I felt chosen
In my last post, I told you about the GRE instructor who said there was no way I’d get in. I applied to one program anyway, and I got in.
What I didn’t tell you is what that acceptance did to me.
I felt lucky. I felt grateful. I felt chosen. Someone had looked at a mom of two infants with a nontraditional path and said yes. I wasn’t about to waste it.
And somewhere along the way, without ever deciding it, gratitude stopped feeling like a feeling and started feeling like a debt. One I could only pay back by saying yes. To everything.
The yes that kept multiplying
It started small. Can you help with this project? Yes. Can you take on a few more hours in the lab? Of course. Would you be willing to work as a research assistant too? Absolutely. Thank you for asking.
Before long, I was working full-time hours between the lab and my RA position. On top of that, I had a full graduate course load.
And on top of that, I was parenting two infants. One of them had special needs, which meant appointments, therapies, phone calls, and a level of vigilance that never really clocked out.
If you’re doing the math and thinking, “That’s more than one full-time job,” you’re right. It was. But I didn’t see it that way at the time. I saw every request as proof that I belonged, and every yes as a way to keep earning my spot.
Saying no felt dangerous. Like it might remind everyone that maybe I shouldn’t have been chosen in the first place.
Why gratitude turns into a trap
Gratitude itself isn’t the problem. Being thankful for an opportunity is a good thing. The trouble starts when gratitude gets tangled up with power.
In most graduate programs, a small number of people hold a lot of influence over your future. Your advisor and the faculty around you can shape your funding, your research opportunities, your letters of recommendation, and how long it takes you to finish. That isn’t a criticism of any one person. It’s how the system is built.
So when someone with that kind of influence asks you for something, it rarely feels like a real question. It feels like a test.
And this isn’t just my experience. Researchers have been studying it for years. In a survey of more than 2,000 graduate students, those who had a strong, supportive relationship with their mentor had lower rates of anxiety and depression (Evans et al., 2018). A large study of PhD students in Belgium found that the supervisor’s leadership style was one of the workplace factors linked to mental health problems (Levecque et al., 2017). And in a global survey of people working in academic science, most of those who reported being bullied by a supervisor were graduate students or postdocs. Most never reported it, and the most common reason they gave was fear of retaliation (Moss & Mahmoudi, 2021).
Put those findings together and the pattern is clear. When saying no feels risky, most people keep saying yes.
For a lot of neurodivergent people, that pressure lands even harder. Many of us have spent years masking, reading the room, and working twice as hard to be seen as “enough.” Many of us carry a deep fear of disappointing people, especially people we respect. Put that history inside a system with a steep power imbalance, and “no” can start to feel impossible to say.
Here’s the part I wish I’d understood sooner: every yes costs executive function. Every extra task needs planning, time, memory, and follow-through. When you never say no, you aren’t just giving away your time. You’re spending the exact mental resources you need to do your own work, care for your family, and take care of yourself.
How to notice it in your own program
The tricky thing about this dynamic is that it doesn’t announce itself. Nobody says, “You’re not allowed to say no.” It just slowly becomes the water you’re swimming in.
A few signs it might be happening to you:
You say yes before you’ve even checked your calendar.
You feel a jolt of panic when a request comes in, even a small one.
Your own research is always the thing that gets pushed to “later.”
You rehearse how to say no, and then say yes anyway.
You feel guilty resting, because someone else might be working.
You think of your acceptance as something you have to keep re-earning.
If a few of these feel uncomfortably familiar, please be gentle with yourself. Noticing is the first step, and it’s not a character flaw. It’s a very human response to an unequal system.
Finding balance (without burning bridges)
You probably can’t say no to everything in grad school, and you shouldn’t have to say yes to everything either. The goal is to make your yeses on purpose.
1. Decide on your non-negotiables first. Before the semester starts, write down the few things that are not up for trade. Your own research hours. Family time. Sleep. A medical appointment that can’t move. When a request comes in, check it against that list before you answer.
2. Give yourself a “yes budget.” Think of your weekly capacity as a fixed amount, like money in an account. Every new commitment is a withdrawal. If something new comes in, something else has to come out, or the account goes negative. (And a negative account usually shows up as exhaustion, missed deadlines, or getting sick.)
3. Never answer on the spot. A pause is your best friend. You’re allowed to say you need to check your schedule, even if you already know the answer.
4. Use “not yet” and “yes, if” instead of a flat no. These feel much safer when there’s a power imbalance. A few scripts you can borrow:
“I’d love to help. Let me look at my week and get back to you tomorrow.”
“I can take this on if I push back the draft I’m working on. Which would you like me to prioritize?”
“I’m at capacity right now, but I could help after the 15th.”
“I can do part of it. Would it help if I handled the data cleaning, and someone else took the write-up?”
That second script is especially powerful. It doesn’t say no. It simply makes the tradeoff visible, and lets the person with more power help decide what matters most.
If you’re still applying: talk to the students
If I could give applicants one piece of advice, it would be this: talk to current graduate students. Find the students who work with the faculty you’re interested in, or who are in the program you’re applying to. You can do this at interviews, or reach out privately by email. Ask if they’d be willing to share a few honest, off-the-record thoughts. Faculty will tell you what the program offers. Students will tell you what it’s actually like.
These are the questions I wish I had asked:
Advisor and power
How does your advisor respond when a student says no or pushes back?
How are authorship and project ownership decided?
If you had a conflict with your advisor, who would you go to, and would you feel safe doing it?
Have students switched advisors or left the lab? What happened?
Workload
How many hours a week do you really work? Is that expected or self-imposed?
How much of your time goes to your own research versus other projects?
Are you expected to answer emails on nights or weekends?
Flexibility
How does the lab handle caregiving, health issues, or family emergencies?
Has anyone taken leave, and how did that go?
Inclusion and support
Do students feel comfortable disclosing a disability or neurodivergence?
Is it easy to get accommodations in the program itself, not just through the disability office?
Does your advisor adjust how they mentor different students?
Cohort and culture
Does your cohort collaborate or compete?
Who do you turn to when things get hard?
The big one
If you could choose again, would you pick this advisor and this program?
A few tips for asking:
Talk to more than one student, and include former students if you can.
Ask privately, not at a dinner where faculty can hear.
Pay attention to pauses, vague answers, and answers like “It’s fine, as long as you…”
Gratitude and boundaries can live together
I’m still grateful I got in. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is that I no longer believe gratitude means owing someone every hour I have. You can be deeply thankful for an opportunity and protect the time and energy it takes to actually succeed in it. In fact, protecting those things is part of honoring the opportunity.
If you’re in grad school right now and drowning in yeses, I see you. You were chosen for a reason, and that reason wasn’t your willingness to never rest.
Next time, I’ll write about what happens when the work itself gets too big to start: the freeze, the avoidance, and the shame cycle that kept me stuck on my dissertation, and how I finally got moving again.
Have a question about grad school, power dynamics, or executive function? Send it my way. If a few of you ask the same thing, it’ll probably become a post.
Borrow mine while I help you build yours.
If you’re in grad school and want support building systems that protect your time and energy, I offer executive function coaching at surrogatefrontallobe.com. You can also find me on Instagram at @surrogatefrontallobe.
This article is for educational purposes and is not legal advice, therapy, diagnosis, or treatment.
References
Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T., & Vanderford, N. L. (2018). Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. Nature Biotechnology, 36(3), 282–284. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089
Levecque, K., Anseel, F., De Beuckelaer, A., Van der Heyden, J., & Gisle, L. (2017). Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students. Research Policy, 46(4), 868–879. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.02.008
Moss, S. E., & Mahmoudi, M. (2021). STEM the bullying: An empirical investigation of abusive supervision in academic science. EClinicalMedicine, 40, 101121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101121