Why the PhD often gets harder after you become more knowledgeable
One of the more confusing parts of doing a qualitative PhD is that many researchers expect confidence to increase steadily as they become more knowledgeable. Surely, the more you read, analyse, write, and understand your topic, the more certain you should start feeling about your work?
Except that is often not what happens.
Most people experience the opposite. The further they move into their research, the more complexity they begin to see.
Questions that once seemed relatively straightforward start becoming messier. Arguments become more nuanced. Interpretation feels less clear-cut. The work can begin feeling tougher precisely because you now understand more about what you’re dealing with.
This is one reason many qualitative PhD students feel wobbly during the middle and later stages of the doctorate. They assume increasing uncertainty means they are becoming less capable, when in reality it is often a sign that their understanding has become more sophisticated.
A few years ago, in 2019, I decided to start taking running more seriously again and signed up for the Birmingham Half Marathon.
I had always been a keen runner, but I had not trained properly for an event in years. In my head, the whole thing initially seemed relatively straightforward. I would get organised, download a sensible training plan, schedule my runs properly, become more disciplined, and gradually get fitter over time.
How hard could it be?
At the beginning, I felt pretty confident about the whole thing.
I had the colour-coded training plan, the new running shoes, a box of squeezy energy gels.
I had absolutely no idea what was coming.
Once I started training consistently again, all sorts of complications emerged from nowhere. Along came the Achilles tendonitis. The constant exhaustion from trying to fit runs around work and life. The strength training I had not really accounted for. The recovery time. The balancing act of trying not to overtrain while simultaneously worrying I was not doing enough.
I vividly remember one afternoon lying on my exercise mat after a run, having decided to “quickly” add a core workout onto the end of it, only to accidentally fall asleep in the middle of the living room floor. I woke up with a start about twenty minutes later feeling utterly disoriented, wondering what on earth had happened to me.
Then there was the panic when I got ill.
I caught a cold after a particularly intense stretch of training and immediately started mentally catastrophising:
Could I catch up?
Should I still run anyway?
Would missing sessions ruin everything?
Had I already lost fitness?
The weirdest thing was that, at the beginning, when I understood less about training, I actually felt more certain.
Later on, once I became more aware of injury risk, recovery, pacing, fatigue, adaptation, strength work, nutrition, and all the other moving parts sitting underneath distance running, the whole thing started feeling much more complicated.
I think something very similar often happens during the PhD.
The more you learn, the more complexity becomes visible
Early in doctoral research, many students understandably imagine that expertise will eventually produce certainty.
Once they have read enough literature, analysed enough data, refined the methodology properly, and worked on the writing for long enough, they assume things will start feeling clearer and more stable.
Qualitative research rarely develops in such a neat linear way.
A more typical trajectory is that the more researchers learn, the more aware they become of conceptual tensions, competing interpretations, methodological limitations, theoretical nuance, ambiguity in the data, weaknesses in arguments, gaps in existing research, and the difficulty of making analytical decisions.
At the beginning of the PhD, you often cannot yet see the full scale of the intellectual terrain in front of you. Later on, once your understanding deepens, complexity becomes much more visible.
That can feel like you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you. Particularly because many intelligent researchers interpret uncertainty as evidence that something has gone wrong.
Early confidence is sometimes built on simplicity
I think one of the reasons this feels difficult to accept is that early confidence is often partly built on not yet seeing the full complexity of the problem.
That's simply how learning works.
When people first encounter a new field, topic, or skill, they are usually engaging with a simplified version of it. At that stage, the hidden judgement calls, tensions, trade-offs, and layers of nuance are not yet fully visible.
Then, gradually, expertise expands awareness.
Researchers start noticing how theory shapes interpretation, how methodological choices affect findings, how easily concepts drift, how many analytical decisions are subjective, how different researchers could plausibly interpret the same data differently.
This is often the point where confidence becomes wobblier rather than stronger because they are becoming more aware of complexity.
There’s a tendency to think, “I felt more confident six months ago, so I must be getting worse.” Often the opposite is happening.
Why the middle stage of the PhD can feel so difficult
This is one reason the middle stages of a qualitative PhD often feel particularly messy and emotionally draining.
You know enough at this stage to see the complexity clearly, but not yet enough to feel steady within it.
That combination can produce overthinking, analysis paralysis, constant doubt, fear of getting things wrong, decision fatigue, loss of confidence, intellectual exhaustion.
Many researchers start feeling as though the thesis is somehow “getting worse” because the work no longer feels as straightforward as it once did.
In reality, the growing complexity often reflects deeper engagement with the research itself.
The problem is that intellectual development rarely feels elegant from the inside.
While researchers are in the middle of the process, the work often feels fragmented, uncertain, and psychologically noisy. People reread the same paragraph repeatedly. They change their mind about arguments. They become temporarily convinced their coding makes no sense. They start wondering whether everyone else secretly understands qualitative research better than they do.
Over the years, I have seen many highly capable researchers panic at exactly the point their thinking was actually becoming more sophisticated.
Expertise often changes the nature of confidence
I also think many people misunderstand what expertise eventually feels like.
Beginners often imagine that experienced researchers operate with complete certainty all the time, but deeper expertise frequently produces something more nuanced.
It now becomes about greater intellectual caution, more thoughtful judgement, awareness of limitations, tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to hold competing interpretations in tension.
Experienced qualitative researchers are not necessarily people who never feel uncertain - they’ve just got better at thinking carefully within uncertainty without immediately interpreting that uncertainty as evidence of failure.
Learning to work within complexity
When I look back now at the half marathon training, what strikes me most is how naïve my early confidence really was.
At the beginning, I thought becoming “serious” simply meant becoming more organised.
I had no idea how many invisible systems were sitting underneath the surface: recovery, injury management, adaptation, pacing, fatigue, consistency, nutrition, sleep, immune function, strength work, and all the tiny adjustments required once real life inevitably disrupted the plan.
The more I learned, the more complicated the whole thing became. That did not mean I was getting worse at running - in many ways, it meant I was finally starting to understand it properly.
I think qualitative doctoral research often unfolds similarly.
The work getting harder is a good thing, because it means you’re finally starting to see the full depth of what you’re actually trying to do, it is a sign that your understanding has become more sophisticated.
The next step for more structured support
This is exactly the stage I designed the Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations PhD Survival Guide to support.
It helps qualitative doctoral researchers make the underlying foundations of their research more visible and coherent, because once they get clearer, the rest of the work usually starts feeling more manageable too.
If you have ever found yourself thinking:
“I understand this… but not enough to defend it.”
or:
“I’ve done the work, but I’m not sure how it all fits together.”
the guide was designed for exactly that stage of the PhD.
When you need it, it’s right here.
If your research is moving, but something underneath it doesn’t fully make sense yet, this guide will help you get it back on solid ground.
This is not about starting from scratch, it’s about making sense of the conceptual and theoretical foundations that are already shaping your work - so you can explain, defend, and build on them with confidence.
If your project feels slightly unclear, fragmented, or harder to articulate than it should, this guide helps you steady it, so your research starts to come together as a coherent whole.
Designed for qualitative doctoral researchers working with interviews, fieldnotes, documents, thematic analysis, grounded theory, ethnography, and related approaches.
Inside, you’ll work through seven carefully sequenced sections with practical worksheets to help you:
Understand paradigms and epistemology without getting lost in jargon
Clarify how your concepts connect to your research questions
Articulate your theoretical position with more confidence
Ensure your title reflects what your research is actually doing
If you’ve ever thought:
“I understand this… but not enough to defend it.”
“I’ve done the work, but I’m not sure how it all fits together.”
This guide helps you make your research foundations visible, so you can move forward with clarity, coherence, and confidence.
When the foundations are clear, everything else becomes easier: your literature review, your methodology, and your writing.
This is a digital download. You’ll get immediate access to the full guide and worksheets as soon as you purchase, so you can start making progress straight away.
Swipe through the images to see exactly what’s inside.
For a more streamlined and coherent approach, you can access all four PhD Survival Guides in the full series here.
Got questions? Contact me using this form, I’ll be happy to help.
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