when you go to grad school, you've elected to move yourself to a new place and surround yourself with a social circle defined by your shared research interests. everything in your life will somehow connect back to work, so doing work (or thinking about work) will easily become all consuming. Disconnecting will be hard because you have to decide how to fill that non-work/research vaccuum and will often default to just doing more work because it's familiar.
So, for me, disconnecting didn't work when it was seen as "pushing away work" to do something else -- it had to be that my focus was "pulled into something non-work". The hard part is finding a non-work thing that naturally pulls your focus away from work (especially on a grad-student budget).
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when you go to grad school, you've elected to move yourself to a new place and surround yourself with a social circle defined by your shared research interests. everything in your life will somehow connect back to work, so doing work (or thinking about work) will easily become all consuming. Disconnecting will be hard because you have to decide how to fill that non-work/research vaccuum and will often default to just doing more work because it's familiar.
So, for me, disconnecting didn't work when it was seen as "pushing away work" to do something else -- it had to be that my focus was "pulled into something non-work". The hard part is finding a non-work thing that naturally pulls your focus away from work (especially on a grad-student budget).