It was 2:13 a.m. I stared at the same paragraph for the fourth time. The words made sense individually, but together they refused to stay in my head. My laptop was open, my notes were ready, and I was “technically” working.

But nothing was moving.

That night, I realized something uncomfortable. I wasn’t struggling with the subject itself, but with my own mind.

For a long time, I believed I was just tired with too many assignments, deadlines, and expectations as a PhD student. Even on days when my workload was lighter, my mind still felt crowded with multiple thoughts running at the same time, and none of them were complete. That is when I realized the issue was not how much I was doing, but how I was thinking.

Students approach everything through logic. We break problems into parts, analyze them step by step, and arrive at conclusions. This is powerful, but what happens when you read the same page repeatedly but absorb nothing, or when your thoughts drift everywhere except where they should?

I came across an idea that changed how I saw this problem: the mind processes information through logic and through feeling. While academia trains us in logic, the deepest learning often comes from experience and feeling. It is the difference between creating understanding step by step and simply seeing it as a whole. I was not experiencing what I studied; I was only trying to complete it.

Another idea that stayed with me was self-excellence — becoming better than who I was yesterday. This concept was introduced to me alongside Kriya Yoga, the science of the mind, from a book called Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.

The first change I noticed in myself after reading was that my thoughts no longer pulled me in different directions. I could stay with one task without feeling restless. 

I also stopped multitasking, which made me more efficient. The effort did not disappear, but it became more effective.

What Kriya Yoga seemed to do was change how I processed things. Instead of approaching everything in fragments, I began to see connections more easily, as if my mind was working with me rather than against me.

This shift extended beyond academics. Rest actually felt like rest, and I was more present in conversations. The constant feeling of “catching up” with my own life began to fade. It made me realize that the majority of our stress does not come from the work itself, but from the state of the mind doing the work.

We normalize stress and burnout in academic environments as if they are signs of effort. However, the real problem is that we are doing everything with a scattered mind.

This experience taught me that focus emerges when the mind is calm and aligned. Learning to bring the mind back to itself may be one of the most important skills academia has yet to teach.