned out. The fear of ever having a draft "not be developed enough" hangs over every draft, even ones that have been explicitly labelled rough or zero drafts, and so each new writing assignment just adds to the pressure. They feel so overwhelmed by all the time it takes to do just one paper that they shove everything else to the side, even projects that are valuable, important, or pleasurable.
I see these types in many of my clients who are neurodiverse, who have experience anxiety, who self-identify as perfectionists - and a lot of that behavior is 100% normalized by academia. If you were to go on Twitter right now, I'm sure you could find all kinds of tenured faculty talking about their avoidance, their deadline-driven behavior, their perfectionism - there are far fewer voices stopping these conversations and saying "wait, what? Maybe there's a more regulated way??"
Because I'm not a therapist, I'm not trained to go deep into the emotional layers, and your own embodied history with these patterns. But, I can say that as a coach, there are a few practices that can help you manage some of the "avoid this" or "never let anyone down" patterns that can come up when you've got some sensitivity reaction things happening:
Have someone translate your feedback for you. Have you gotten a nasty email? Is your Reviewer 2 feedback awful? If you have a colleague you trust, or a partner, or someone who has a little distance, you can ask them to look at emails and see how harsh they are. You can give a red-ink covered draft a friend and say "can you look at this and summarize three big things for me to start working on first with this draft?" Sometimes, another set of eyes can help you translate it into language or a framework that isn't so activating.
Clarify expectations. If your advisor says "email me back when you have a draft" and you immediately jump to "a publication ready draft", either one of two things is true: they want to see writing that's ready to send off to an editor, or they are open to seeing writing in a variety of stages. If you feel comfortable, you can ask a clarifying question - "Would you be willing to read a rough draft?" is a professional thing to ask!
Assess where you are before you take any further steps. If you get a draft back with comments, and the email has language that sets off your rejection alarm bells, your body could be bracing for a fight. It might make sense for you to do a check in - is my pulse racing? Are my teeth clenched? What color do I feel like? - and act accordingly. This video has some good suggestions for green/yellow/red levels of activation. You might want to schedule a time to go through comments, maybe with a friend to help you work on them. Or you could set a schedule of looking at one or two pages of comments and translating them into tasks in your to do list at the end of each day, so that you can unwind and take care of yourself at night, before working on the to-dos the next morning.
Create some visibility around The Great Undone Thing. If you tend towards the "nope! never again!" reaction, it might be helpful to create a little bit of visibility around the thing that is not currently surfacing on your to do list. Especially with other executive function symptoms, you might swing from hyper-awareness of the thing you are avoiding, to periods of time where you are so fully engrossed in other projects or tasks where you lose sight on the other, more emotionally-loaded tasks. You could try repeating tasks in a database like "check in on draft", or have an accountability partner who checks in on that project, or a whiteboard where you have a visual cue of a few next steps you could take on that project.
So much academic advice seems to boil down to "write every day, and work as much as you can on every opportunity so you can always have slightly improved odds at succeeding on something every so often." And while that advice, when framed correctly, can be sound, it also can really invalidate the experience of someone who cannot simply open a rejection letter and keep it moving. And while a good task management system, or coach, or community can help, they're no substitute for compassionately acknowledging your own experience, and where you do or don't fit with some of the advice and assumptions on offer. If any of these patterns were easy or simple to solve, they wouldn't impact so many of us. But, the more you know, the more you can work with yourself, and build systems and frameworks that help you be your best self without denying who you are and how you move through the world.
**For the purposes of this article, I'm choosing to use the term rejection sensitivity, which is a symptom that can, in official DSM terms (on its own a flawed system!), overlap with diagnosable conditions like ADHD, BPD, body dysmorphia disorder, and social anxiety) rather than Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, which is specifically talked about in relation to ADHD. For more on RSD, see here and here!