There's a reason why after my three months of paid family leave expired, I opted to take an additional semester of unpaid leave as a postpartum PhD student. My mind was so full—overflowing, really—with newborn care, breastfeeding, and pumping logistics, all while I was struggling with Postpartum Anxiety (PPA) and a level of exhaustion I genuinely hadn't known was possible. The thought of returning so quickly to writing my dissertation was absolutely terrifying. After all, my body had just been through something really intense that fundamentally rewires you from the inside out.

Despite the expectations of your advisors, your department, your institution, and let's be honest—the world—most people who've given birth really struggle to "bounce back" and resume being the person they were before they had a baby. If you're tackling something as intensive and exhausting as a PhD, this reality is amplified more so.

I took my sweet a** time getting back to my PhD studies (well, in a US context at least—had I had my son in the UK, the 11 months I took "off" would be perceived as completely normal rather than an extended period). I realize how privileged I was to even have that choice in the matter. When I did return to teaching and dissertating at 11 months postpartum, I did not "snap back." I did not resume my research as if I wasn't also now a full-time caregiver. It took real time to get back into writing, and writing well, again.

If you're pregnant or postpartum and wondering how you will ever get back to researching and writing again (or perhaps you've tried and it's just not going well), here are some strategies I used that may help you.

1. Don't Force Yourself to Write—Read Instead

Writing is really, really hard under the best of circumstances. Under postpartum circumstances, when your brain is operating on fragmented sleep and a cocktail of hormones and survival instincts, it can feel close to impossible.

So don't start there. Instead, begin by easing yourself back into your intellectual world through reading things related to your field. Low-stakes, no-pressure reading. Take some loose notes—even just a sentence or two to capture a thought. You're not producing anything. You're simply reminding your brain that it has another identity beyond "caregiver," and that is genuinely enough for now.

Reading is a gentler re-entry point than writing, and it will begin to slowly reactivate parts of your scholarly mind that have been dormant. Give yourself that grace.

2. Set Realistic Writing Goals—Your Capacity Has Changed, and That's Okay

Just because you used to be able to write pages and pages on a good day does not mean you should expect that of yourself now. You have a full parent brain. Your cognitive bandwidth is not what it was before, and that is not a personal failing, but a biological and logistical reality. The sooner you make peace with this, the better off you'll be.

Start small. Genuinely, embarrassingly small, if that's what it takes. Even a paragraph a day is phenomenal when you're also keeping a small human alive. Setting realistic writing goals doesn't mean you're lowering your standards, you're just setting yourself up to actually meet them, and experiencing the accumulative momentum that comes from consistent, achievable progress. A paragraph a day is still a paragraph more than you had yesterday.

3. Lean Into Consistency, Not Perfection

This is perhaps the most important mindset shift you can make as a postpartum PhD student. Do not reach for perfection when you first return to research and writing. I know that might feel counterintuitive—you're a PhD student, you have high standards, your work matters to you. All of that is still true. But perfection is the enemy of progress, and progress is what will get you to the finish line.

Aim to do something related to your research every day, or every weekday if that's more sustainable. Some days that might mean reading a single article. Some days it might mean editing a paragraph you wrote last week. Some days it might mean writing a messy, imperfect page that you know will need significant revision. All of this counts. Consistency over a long period of time compounds into a finished dissertation. Waiting for the perfect writing conditions, the perfect headspace, the perfect day, is a waiting game that postpartum life will never let you win.

4. Communicate Transparently with Your Advisors

You've just had a baby. Your life is irreversibly different. You should not have to pretend otherwise—not to your institution, not to your department, and certainly not to your advisors.

When you resume research and writing, have an honest conversation with your advisors about your new capacity as a parent. Don't allow them to assume you'll be operating at the same pace or in the same way you did before. This conversation may feel uncomfortable, especially if you're navigating a power dynamic that doesn't exactly invite vulnerability. But setting expectations now will save you enormous stress later.

Come to that conversation with a realistic sense of what you can commit to given your actual schedule and bandwidth as a caregiver. Set goals collaboratively that genuinely account for your new reality.

5. Experiment with a New, Flexible Writing Routine

If you're someone who used to write only in long, luxurious sessions between the hours of 9 and 5, with a coffee in hand and a whole afternoon stretching out ahead of you, I'm going to gently tell you that those days are on pause for a while. As a postpartum PhD student and parent, you are going to have to learn to take advantage of whatever windows of time you can get when you're not actively caregiving.

At first, this will feel nearly impossible. But with time and practice, this is exactly how you will eventually finish your PhD.

Your baby is napping—that could mean anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours of quiet writing time (and if it's one of those days of 20-minute naps followed by full-volume screaming, I've been there, I am so sorry, and it will not last forever). If your partner, a family member, or a friend takes the baby, that is your green light to try and get something done. I know the dishes are in the sink and the laundry has been in the dryer for three days—but here's the thing: those low-attention tasks can happen in the evening when the baby is asleep. Use your most energized, most cognitively alive windows for PhD-related work. Even if those windows are 45 minutes at a time.

The version of your writing routine that worked before parenthood may not exist anymore, at least not right now. That's okay. The new routine doesn't need to be perfect—it just needs to be yours, and it needs to work for the life you're actually living.

Final Thoughts

Completing a dissertation as a postpartum PhD student is not easy. It is not supposed to be easy. There is no productivity hack or morning routine that is going to make it feel effortless, because it isn't effortless. It's hard, and you are doing it while also doing one of the hardest things a human being can do. Give yourself credit for that.

What I can tell you is that it is possible. Not by pretending that having a baby didn't change everything, but by working with your new reality rather than against it. By reading before you write, by setting small goals and meeting them, by choosing consistency over perfection, by being honest with the people who are guiding your academic work, and by releasing your grip on the writing routine that existed in your pre-parent life and building something new in its place.

You will find your rhythm again. It will look different than it did before, but your whole life is different now.

Are you a PhD student navigating parenthood and dissertation writing? I work with PhD students and graduate student parents as an academic editor, helping you get your work across the finish line—at whatever pace that looks like right now. [Get in touch to learn more.]