I couldn't find any recent posts on this topic so it's a good chance for me to vent something that is bugging me. Thanks in advance for reading.

I was wondering how much time people spend with friends and family during their PhD study years?

Not only do I suffer from the common 'time off from PhD guilt' but also from the 'not seeing friends and family enough guilt'. Often I'll work Monday to Saturday on my PhD projects and then honestly the last thing I feel like doing on my one day off is spending time with friends and family who struggle to understand the whole PhD thing.

I live with my boyfriend and we get a couple of hours each evening together which is nice and keeps me sane. However as I've reached my final funded year I've found myself working longer hours and becoming increasingly apologetic with my boyfriend for not being able to spend quite as much time with him.

I haven't got a close family anyway and few close friends but typically my contact with others is something like this:

Mum - 30 minute phone conversation every couple of weeks
Brothers - Text/Facebook/Phone call a couple of times a month
Grandparents - 2 to 3 visits per year
Best friend - meet up for lunch/sports once a month
Friend A - An hour sports session once every 2 weeks
Friend B - 50 mile trip to see them twice a year.
Everyone else - occasional facebook messages and "oh we must meet up soon!" type conversations

Day to day I have little contact with friends and family besides my boyfriend. I get on with the other PhD students in my building really really well but all of our relationships feel very superficial and I don't know how to change that or if I should. I'm an introverted but confident and approachable person and I 'know' lots of people.

I tend to feel equally lonely and equally wanting to be left alone. Does anyone else get this?

Thanks

GM x

I'm quite lucky in the sense that I have a wife and kids who I can come home to at the end of the day, which has helped keep me sane throughout my part-time PhD. That said, I also work full-time and have to squeeze my work in whenever I can (as well as all the other employability tasks, such as teaching and trying to get papers published). I don't really have any friends among my fellow PhD students, in part because I'm much older than they are, and I hate the job I work in to pay for my PhD -- in consequence, I don't have any work friends. So yes, like you I feel lonely and isolated most of the time. A mitigating factor is that we live in an internet age, so it's easier than at any other point in human history to share these experiences. Loneliness and isolation are, I think, inevitable -- doing a PhD is inherently isolating, but it's also a temporary state of affairs; things will change.

Thanks very much for this. I think I'd save myself a little stress if I just accepted that doing a PhD is isolating. I read somewhere that before you start a PhD you should apologise in advance to friends and family for not seeing much of them!

I've cherished the alone time and space up until now when I'm currently working 12 hour days, money is running out and so is time. I'm probably in need of a couple of days off and a bit of perspective.

Hi GM, indeed the PhD can be a very isolating experience. Some people manage to treat it as a 9 to 5 job and so they can fit a lot more in their day. It wasn't possible to me, tasks had to be completed when resources where available etc. That meant working at weekends or during holidays, but I learned to be very organized. I think that I also learned to put energy and resources on what was important (for me) and spend time with people I really wanted to be with. I think that it is about finding a balance that works for you.