mentally paralyzed, but I need to write and present a talk in two weeks: help?

The technical term for your problem is “psyched out”. This is actually especially common to people in your sort of education-is-my-job situations as university seems designed to turn everyone it touches into a neurotic mess. Of course knowing this doesn’t really help, but there are some steps you can take to relieve the problem beyond counseling- I think half the reason universities keep a mental health department is because of all the adults trying to be productive around anxiety. Right now your body is helpfully protecting you from what it perceives as a horrible calamity by locking you down with the sort of stress reaction more suitable if you felt compelled to hang out in bear caves or jump off high things. It’s also an (un)helpful ego protection mechanism- people with your problem are commonly being prevented from working because contrary to reality your brain thinks not doing it at all is better than half assing it. To get around this anxiety you need to trick your brain into thinking you’re doing the same work for something other than a horrible calamity or act like the calamity already happened. Tricks you can try, which I’ve used successfully, include: 1) Try to do it extremely badly. Write with profanity. Write paragraphs talking about how it is stupid, stupid, stupid, write with intentional typos. Somewhere along the way the actual writing will sneak out. 2) Have an understanding friend type up notes for you while you puke and cry, ideally one who asks you some questions to keep you talking and distracted. If you’re too anxious, puke and cry into some recording software. 3) Write this as if you were writing for someone else. This one’s not quite as reliable, but if you’re one of those people who can walk through fire for other humans but panic when you’re asked to look after yourself, pretending you’re helping someone else who is having a panic attack about their talk allows you to step outside the rigid little framework your traitor brain built for you. 4) Bore yourself calm. Remove ALL distractions (or remove yourself from the distractions) including turning off the internet. Then shackle yourself to the chair for an hour. You have full permission to spend the hour crying and punching the desk, but you’re allowed to do only two things- work or be bored. 5) Do absolutely everything else to get ready for your talk. Pick out your outfit/pack your suitcase. Choose a template for your slides. Practice in front of a mirror (recite the pledge of allegiance/bene gesserit mantra/lyrics of your favourite song as a place holder). You can even do up your slides with lorum-ipsum- basically treat it like efficiency measures for a talk that is going to happen one way or another. Another version of this trick is working backwards. 6) Bribe yourself- Three sentences (even crap sentences) and you get a treat. Finish just an outline and you get dinner out. Etc.. 7) Mother yourself. Do all the things a sick person gets, the soup, the blankets, the comfy fuzzy socks, etc… Tell yourself this mean-bad-project is just like a flu you have to suffer through. 8) Write your talk, lying to yourself that if you can actually write it you will then claim laryngitis and someone else will do the talk-y part, and all the work you’re writing is an outline for them to fill in for you.

Been there in a related way, and to a certain extent, still am. One thing I learned is that there is absolutely no "One solution fits all" for this. A long term solution may require therapy, medication, confrontation with past things, a change in setting, a change in routine, or a combination of these or other things. For the long term, start with the basics. You need, absolutely need, decent sleep, exercise, water, decent food (some of which you're doing). Every day. When those take a hit - especially the sleep - everything else starts to slide. Those, and as others suggested, a therapy route before (as a last resort) going down the medication road. This bit jumped out: "...and I don't understand how I got this PhD." You cannot "luck" a PhD. OTHER PEOPLE AWARDED YOU a PhD because: 1. You put the work in. 2. You had the analytic and research skills. 3. You teased out PhD-worthy results. 4. Experts in the field determined it, and you, were PhD worthy. 5. And they determined that YOU ADDED SOMETHING UNIQUE TO THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. Yeah. You did that, Starcrust. You have the skills and did the work and got the PhD-worthy results. You proved it. And experts verified this. But the illogical part of your mind, which is currently working against you in a shitty and really unhelpful way, is blocking you from accepting this irrefutable, logical, FACT. It'll be the bit saying "But ... No ... But ..." when you read that five point list a few seconds ago. In the long term, you'll need to sort out this unhelpful demon (start with therapy, or get thee to a library and dig out the right books on it), or at least work out what's causing it, and therefore ways of keeping it caged up so it doesn't intrude on your thoughts. For the here and now, ditch the pomodoros if it doesn't work. The time clock limit thing is good for some, another level of pressure for others. And an underlying thing in your post is time pressure. Baby steps. Ignore clocks, watches, time, in all forms. Write one sentence. One sentence is good. Then a quiet yay, and try another sentence. Repeat until you need the restroom or food.

Well, you didn't get your PhD in a vacuum. People respect you and find your contributions worthwhile. And yes, you do need help. You're having suicidal ideation and you're anxious and depressed to the point of non-action. You do have the ability to change this. You can get better. It's not your fault and it's not something that reflects on you as a person. You are most certainly not alone. Please see a doctor about this.

Please inquire with university counseling services to see if they extend services to post-docs, or to get a referral. That should be your first step and first concern, even above this talk. I don't think advice beyond that is much more helpful. As someone who pushed through anxiety in a similar situation, everything but therapy was a temporary fix. It came back full force, and it sounds like that's happened to you as well. Side-advice: running is not great if you are stressed out. It increases cortisol. Try gentler forms of exercise for awhile, ideally yoga with an emphasis on meditation.

I agree with advice about therapy, etc. etc., but for the more pressing question of how to get through this talk in two weeks: It should be on parts of my dissertation [...] I've given talks and conference papers before What would you do if you had an hour to prepare for this talk instead of a few months? Could you pull out your dissertation defense talk (or a similar conference paper), look it over, and ad-lib some comments about the relationship to your postdoc project and current department's interests? If so -- boom, you have something that's passable if not ideal. If you want to curl up into a ball for the next two weeks, you can. Maybe you won't impress someone important as much as you could have, but it would still be better to give the talk than to cancel it, right? I struggle very similarly -- in fact am procrastinating writing my own dissertation at this very moment -- but have never actually flopped. Because when I get to the point above, most of the anxiety goes away, and I'm able to focus on using my new ideas (all those disorganized notes you mentioned) to iterate on the previous work, and the result is often 80% new instead of a rehash. It sounds like in your field talks might be delivered mostly as text-based monologues... but maybe it would be helpful to play around with organizing your ideas in a flowchart to establish the connections you want to make? Good luck.

Speaking as someone who took 10+ years to figure out why my academic career, ability to concentrate and creative ability ground to a disastrous halt in university... please see a psychiatrist. I turned out to have a dissociative disorder/complex PTSD and I could have saved a lot of time if I'd had appropriate treament. My "writer's block" was dissociative avoidance of traumatic triggers associated with writing, attempts to express myself, impossible self-expectations and, yes, horrific doubts about self-worth, achievement and fraudulence. For the moment, mindfulness meditation and grounding exercises to help manage the pain, torment, overwhelm and frustration associated with sitting down to write. For the long haul... competent psychiatric assessment. And please feel free to memail me if you'd like to talk further.

Everyone is giving you good advice about dealing with the anxiety long term. You need to talk to a counselor or therapist -- I have had this same issue in the past, and counselors, especially at university health services, are experts in this area. As far as the talk goes, do you have a trusted friend either sort of in your field (a friend from grad school?) or just a smart friend in general? Could you ask them to spend a few hours with you to help you with your talk? If it is on parts of your dissertation, and you already have your Ph.D., then you must have defended it in front of a committee of established researchers. This means 1) your work is definitely up to snuff and 2) you may already have slides or talking points from when you did your defense laying around. If 2 is true, you should try to dig those up, and base your talk off of that. If you get a friend to help you, even if they are not in your field, show them what you have done so far, show them the chapter of dissertation that your talk is based on, and just start talking to them about your work (like you're talking to, well, a friend). Maybe try to explain some of the figures in the paper. Ask them to take notes. Even if they don't exactly know what you're talking about, getting something on paper will be useful. It will help you hone in on the most important aspects of your work.

starcrust, I feel like you've written what I've been feeling over the past six months. I'm not yet a Ph.D. but I'm in my final years and should be writing my dissertation. I've dreamt of self-harm and imagined myself stepping of the balcony of my apartment, because, in the end, don't we all end up in the same place, and that way I wouldn't have to deal with all these stresses and obligations?, etc. etc. I finished up my fieldwork in the spring, and at that time, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I had given a couple of talks on small parts of my research and gotten good responses to them. I discussed my overall plans with my supervisor and she was happy with what I told her. But whenever I sat down to write, I would get blocked. Things would get on paper but they'd stop making sense part way through the day. When I tried to return to it the next day, I lost all sense of where I was supposed to be heading, and nine time out of ten, had to start writing from the beginning again. I've started to doubt whether I actually gathered any useful data and whether I have the capability to analyze it in a way beyond saying, "isn't this kind of interesting...?" I've been avoiding contact with professors and fellow students because I'm terrified that they'll find out I've been coasting all this time, or that I'll be confronted with the reality that I'm not that good or that I'm even further behind than even what I'd imagined. I set deadlines for myself and watch them fly by, not having written even a dozen pages that still make sense to me. I don't have a talk looming like you, but the day of my last award payment is hanging over my neck like a guillotine ready to fall. On top of this, I have a young family that I need to take care of and that I can't feel like I can neglect, even for work. I feel constantly tired, like my head is in a fog. There are days when I can't get out of bed, and wander in and out of restless sleep during the day while constantly checking the e-mail on my phone, hoping that there's no message from my supervisor. I feel my chest tighten when I see a message from her, and the feeling doesn't subside even when it's about something insignificant. For the last two months, I've been seeing a psychiatrist at school almost weekly. He prescribed an anti-depressant, which I was very apprehensive about taking. I feel like the therapy and meds have finally kicked in in the past week, and though overall conditions for me haven't changed, I feel a bit better able to cope with them, or at least ignore them without becoming an anxious wreck. I know this doesn't help you now, but please see a therapist or psychiatrist, and consider medication. I'm still in the early stages, but I'm starting to feel like I should have sought help years ago. In the meantime, take each day as it comes. You've got a lot of knowledge packed away in your head and computer, and you've got to let it bubble up when it wants to. Even though you might feel like you're not making any progress, your mind is probably chipping away at the problem a little by little. It would be nice if it would let you in on the process, but that's not always how it works. Have faith that there's something happening in there, even if it feels like everything you're doing is getting washed away. Don't tighten up and try to force the right words out. When you hear them scratching at the door, open it slowly so you don't scare them away. What I've found that works sometimes is just to sit down and type, in a sort of Artist's way style. Don't think. Just write everything that comes into your head. Let all of the anxieties and worries onto the page as they come. For me, sometimes it starts like a diary entry. I write about breakfast, or how achey my hands are from typing. I might complain about that person who bumped me on the subway, or about how much I hate myself. From time to time, this writing starts to shift into my research. Lots of it makes no sense, but I'll occasionally discover myself writing a sentence or two that gets me thinking. If I'm lucky, this becomes a page or two of useful text. Reading that paragraph now, I wish I could take my own advice. I haven't done this myself for a while, but I'll give it a try this afternoon. Good luck to both of us.

Does your school have free or low cost therapy for students? It sounds to me like you need someone to unload to. I bet if they do you're not the first student they've met who feels like this. It also might be worth going to see your doctor about a depression screening because stuff like thinking of running away or harming yourself isn't normal or something you should have to just live with or power through. If it makes you feel any better when i wrote my masters thesis I could have wrote a lot of what you wrote above and being in therapy really helped. It helped to have someone I could talk to without worrying about social niceties or that i was ranting. Keep in mind too that you didn't get to where you are academically without being smart, and capable and doing good work. The amount of people i know personally in academics who have had doubts about themselves is stagering and in all the cases of know of their worries are completely unfounded and brought on by stress and worry. In my experience doubting yourself and your abilities is incredibly common. It also sounds like you're doing a really good job of taking care of yourself in a difficult time, I think is great that you're getting enough sleep and food and going for runs. It seems to me you might just need more help than you can give yourself and that's ok. If you ever need to talk feel free to memail me as well.