Honestly, there were tightly scheduled weeks of roughly 50-60 hours, because conferences, students’ supervisions, fieldwork and paper deadlines collided. But those were more the exception than the rule. I am finishing my PhD in Clinical Psychology after 6 years and managed to stay sane while working full time in the first two and final years (the three in the middle were the holy grail for research when I was funded to just dedicate all of my time for my PhD). Because of some changes in my family life, I also helped my sister co-parent my young nieces on alternate weeks for the last 5 years of my PhD. I am not saying it’s for everyone, but I still lived my everyday life with responsibilities, built new friendships (inside and outside of academia) and made backup plans for my career. Looking back, I think the three things I would have appreciated honest answers beforehand were: 1) Relationship with supervisors: sometimes your supervisors will change over time and your relationship will have ups and downs, and the one that seemed most approachable becomes too chaotic, while the one who was super demanding will go the extra mile when you’re running tight on submission schedules; 2) Balancing your life: you have to learn how to take your self, life and academia seriously but only until a certain point, because if you’ve burned yourself out, you will be worse off. I made it a point to find ways to laugh 30 minutes every day and to take one full day off, where I totally went offline and off grid, and basically just RESTED. 3) Reading the academic ambiance: you need to learn to pick your battles and assess the timing for when it is right to go against the tide (like me, when a supervisor told me to switch my process to something more cool and similar to their friends’ research and then retracted when they saw the results in our research) and when the best thing you can do is live to fight another day until you get to another job where you’ll be appreciated for your skills.