Low-Grade Panic

Have you ever had a low-grade fever? Just feeling slightly under the weather as your body tries to fend off germs, but without breaking out in cold sweats while the body burns up. Well, let's draw the analogy out towards panic. Panic is an all-out attack of fear, complete with heart palpitations, frenzied breathing, etc. A low-grade panic, I've decided, is the presence of fear-inducing thoughts that gnaw at the back of the mind while the mind makes attempts to suppress these thoughts. The result is an overall dampening of spirits and unspecified sense of doom. Some of you are thinking, "Hey, that sounds like anxiety!" Work with me here, people.

Anyhoo, I think dissertatin' is like an infectious psychological disease. It starts out with low-grade panic and progresses through a number of different stages, including advisor anxiety, looming-deadline phobia, writer's dysphoria, and oral-defense nausea. The outward symptoms of each stage are very similar and the course of each stage is lengthy and drawn out. Considering such, one can get the notion that this is a chronic psychological disease, like pneumonia. Let's call it dissertatin' anxiety pneumonia.

I have therefore diagnosed myself with low-grade panic associated with dissertation proposal writing, which is the first stage of dissertatin' anxiety pneumonia. I hear that eventually the sufferers of said disease do heal. But, undergoing the disease puts one at further risk for developing tenure anxiety pneumonia. I'm hoping that a cure can be found for both of these debilitating diseases. Would anyone like to join me in starting an organization to support research on these diseases? My concern is that the only way of alleviating the disease is prevention aimed at increasing awareness of the disease such that future sufferers will not even attempt to obtain a Ph.D.