The nature of a PhD journey, and my practice to disconnect the identity as a PhD

I just had a chat with my colleagues and realised the nature of a PhD indeed cause a lot of stress for us. The fact is, regardless of how you have been acknowledged in other areas of your work, you will still find the PhD journey difficult. You might still be criticised that you are not working hard enough and so on. This happens almost every day, and all of us are very discouraged.

I had a thought that in order to resolve the stress from the research work yet still work it very well, I have to learn to disconnect from my identity as a researcher. I am going to do an experiment about this, and see how it might soothe the stress from work. When a work does not define you or become your identity, you might less likely feel attacked by the criticisms.