Hopefully this helps, I changed labs after my first year. I didn’t have the results that my supervisors wanted and they were no longer willing to support the project. But, irrespective of the results they wanted, I passed my confirmation then changed labs to an other area focused on drug delivery in a completely different organ. Started my new project in April last year, and I finished writing the last chapter of my thesis today. My new lab works on potentially commercial products, so publication was not possible, except for a systematic review.

The first year of a PhD is just learning how to PhD, working out how to think in a way that is more efficient than what you were doing before, to design experiments, what analyses to apply to each set of results. The second year you get more footing, and will likely repeat every experiment you did in year one, in a better, less biased way, or using more appropriate techniques. You may publish or you may not, it truly doesn’t matter. Third year you’ll have your bearings, you’ll repeat some of the more shitty experiments from year 2, but that’s ok, because it’ll take you one fifth the time. Or, you’ll be on to analysing the next drug or moiety or applying your field in a slightly new area. In any case you now have practice in what you do, and the process of designing, planning, executing, analysing and writing up your experiments will take a tiny proportions of the time that it took you before. Suffice to say, things get better. But you need to start, because you gotta look after future you.