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The pressure to succeed presents a significant challenge to well-being, health, and key connections.

Being an absent parent or allowing work stress to spill into home life puts family relationships at risk.

Rationalizing missing out on important moments does not change reality, but prioritizing family can.

Achieving work-life balance requires refocusing our attention on what matters most at home.

In the film Jay Kelly, George Clooney portrays a superstar celebrity whose climb to the top has frayed connections with the people most important to him—his agent-best friend and his daughters.

Clooney, starring as the main character Jay Kelly, dramatizes the devastating havoc that devotion to work and career plays on friendship and family dynamics. The movie centers on a tribute to Kelly’s onscreen achievements and underscores how your job and the stress it creates can isolate you from family and loyal friends.

In the real world, Dr. Guy Winch, author of “Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life,” explains why this happens. “Our unconscious mind believes that work is our top priority; it will consider any risk of losing a job to be an existential threat,” Winch writes. That is why we’re often preoccupied with work when we’re home, inadvertently bringing the stress of work into what should be a place of peace and restoration.

In his book, Winch details the many ways work creates stress in our personal lives and offers science-based tools to reverse the damage. His insights can help you identify work overload before it harms your health or fractures your family.

Here are a few common concerns to look for that upset a healthy work-life balance.

Work demands are so excessive that they conflict with duties at home. You feel forced to choose one over the other.

Work tanks your mood. “The worse our mood is when we get home, the more likely we are to overreact to our loved ones,” Winch explains.

You find yourself putting your work ahead of your family. Over time, your children and partner “will feel that you’re prioritizing work over them.”

Fortunately, there are things we can do to restore a work-life balance:

Be present and focus your attention on your family. Showing up and being focused feeds closeness and helps prevent your children or partner from resenting your work life. Plan to spend more time with your family.

Be empathetic toward your partner and children. Winch suggests we think about what our partner and children might have gone through that day, rather than ruminating on our own bad day on the job or the injustices we feel about it.

Take time together to recuperate from the rigors of work. Use evenings and weekends to recover from job stress by planning time with family or friends without being distracted by work details or problems.

Make specific arrangements that work for everyone in the family and be conscientious about following through.

Submergence in our jobs—be it chasing fame, trying to get ahead, or just making “ends meet”—makes it tempting to take shortcuts with family members and our closest friends. Did you read one less story at bedtime recently so you could get back to a pressing work project? Do you regularly miss your children’s soccer matches, play performances, or other events important to them?

Take our Family Estrangement Test for the Adult Child

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When we overly prioritize work, it’s easy for adults to rationalize absences or not being present in the moment, but our children do not. They are aware of and deeply feel your stress, absorb your mood, and note when you pretend to be engaged with them. In short, long hours devoted to work and tensions brought home can create a barrier or cause a permanent break in the parent-child bond. The same is true with your partner. Put another way, those in your close personal circle will only tolerate being ignored and feeling left out for so long.

Jay Kelly pinpoints what happens when we allow our work life to seep into our home life or engulf us to the point of ignoring those closest and most important to us. The film highlights how mothers’ and fathers’ drive for success can threaten relationships—and, at worst, destroy them altogether.

At the end of the film, Jay Kelly is honored and awarded for his long, outstanding career. He realizes with regret (spoiler alert) that he sacrificed his relationship with his daughters and severed his bond with his most important friend. He was alone and filled with remorse for the loss of his crucial connections; he paid too high a price for stardom. He asks, “Can we go again?” We all know the answer.

Copyright @2026 by Susan Newman

Winch, Guy. (2026). Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

© Psychology Today