Why Your Postdoc Feels Scattered: Fragmentation, Burnout, and Finding Your Throughline
If your postdoc or research role feels scattered, like you’re constantly juggling projects and reacting to whatever funding comes through, it makes sense. It’s genuinely hard to build something coherent in that environment.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with a number of researchers about this feeling of fragmentation. What I’ve noticed is that this isn’t about individual focus or discipline. It’s structural. Soft money, short-term funding, and constant pivots make it hard to shape your work with intention.
On top of that, people simply work differently: some thrive going deep on one narrow question, while others do better with a small portfolio of projects.
The challenge isn’t forcing yourself into one model. It’s learning how to design your work deliberately and find the throughline that makes it all feel connected.
I started with a clear “why”
My PhD began with a love of languages. I fell into psycholinguistics because it let me combine biology with questions about the structure of language. It felt aligned and curiosity-driven, and I had a strong sense of purpose.
Then I started my first postdoc. I moved to a new city (and a new country) where I didn’t know anyone. While struggling with the change in environment, I was also adapting to a new research culture.
The institute where I landed was run entirely on soft money, so my work followed whatever projects had just been funded. Like many postdocs, the projects were adjacent to my interests rather than fully aligned, and they didn’t always connect to each other. My second postdoc was similar, even though the environment and topics were different.
The drift I didn’t notice
Over time, my CV filled up with projects that were adjacent to my original interests rather than truly aligned with them. When I went on the job market, that patchwork of projects naturally shaped the research program I could propose.
Somewhere along the way, my research had drifted, and my sense of why drifted with it.
I didn’t fully see it at the time, but I think that loss of clarity contributed to the burnout I later felt as a faculty member. It’s hard to stay energized when you’re no longer sure what thread connects your work, or when the program you’re running doesn’t fully align with your deeper motivations.
When I moved to industry, the same sense of being scattered showed up again. I had changed fields from educational neuroscience into healthcare data science and AI, and for a long stretch I couldn’t see how my past work connected to my current work. That uncertainty brought a lot of doubt with it.
What finally helped
What helped wasn’t finding the perfect title or perfectly aligned job. The shift came when I started paying attention to the questions that kept following me from one setting to another.
Instead of asking whether a position matched my background, I began asking what problems I kept caring about no matter where I was working.
I noticed that I was always drawn back to the same themes: how data can guide more personalized decisions, and how we communicate science in ways that genuinely help people. Even as the fields and job titles changed, those questions stayed consistent. They became the throughline that connected everything.
Holding onto the thread
Having gone through this myself, I now help researchers step back and see the thread that’s already there: the questions, skills, and motivations that connect their work across projects and roles.
Careers don’t have to look linear to be meaningful. But it helps enormously to understand what ties the pieces together, especially when everything around you keeps shifting.
That sense of coherence can be the difference between feeling scattered and feeling like you’re moving forward with intention.
A small reflection, if you’re in this phase
If any of this feels familiar, it might help to pause and ask yourself:
What kinds of problems do I keep returning to, even when the projects change?
What skills or ways of thinking show up again and again?
When have I felt most engaged?
If titles and funding constraints disappeared, what questions would I still want to pursue?
Often there’s a thread already there. It just takes a bit of distance to see how the pieces connect.