 Here are some self-care tips for PhD students. In academia, it's common that we work long hours. We push ourselves over the weekend and we answer emails in crazy hours of the night, all the while reading papers. But it has been proven that your focus and efficiency and accuracy of your work drops when you overwork yourself, so please set a weekly limit and a daily limit to your working hours and try to stick to it. Overworking yourself is not going to make your work better. It'll just make you feel like you're achieving less and putting in more time. As a PhD student, it's also really important to connect with your surroundings. Oftentimes, you've moved to a new country, maybe a new continent, and you don't know that many people. Many PhD students tend to find themselves making friends within their research group or research institution, not really exploring the outside world all that much. Yes, it's convenient, but very soon you'll see that your worldview is slowly shrinking and your opportunities to make friends tend to drop with time as well too. The easiest thing you can do when you go to a new city is look at social connection websites such as Facebook events or meetup.com and find people with interests similar to yours. Perhaps there's a language learning group meeting around for coffee once a week, maybe a movie going group. Perhaps you'd like to learn how to knit. Find some social activities that take you away from your work and give you a way to relax and leave all that PhD-related stress at the office where it belongs. A cool trick that I learned through a PhD process was called the Three Things. It's a really simple process where every evening, once you're done with work, you write down for yourself in a special file or notebook three things that you have accomplished in that day. And three things that you plan on doing the next day. It's really important to be realistic with these goals, so don't overdo it. The idea is that you always manage to accomplish about 70% of the goals that you set. One of the ways people use to set good goals is called the SMART system, S-M-A-R-T smart goals. That stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. So make sure that every goal that you set is clearly defined and that it comes at the right time and that you can achieve it. Don't over-stretch yourself, you'll just get disappointed and then the whole process is going to be much more pain. Take away about five minutes each week to update your CV. Academic CVs tend to be really long and you participate in so many seminars and lectures and give talks and go to conferences. But when it comes the time to apply for a talk or perhaps some funding, you getting together, your CV is going to take days. So take five minutes each week, Friday afternoon, and update your CV. It won't take you long, but you'll be very, very happy you have it when the time comes when you need it. But most importantly, it's normal to struggle. Most people struggle, most people struggle most days of their PhD. But make sure to take care of yourself because at the end of this PhD process, it's still going to be you and not your academic position that matters most.