Academia inspires a whole range of emotions in people. We get a lot of questions here of the form "How to deal with feeling X?", or "Is it common for people in my situation to feel X?", where X is:
- Lack of motivation: How to stay motivated in a low-motivated group? and How to motivate myself to do more than the bare minimum that is required of me?
- Discouraged: How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student? and How should I deal with discouragement looking at others success?
- Guilt: How to stop feeling guilty about the unfinished work?
- Burnout: What can I do to recover from a short term burnout? and Strategies to overcome “academic-apathy” in the final stages of the PhD?
- Intimidated: How do I stop feeling intimidated by my advisor?
- Dread: Is it normal to feel dread before starting a faculty position?
- Impatient: Is it normal to feel impatient in lectures when a lecturer explains material that could be obtained from textbooks?
- Undeserving: “I've somehow convinced everyone that I'm actually good at this” - how to effectively deal with Imposter Syndrome
I think we need a tag to cover questions specifically about "dealing with the things I am feeling."
The scope of the tag would be something like:
On emotional issues such as guilt, discouragement, jealousy, or feelings of inadequacy affecting academics and researchers.
It's similar to tags like health-issues, religious-issues, and legal-issues in that scope.
But, I have no idea what such a tag should be called.
I think emotional-issues implies abnormal emotions, which is definitely not something I want this tag name to convey.
And I don't like just emotions, because then it's likely to also be used for questions about research/study related to emotions. (I know this because that's what happened to healthcare before I split it into medicine and health-issues, and there were similar issues with law until I created legal-issues.) This would make it a bad dual-purpose tag.
Any ideas?
Note: The tag should exclude questions on dealing with other people who have these emotions (or, who the OP thinks have these emotions) - these are better categorized as interpersonal-issues