I took 5 my senior year, which probably ends up worse than doing it junior year. Instead of a bunch of SAT and ACT studying, I had to pile a bunch of college application essays on top of my hours of work (meanwhile senioritis was hitting hard). So, keep that in mind for scheduling next year. Study rigorously for your SATs/ACTs now in the summer, so there's less pressure throughout the school year and you can just brush up to maintain what you know later. Take them several times (each, if you're into that), and at least once before senior year. Also maybe look into SAT subject tests if you haven't already (not that I'm trying to stick you with even more tests). The rest of this will be experience from my senior year, because that was when I had my 5 APs. As far as maintaining your sanity: I did an absolute terrible job of this, and I fell into a couple rabbit holes of doubting myself, my abilities, my future, everything. I'm an anxious person myself. For one, get enough sleep. Can't stress it enough. "Enough" will not be enough per se; a good night's sleep by the end of my year (and bare minimum what you should aim for, if you can't manage more) was ~4.5-5 hours. I averaged 3, and sometimes got less. Not worth it. I also tended to want to procrastinate with things, because I was sitting around worrying about them the whole time. Don't fall into doing that, and you'll probably have a decent amount more of time on your hands. But lack of sleep really stresses you, and takes a toll on both physical and mental health. Number one absolute thing should be getting enough sleep. I think the hardest, but best thing for me to learn was prioritizing. I had always been the one to make sure my work was perfect, 100% effort into every assignment, and that had been easier to do until my senior year. But it just wasn't working. You need to figure out how much effort you need to put in to keep the good grade, and cut things where you must. Shift the scale of efficiency versus quality a little closer to efficiency. Miss an assignment or two if you must, but be aware of how it affects your grade. Learn how your teacher grades/what they don't even collect/what they just check off instead of reading, and take hardcore advantage of that. Just make sure if you're cutting out notes, you know damn well what you're doing already and can pick up everything you need in class. For example, AP Bio, my teacher would assign notes to take the night before we reviewed them in class, then didn't collect them (she started to midyear because she got sick of people not being familiar with topics as we reviewed, though), so I would rarely do them, or do bare bones minimum. I just made sure I had a general knowledge and sense of the material, maybe read the text and jot some quick notes instead of wasting all of my time writing every little thing. I was then able to pick up what I missed by what was discussed in class, but I still made sure to know enough to be able to contribute actively to that discussion. Doing this, I managed to stay on my teacher's good side and consequentially catch a break here and there, and still got a 5 on my exam in May. But you need to be well aware of your abilities to do things like that- I write very fast, so I could catch notes in class, and I have a natural inclination towards science, so I could skimp here and there and still have a good understanding. A class like Calc, I couldn't do this to save my life. Figure out your abilities, what you know, and basically how to play the system to your advantage as best you can. Also know when enough is enough, and that you might not be able to do everything as well as you want. Be easy on yourself. You'll already be stressed from lack of sleep and your responsibilities, don't be even harder on yourself if you don't do as well as you would've expected of yourself. Don't hate yourself because you got a B instead of an A. Take things in stride and learn to accept things. Be your own friend, as cheesy as it sounds, and also stay in touch with your friends and loved ones throughout the year. I took things to the absolute ridiculous, unhealthy extreme (if you couldn't tell by this point in the post anyway) and kind of started to isolate myself, from family at least, because I didn't think I had the time when I was home to goof off and joke around, or else I'd be losing sleep later to catch up on my work. Don't do that. Keep your friends and family in your life too, and realize the good that a support group like that can do for you, and don't be afraid to ask for help from them if you're ever struggling. Also do everything in your power to maintain your hobbies. You'll likely have to cut down how much time you invest in them, but keep them around. Find ways to relieve stress; that'll be incredibly important to maintaining your health. There's a lot of scattered rambling in this post, hopefully some of it makes sense. Take from it what you will, but anyway, I sincerely wish you good luck. This post (or at least the thoughts and personal experiences that inspired it) are kind of bleak, but hopefully it won't actually be that bad. I think it'll help to keep in mind that I was not in the greatest of places going into the start of the year and my classes, so that made things harder for me and had a bit of an impact on how my year was. It probably won't be that bad. Regardless of if it is or it isn't, I wish you the best.