3 Hidden Ways Work Stress Invades Your Life Outside of Work—and How to Fix the Damage
Break the cycle of burnout and start thriving at work and in life
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Guy Winch Ph.D., an internationally renowned psychologist who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. I (Ethan) first met Guy at TED in Vancouver in 2024, he was so welcoming to me, I could feel his caring nature right away.
His science based self-help books have been translated into 30 languages and his 3 viral TED Talks have garnered over 35 million views. He advises start-ups in the mental health space, has worked with the US and UK governments, and has created emotional health programs for Fortune 500 companies. His work has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ, The Boston Globe, CNN, TIME, Psychology Today, and other major outlets. He lives and maintains a private practice in Manhattan.
In this article, Guy reveals how work invades your thoughts, hijacks your leisure time, and harms your relationships — then offers clear, tactical fixes you can apply immediately.
A must-read for anyone ready to reclaim their life and boost their productivity.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
The pandemic shutdowns had an unexpected effect on workplace culture: emotional health finally became a priority.
By April 2020, I was giving as many as ten virtual talks a week to companies on managing stress and uncertainty, navigating the challenges of working from home, and maintaining emotionally healthy teams. Mental health resources mushroomed on companies’ HR and EAP portals, employees’ focus on work–life balance skyrocketed, and emotional wellbeing at work finally earned a seat at the (conference) table.
And yet, something wasn’t adding up.
Surveys soon began to show that despite these efforts—on the part of both employers and employees—workers’ emotional health was getting worse, not better. Forty three percent of workers reported high levels of work stress, and 67 percent reported symptoms of burnout—an all-time high.
Disturbingly, those numbers remain near peak levels today.
My work as a psychologist over the past decade has given me a unique vantage point on this disconnect. My work with companies and leaders offers a window into the relentless pressures of the modern workplace, while my private practice allows me to see how those pressures spill into people’s lives—into their evenings, weekends, relationships, and sense of self.
What I came to realize is this: work stress no longer stays at work. It spills over into our lives outside of the office in hidden and often unrecognized ways. That’s why so many efforts to reduce stress and burnout have fallen short. The problem isn’t confined to the workplace. We bring it home with us—and once it’s there, the damage compounds, and the more our general emotional wellbeing suffers both at work and at home.
The good news is that once we understand how work invades our lives outside the office or the laptop, we can take concrete steps to reverse the damage. Doing so can dramatically improve not only our emotional well-being and quality of life, but also our productivity, engagement, and satisfaction on the job.
Following this playbook has helped my clients make remarkable changes and significantly improve their lives both in and out of the workplace. Their successes encouraged me to share my approach in a new book that covers the many hidden ways that work can hijack our lives. In this article, I focus on three of the big ones and how you can fix the damage and take back control.
How Work Invades Your Thoughts
Stressful and pressured days at work—conflicts with coworkers or bosses, uncertainty, job insecurity—make it extremely difficult to switch off after hours because we’re likely to keep replaying the upsetting, annoying, insulting, unfair, or frustrating events of the day in our head. We replay how a colleague threw us under the bus in a meeting, or how our boss chewed us out in front of the entire team, and we imagine entire confrontations with them that we will never actually have. Ruminating in such ways activates our stress response. It keeps us in fight or flight mode and floods our system with cortisol. And since ruminations are intrusive thoughts and feel very compelling, we tend to indulge them.
Upsetting events at work can keep us ruminating for hours—unpaid overtime in which we accomplish nothing except extending our workday well into the evening. Our friends and family can tell that we’re checked-out and present only in body, not in mind, so it’s not fun for them either. Keep in mind that both physiologically and psychologically, your workday doesn’t end when you stop working. It only ends when you stop thinking about work. And if you ruminate, your workday may not end until you fall asleep.
How to fix it:
You can’t simply tell yourself to “stop thinking about it,” because ruminations are involuntary. Instead, you need to convert ruminative thoughts into problem solving ones, questions that you can answer and resolve. Rumination keeps stress alive; problem solving reduces it.
Turn the ruminative thought into a problem that can be solved or a question that needs to be answered by action.
In the above examples you might want to write down the following kinds of questions and then answer them:
Do I need to have a conversation with this coworker?
If so, what’s the outcome I’m after and what’s the best way to attain it?
If not, what do I need to do to protect myself from that happening again?
Or, what can I do differently to reduce the chances of being publicly criticized again by the boss?
Do I need to repair my relationship with the boss and, if so, how can I go about it?
Turning vague mental replay into concrete action steps gives your brain closure.
Once your mind feels that something useful has been decided, the urge to ruminate weakens, and you can be more present in whatever you’re doing.
Which brings us to the next issue.
How Work Hijacks Your Leisure Time
Many of us end the workday feeling exhausted, drained, or wiped out. All we want to do is relax—binge a show, scroll aimlessly, or collapse on the couch. And while there’s nothing wrong with relaxing, it’s only half of what we need to recover from work.
Relaxation prevents further depletion, but it doesn’t actually recharge us.
What does recharge us are activities that we find personally revitalizing–ones that require effort and that cannot happen on a couch. The reason we’re so compelled to ‘slouch and screen’ to begin with is that our brains don’t distinguish well between mental fatigue and physical fatigue.
After a workday, we’re usually mentally exhausted, not physically drained (most of us have been sitting all day).
How to fix it:
Spending just 15–30 minutes on an active, recharging activity can make a disproportionate difference: exercising if you’re athletic, socializing if you’re an extrovert, creating if you’re a maker, engaging your creativity, working on a passion project, learning something new, or pursuing a personal interest. You don’t have to do the activity for the entire evening—you just have to give oxygen to those aspects of your personality and identity that help you thrive.
I’m into working out, so a 30-minute run does wonders for me. Yes, I have to force myself to do it sometimes. One trick I use is to make a deal with myself that I only have to change into running clothes and shoes (or physically go to the gym and change).
Once I have the clothes on, I give myself the option to opt out. But by the time I’ve changed or gotten to the gym, the threshold for action is so much smaller (step outside or walk down to the weight room) that I end up working out 9 times out of 10. If you’re a painter, set up the canvas and the paints and decide then. If you’re a writer, open the file and go to the page you’re on and place the cursor. If you’re into woodwork or repairing old cars, put on the clothes you would use, go to the garage, and take out the tools.
Also, remind yourself of how glad you will feel afterwards–these activities have a magical ROI. They take energy to do, but you often feel more energized afterward than before you started. Pairing relaxation with recharging allows your nervous system to truly reset. You will wake up the next morning feeling much more restored. Unless you encounter the third hiccup that work inflicts on our home life…
How Work Stress Harms Your Relationships
You might have noticed that difficult days at work are often followed by tense evenings at home. This usually happens without intention or awareness but with significant consequences for those around us.
Studies have found that when one partner experiences high levels of work stress, the other partner can develop symptoms of burnout as well.
Stress is contagious.
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