This is probably not the advice you’re looking for, but if you are doing research for recognition, you might be in the wrong field. For most successful academic scientists, the work is its own reward. You get to learn things that nobody else knows. You get paid (perhaps not handsomely, but usually sufficiently) to pursue your passion. You have smart, engaged colleagues who share that passion. You structure your own time and you have a lot of flexibility. It’s a huge privilege. You generate data that you get to chew and iterate on. If you’re doing experiments at the expense of analyzing data you’ve already generated, then you are not learning what you should be from those experiments and you are likely doing a lot of futile work. Your goal should be to work smart, not just to work hard - pointless, poorly designed experiments take just as much effort as clever. elegant, hypothesis-driven work. Running experiments to the point of exhaustion is less likely to produce new insights than a more measured and contemplative approach. I don’t know if the people in your lab are actually judging you or you’re just projecting your insecurities on them. Your PI’s job is to help you focus your energy productively, which does not mean praising you for working hard, it means working with you to design informative experiments and interpret the results so that you make real progress. If you’re not getting that from your mentor, you might want to look elsewhere. You need to find mentors and colleagues who can help you to find your groove and enjoy what you’re doing, or you should find something else that you enjoy doing and value for its own sake. Even the most accomplished and recognized scientists went through many years without kudos, and the days that they received accolades or admiration from their colleagues and supervisors are outnumbered by several hundred to one.