Is Your Job Hijacking Your Life?

Burnout has become a defining complaint of modern life. Once considered an occupational hazard, it now touches everyone—parents, caregivers, students, clinicians, and anyone struggling to sustain motivation and find meaning under chronic stress. While the term is often used casually to describe ordinary fatigue, true burnout reaches deeper, affecting emotional resilience, cognitive functioning, relationships, and even our overarching sense of purpose. Yet in a culture that prizes productivity, many people don’t recognize it in themselves until they’ve become detached from work, chronically exhausted, and unable to recover through rest alone.

Enter Guy Winch: a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, TED speaker, and co-host of the Ambie-nominated Dear Therapists podcast alongside Lori Gottlieb—he knows this problem firsthand. By his own admission, he’s a recovering workaholic who once needed 12 epidural injections in his spine from years of hunching over a desk. In his latest book, Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life, he argues that contrary to popular opinion, burnout isn’t something you can solve by “taking a vacation.” It’s about learning to manage ourselves more intentionally when we’re under pressure.

Ryan Howes: How is it that even when we choose a career we love, we still suffer burnout?

Guy Winch: If you love your job, you may be even more susceptible to burnout. When you have your eyes firmly fixed on a target, you take your eye off what happens in other areas of your life.

This happens when your job hijacks your thoughts when you’re home, when you ruminate about work while you should be doing other things. The more pressured and stressful your day, the more likely you are to ruminate about it at home.

In fact, many people have fantasy conversations with their boss that they’ll never actually initiate. They rehearse mic-drop moments that never occur. It’s maladaptive. People think, Oh, I’m just thinking things through, but they’re not reaching any conclusions, solving any problems, or coming up with any action items. They’re just ruminating, and that’s damaging.

Research tells us that when one partner is pressured and stressed at work, the other partner might also start to develop symptoms of burnout because it affects the home, often in unconscious ways. We’re tribal people. When you spend your whole day with your work tribe, switching those allegiances when you come home takes a minute.

For a lot of people, work is a modern battlefield. When we’re in work mode, we’re in battle mode. We get activated. We need to keep our jobs and the stakes are high. It puts you into fight or flight. There are tense meetings all day. You need outcomes to happen. It’s one call after another. You can’t emerge from the battlefield into someone’s embrace. It takes a while to unwind and come down from that intensity. The hug from your spouse or your kid feels like an intrusion because that’s not where you’re at.

Another way work hijacks us is in how we handle leisure time. Our brain can’t tell the difference between mental and physical exhaustion. Most of us sat at our desks all day. We get home feeling drained. And then we veg out on the sofa for four hours. But research shows that if this is how you rest, you’re likely to wake up tired the next day because even though you didn’t drain your batteries further, you also didn’t recharge them. To recharge and get a second wind, you need to do something that recharges you. Passively doom-scrolling or binge watching a show isn’t going to reinvigorate you.

And our coping mechanisms get hijacked, because when we have a lot to do, most of us put our heads down and just try to get through the day. We move from one task to the next, allowing our unconscious mind to take charge. When we do that, we end up choosing ways of coping that bring a moment of relief but aren’t all that helpful, like surfing social media or postponing tasks. And when procrastination and avoidance kick in, the pressure mounts, your ability to regulate yourself emotionally gets upturned, and you’re less likely to calm yourself before a difficult meeting. Then, when you enter the meeting room, you’re charged up and say the wrong thing.

RH: My clients often say, “It’s my job, not me. My employer is expecting too much of me. Why should I be the one to change?”

Winch: Of course, overworking is often expected in many companies and industries. And it’s dangerous. The World Health Organization says that 750,000 people a year die from overworking. In Japan, it has a name—death by karoshi—or death by overworking. In China you see headlines now all the time: “Thirty-year-old executive died from overworking.” It increases your risk of stroke and heart attack.

But we need to begin by managing ourselves, because we tend to make the grind worse when we could actually be making it easier. My approach is to focus more on self-care. Can you monitor your own self-care and make sure that certain essentials remain in place? Can you limit how long you overwork? Many people feel they need to overwork until they receive the promotion, or until the next round of funding. But when will the promotion happen? When will the funding come?

There was a period in my life when I needed epidural shots in my spine because I was hunched over and overworking for so long that I damaged it. And it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, got scurvy working on his previous startup. Scurvy! Because he was that malnourished, that single-mindedly focused. People overwork to the point where they become diabetic, lose toes and limbs, because they’ve put off caring for themselves in basic, essential ways. They’re so busy they stop going to the doctor.

If you can monitor self-care, you can work in a way that addresses your basic, essential needs—physical and psychological—and then you can make an intentional choice, and maybe that choice is to overwork for a short period of time. But that period needs to ease up, or your body will break down.

RH: So sometimes, it’s about harm reduction?

Winch: Exactly.

I work with people at the top of their fields, and some of the questions I ask when we start are, “When’s the last time you had a checkup? When’s the last time you saw a gynecologist? When’s the last time you saw a dentist?” That’s the first thing people begin to postpone, caring for their health.

Another way we neglect ourselves is by no longer pursuing our passions, interests, and hobbies. And we neglect relationships with partners, kids, and friends that used to allow us to express parts of our personalities that we don’t get to express at work—our goofy, creative, funny sides. Who we are gets diminished. We become narrower and unhappier. Our quality of life and our ability to recharge are both compromised.

RH: How do you help people develop a healthier mindset so they can return to the basics?

Winch: When I ask people, “How often is your job stressful?” they’ll say, “Ninety to 100 percent of the time.” They’ll say “I hate my job,” “I hate my boss,” “I hate my team,” or “I can’t stand the company I work for.” The problem with those formulations is they’re overgeneralized and create an unnecessary amount of extra stress because when you believe those things, they set you up to go into work every day on high alert, anticipating the worst. That brings a ton of unnecessary stress into your day.

There’s an exercise I have in my book called “Identifying Your Stress Mines,” which helps people figure out what percentage of their job is actually intensely stressful. It’s usually 10 or 20 percent. If it’s unusually highly stressful, it can go up to 40 percent. But the reality is, not every meeting or interaction with your boss is stressful. Some are just boring.

If you’re assessing accurately, you might say to yourself, “I don’t love my boss, but I don’t interact with them most of the time,” or “My team can be a real pain, but not all the time,” or “I have four really difficult meetings today, but three of them are likely going to be fine, and after that, I can take lunch.” Assessing work situations more accurately reduces stress.

Then, at lunch, you can sit in the park and have a favorite treat. You can allow yourself to exhale. That alone can take a lot of stress out of your day. From that more centered place, you can problem solve and use coping mechanisms for truly difficult moments. You can take a walk around the block and reset so you don’t carry all that tension into the next meeting. There are ways you can be smarter and more intentional in how you manage your workday and reduce the stress you feel daily.

And when you come home, it helps to develop a ritual to transition from a work mindset to a home mindset. Rituals that draw on the senses can help you unwind from the day. You can use aromatherapy, cuddle the dog, do things that help you downregulate so you can shed as much of that battlefield mindset as you can at the door. You can listen to a certain kind of music that lightens your mood, or change clothes to make you feel at ease and comfortable.

RH: Like Mr. Rogers changing into a cardigan when he comes home.

Winch: Sure, if that works for you!