Some weeks a go I spent five full days in Barcelona for the CHI2026-conference, the flagship one for Human-Computer Interaction. Even gave a talk after quite a few years of break, and that was FUN! In addition to that… yeah old friends, a few new ones, tons of good food and a healthy amount of beer.

The good academic life.

But there was nothing genuinely new in all that. What was, however, genuinely new was the number of people who… approached me to sort of “confess” during our small talk. To confess how it’s so important to talk about the struggles we all feel, almost despite the level of seniority. I’m talking about established senior researchers, full professors, and all kinds of academic literal superstars.

All have some form of cognitive biases and issues I’ve been talking about lately on LinkedIn.

So… you and I, my friend, we are SO NOT ALONE with any of these erratic thoughts.

While that’s really all I want to say today, I’ll give you a handful of tools against the three biggest ones I kept hearing last week.

Stay with me for a few mins, right after the commercial break!

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Hedonic Adaptation

One of the bigger names I ran into, seriously senior, casually mentions winning over 800,000 euros of sweet, almost-no-strings-attached grant money. That’s a lot. And a couple of months later, already anxious about the next one.

True story.

Barely had time to recruit folks to even begin the work, and brain already going “That was nice. You need more.“

And that’s essentially hedonic adaptation in the wild. Bet you’ve heard about how lottery winners return to baseline happiness within months.

Oh, so do btway newly tenured professors. So do Nature authors. Your brain resets before you’ve finished the celebration party.

Early research calls it “hedonic treadmill.” And yeah academia is basically a hedonic treadmill with fancy titles. The grant funds the next grant. The paper requires the next paper. Tenure unlocks the fight for full professorship. There’s no finish line, because your brain keeps quietly moving it the moment your foot lands.

The counter-move lives in perfectionism detox. Here’s the simple version:

Define “enough” BEFORE the goal lands. In writing. In boring specifics.

Not vibes, not random vague descriptions. You want numbers. Papers per year. Actual money you think/know is enough. Hours of focused work you want to protect in a week.

Boring, specific, non-heroic stuff.

Then, when the win lands, you hold the line! You pause.

You celebrate like a functional human you were before entering academia.

You wait at least 72 hours before you even think about the next goal.

If you don’t do this, every win gets swallowed by the treadmill before you’ve had a second to taste it. You run forever and arrive nowhere.

And you’d be seriously surprised about how many academics who “made it” in your eyes are secretly in this devilish cycle.

Comparison-Driven Identity

Different night in barcelona. Different guy. Different career stage. Objectively crushing it. Grants, publications, the CV most of us would cry happy tears over.

“Oh I feel so behind.” (said in a different way but you get the point)

Behind who? Three or four LinkedIn academics who “seem to have it all together?” Some Oxford scholar who had 10-million-dollar lab around him to support his work?

Stooooooop. This one is Comparison-Driven Identity, and it’s one of the most expensive cognitive biases I see around me (and OK a bit too often in the mirror too.)

Background work is in social comparison theory, and the research since has been painfully clear. Upward comparisons, where you measure yourself against people you perceive as above you, correlate with reduced wellbeing, more depression, and…lower motivation.

Guess what lower motivation means? Less stuff done. Less happy you. Less momentum. Less of all of the good stuff. Also, those academics you look up to almost never show you their rejections. They’re not showing you the nine grant rejections that preceded the one win they’re humble-bragging about today.

You’re comparing everything about you to their highlight reel.

This is close cousins with another known cognitive bias: Attribution Asymmetry.

Let me make a guess. When a colleague fails, you instantly say “the system is unfair,” or “tough year,” or “bad luck.” When YOU fail, you say “I’m just not good enough.”

You give everyone else easy time while you’re merciless on yourself.

Want to… do something about this? Run the 2-step Colleague Rescript.

1) Whatever you’re beating yourself up over this week, write it out in one sentence.
2) Then imagine a colleague told you the exact same thing about themselves. Word for word. What would you say to them?

That’s the response you owe yourself.

And the final fancypants term for today is…

Temporal Myopia

Woah Simo why all these fancy terms?

OK you got me there. Sure. So. I’m preparing another course on mental aspects of academia…that’s why. And these all come from how I’m structuring these issues there!

You’ll hear more about that in due time.

Anyway, the third thing I kept hearing over and over, just in slightly different forms:

“I just can’t see this ending well.“

PhD students, postdocs, ECRs, even senior faculty. Different situations. Exact same brain pattern.

They could all see the threats. Clearly. Specifically. But when asked what positive futures are even possible, they go silent.

Just… stuff going all alright is not on the menu at all. And, get this, this comes from people who have a history of working things out 100% of the time, in one way or another.

Temporal Myopia is an evil mixture of two well-known cognitive biases running in parallel.

First, negativity bias. The classic. Your brain weights losses and threats roughly 3 to 5 times more heavily than equivalent gains.

This was of course evolutionarily smart. Run from the tiger you must much more than enjoy smelling the flowers.

But today it means your entire nervous system is just miscalibrated for modern academic risk. I mean.. What’s going to happen? Really? Chances are, not much.

Second, affective forecasting errors. Humans are consistently bad at predicting how bad future events will actually feel. We overestimate the pain. We underestimate our own resilience.

And we do that every single time.

So when your brain shows you a future of nothing but impossible odds, none of this is backed by data or facts. It’s more like kind of factory setting. And a bad one!

So. What to do?

Run the 10-10-10.

How will this feel in 10 minutes? In 10 months? In 10 years?

Most academic “catastrophes” don’t survive the 10-month test. They definitely don’t survive the 10-year test. Whatever ruins your week now, will feel like a fun story in 10 years.

Stay in the game. Long term mindset. Have fun, and you’ll win.