why labs should take more coffee breaks

I woke up one morning in the aftermath of one of those four-hour group lab dinners and knew I had to write this post. So, I rode my bike out in the drizzling rain to the only cafe open at 5:30a.m., set up camp with my croissant and mocha and pounded out this piece in the two hours that ensued. After a cursory look, I decided to send it off to the general Science Careers email mostly out of curiosity to see if people would find my call for a lab culture change convincing. 

To my surprise, a week later, an actual editor from the magazine replied to me and three weeks of editing later, the piece (albeit a highly redacted version of it) got published in Science Careers last Thursday (original article here)! However, I was given permission to publish the original unredacted version of it on my blog, so dear readers, here it is in all its 7:30a.m.-croissant-and-mocha glory 😉 

I’d always heard the stereotype: North Americans value their independence; Europeans value togetherness. But I never fully understood it until a month ago, when I arrived at my new lab in Strasbourg, France, where I would spend the next four months of my research career.

For one, all the students in the lab sit at desks a chair’s roll away from each other compared to my seating situation at McGill, where my labmates and I are spread across various lab offices in the department.

But then it is ten minutes sitting there before Pierre, the PhD student sitting across from me, taps me on my shoulder. “Coffee?” He asks.

I nod and follow the other students filing into the common room. One lets me use one of his coffee capsules and the machine brews me an espresso five times stronger than my normal Americano. There is no milk or sugar available.

As I gingerly sip the bitter liquid, trying hard to not reveal my uncultured tastes (Starbucks anyone?), the regular morning lab chatter fills the air.

Someone shares their weekend happenings, another asks if anyone has seen their UV-Vis cuvettes, we laugh over a story of a harrowing experience someone had at the electron microscope last week.

I soon learn that these coffee breaks are a ritualistic part of life at the lab.

There’s one at 10 before you start work, one after the group returns from lunch at 12:30 and another one around 4, a pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon slump. After work ends at 6:30, there are outings organized via the WhatsApp group – sushi dinners, cook-offs, travel to an Alsatian town on Saturday.

My first dinner out with the group, we arrange to meet at a cheese fondue restaurant at 9p.m.

By the time everyone gets there and orders, it’s 9:30.

I have to refrain myself from looking at my watch as we slowly proceed through the various courses: first, glasses of Riesling white wine and a collective “Salute!”, followed by an all-you-can-eat array of meat and bread dipped in cheese, ending with rounds of dessert, espressos and liquor shots.

The bill finally gets settled around midnight and I’m wiped.

The rest of the group, however, is alive with chatter.

“Anyone up for going to a bar?” One pipes up.

It’s a month in and I’m starting to see the wisdom in the European mindset.

In North America, work has clearly defined boundaries. You go to it in the morning with pre-defined goals to meet for the day: write a section of this paper, complete the following experiments.

Lunch comprises of shovelling in spoonfuls of salad while your eyes are glued to your computer as you power through those goals.

An alarm goes off, reminding you of a Google Calendar meeting you have set up to discuss a part of your research project. The weekly group meeting is where you get to converse cordially with your labmates and ask pertinent questions about their research direction. As 5 rolls around, your day ends and you return home for some peace and quiet at night.

Yet, what the North American mentality fails to recognize is that research simply cannot be done in isolation.

Good ideas do not just crop up by submerging yourself in literature or one-hour group meetings during which everyone shares data that makes sense.

Research is messy, there is a lot we don’t understand and so it has to be done in community, where we have to be willing to share in the day-to-day ups and downs that the graduate life brings us, not just when we get data we like.

There recently has been a lot of talk of the mental health epidemic among graduate students.

Apparently, graduate students experience 6 times higher rates of depression and anxiety than the normal public, and 40% of us are in fact suffering from moderate to severe depression. These statistics surprised me, probably because I never talked about it with my peers.

Work and personal life were separate; it almost seemed intrusive to ask work colleagues about their emotional state.

I remember many lonely moments in my first two years in my program, staying up late reading papers as I tried to solve problems in my research I felt were solely my burden to carry.

My supervisor was always very supportive, but a bi-weekly meeting with someone who is a few degrees separated from the daily grind of lab work was good, but not enough.

I struggled with imposter syndrome, always thinking it was something wrong with my research techniques and protocols, yet feeling the pressure to have to produce a hypothesis explaining my weird results whenever I was asked how my research was going.

I knew I had to ask others for help, yet I didn’t know who to ask and also did not want to bother other people with Google Calendars filled with actually important meetings with people who were more relevant to their goals.

Anyway, I was supposed to be independent now, an expert in my own field. I just had to read more literature and do more experiments.

And herein is the mental health epidemic we are currently seeing among the graduate student population.

While we struggle alone, the time ticks on – time we should be publishing more papers to make us more competitive in the academic market, time we should be gathering data we could present at conferences, time we think will help us feel more confident to deal with the dreaded question, “How is your research going?”

We think the answer is more seminars. So, we schedule more workshops to give graduate students strategies to cope with mental health. Take more breaks, we hear, get rid of imposter syndrome!

And then right after the workshop, we head back to our little cubicles, plug in our earphones and plunge back into our world of problems only we can understand.

I propose that instead of giving students more workshops on how to deal with mental health, what we need is an overhaul of lab culture.

Studies have shown that our brains are more creative when given space to think – hence, breaks are good. It is also a fact that other people doing experiments have knowledge you need that cannot simply be acquired by reading papers – hence, we need to be talking to each other.

The more time I spend in Europe, the more I believe research was meant to be done together.

And that more than churning out data or high-impact papers, the joys of the graduate life comprises of sharing data we don’t understand, talking about harrowing electron microscopy experiences over too-bitter espresso, and staying out late with the select group of people who “get” your headspace more than most of the other people in your life.

So, perhaps instead of concentrating on having meetings only when we have specific goals to accomplish, we should be making more space for organic conversations about lab life and research ideas to occur.

Perhaps it means starting a lab culture of sharing failures, frustrating experiences and incomprehensible data.

Perhaps it means normalizing the idea of taking lunch breaks together as a lab instead of eating in front of our screens, or something as simple as getting a coffee machine in the lab common room to incentivize more of these lab coffee breaks.

Last night, our lab went out for a group dinner at a Greek restaurant to celebrate the departure of two of our lab mates.

It was midnight, but this time I was prepared for the late night. In fact, I had ordered an espresso allongée myself, this time the bitterness the perfect complement to my cardamom panna cotta.

Pierre was sitting across from me and had ordered a shot of liquor made of anise seed.

“Wow, what an emulsion,” he commented as he swirled the milky mixture of anise seed oil and alcohol, “I’m guessing the particle size to be five microns.”

“Looks like aggregated silica nanoparticles to me,” I joked, a slight reference to the perpetual problems of nanoparticle agglomeration we face in the lab.

“I guess we’ll have to put it through the DLS* on Monday to really know,” he replied with a smile.

I laughed, and in that moment, it was as if two years of loneliness and frustration had lifted.

Not knowing why things happen is normal, and that’s the beautiful thing about being scientists:

we get to apply our minds to questions no one has the answer to and experience what it is to be limited in knowledge.

And yet, those limitations should force us to depend on each other, instead of pretend we have all the answers.

I hope I always remember the joy of being part of such a scientific community and seek to build more of that light-hearted togetherness even when I’m back in my highly-independent, product-oriented, time-aware North American home culture.

*Dynamic Light Scattering: an instrument used in lab to determine the size of nanoparticles suspended in solution, often used to tell us if our particles are stable or not.