Passion Struck with John R. Miles
What to Do When Work Hijacks Your Life | Dr. Guy Winch - EP 767
14 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up next on Passion Struck.
Moods are extremely contagious as when somebody comes home irritable or preoccupied or anxious or worried or tense, it radiates to the, it creates that vibe in the home.
Chapter 2: What are the hidden emotional signs of burnout?
And so there are all these ways in which we really bring work home, not to mention that So many people are dealing with after-hour emails that they have to check in all the time. So they're not even, they're still really at work. They're still dealing with it. They're still in that mindset.
They don't even get the evenings or the weekends to fully detach and to be somewhere else mentally, physically. And for all of those reasons, we absolutely bring it home. And then it really infects them.
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming.
Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Welcome back, friends, to Passion Struck episode 767.
Whether this is your first episode or your hundredth, thank you for being part of this global community committed to living intentionally, leading with purpose, and creating a world where every person feels like they matter. We're continuing our May series, Forged in Adversity. how struggle shapes meaning, resilience, and transformation.
And this week, we're focused on one of the hardest parts of adversity, recovery. Not just surviving difficult experiences, but healing from the invisible toll that they leave behind. On Tuesday, Dr. Paul Conti and I explored how adversity can quietly shape our inner world, our emotional patterns, our sense of self, and the stories we carry about who we are.
And honestly, today's conversation feels like a continuation of that idea in a way that I think so many people are living through right now. Because adversity doesn't always arrive through a single traumatic moment.
Sometimes it happens through accumulation, the constant pressure, the endless demands, the inability to disconnect, the feeling that no matter how much you accomplish, you can never fully recover. I know for me, there were periods in my corporate career where externally everything looked successful, but internally I felt exhausted. detached, and disconnected from myself.
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Chapter 3: How does chronic work stress impact relationships and mental health?
Before we dive in, one quick note. If this show has ever made a difference in your life, please share it with someone who might need it. Leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and follow along on YouTube for our full episodes and passion-struck shorts. All of it helps us reach more people who aren't just searching for answers, but for a better way to live.
Now, let's dive into my conversation with Dr. Guy Winch. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Guy Winch to PassionStruck. Guy, it's very nice to meet you. And it's a thrill to meet you and thank you for having me.
I am honored to have you and I met you through a good friend of mine, Nir Bishan. How did you originally meet Nir?
I have an identical twin brother who's also a psychologist. and also had a book out and he met Nir through his work with the company that he founded and put me in touch with Nir, who put me in touch with you.
I'm not sure if Nir had told you, but he and I have started a speakers bureau together. I'm talking to him quite frequently these days. Yes, he did. So your new book is titled Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. And I think a lot of us these days feel like work is hijacking our life. It feels like lots of things are hijacking our life.
Yeah.
What got you to come up with that title, Mind Over Grind?
Mind Over Grind is the solution. In other words, part of why we get hijacked by work is that we are on autopilot all the time. The workplace today is a very high pressure environment. So we're on autopilot. We just kind of put our head down and just get through the day. We all wake up, we just get through the week kind of mentality.
And when you do that, you're grinding and you're not thinking well about how you can reduce the grind and be more sophisticated in how you manage yourself. And so mind of a grind refers to the idea of if we use our mind correctly, then we can manage the grind. And how to break free when work hijacks your life is this phenomenon of all these different ways.
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between exhaustion and emotional numbness?
And then there's being exhausted as if you're burned out, exhausted. And sensation that bothered me the most was I just felt numb. And I remember I went to a psychologist trying to figure out what was wrong with me and He gave me this analogy that I still use to this day. And that is he had me picture myself as if I was sitting on a stool in my kitchen.
And he said, John, what are the different pillars that are holding that stool up? And as I was going through the analogy, I realized that the constant grind was the one pillar that was more prominent than any of the others. It was almost as if I was on a stool that had one pillar because all the others were slowly erasing. And it really helped me because
What was happening to me is that relationship pillar was dissolving, the emotional pillar, emotional health pillar was dissolving, the physical health pillar was dissolving. And is that kind of how you felt as well?
Yeah, I absolutely felt as yours were dissolving, mine were barely existent. In other words, I had been so dedicated to my work and to setting myself up to do the things. that I had neglected vast areas of my life. And you're right about the numbness because the numbness doesn't stay contained to the workplace. It generalizes.
You get numb psychologically, but we numb as a defense mechanism, as a coping mechanism. We don't numb selectively. We numb period. So get numb to everything. Nothing seems important. You're just tired. You just want to be left alone. It's not the kind of tired that a good night's sleep or a good weekend away is going to address. It's not. Something... much more dramatic needs to shift.
There needs to be changes that happen. And why I wrote this book now, this happened so many decades ago, but burnout and work stress are peaking in the workplace over these past four or five years. They're at peak levels, at all-time highs. So it's something that's becoming much worse in the current workplace with no real signs of it letting up.
That's happening, A, because of the culture of the workplace, but B, because of our mismanagement of
of that culture a mismanagement of ourselves the way we are dealing with it is not adaptive it's not healthy and we're not aware that we're dealing in unhealthy ways and that's the message i tried to bring oh no these are the ways that you're doing things which might seem normative to you but they're actually quite bad
Yeah. One of the things I found as I was going through this and I talk a lot about the topic of mattering was not only did I feel exhausted and numb, I felt completely insignificant. And it happened at a point in my career where on paper, man, I was flying high. I finally had gotten this Fortune 50, $80 billion company, C executive, C-suite role that I had always wanted.
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Chapter 5: Why is rumination a barrier to stress recovery?
I should have known, oh, that's not good. That's not something you should be proud of, that you don't actually take time over the weekend, that you don't rest, that you're going at it so hard. It should not be a point of pride. Certainly for a psychologist who knows better. And she looked at me and she gave me this look and I was like, okay. And then after the burnout, I realized, wow.
And I remember when I dropped to six days a week first. Let's not go crazy. Let's not have whole weekends. And so I did that minor adjustment. But it felt to me like I am slacking off. It felt to me like I'm being irresponsible by taking a full day off to live my life because you get so used to it that then you feel guilt about actually doing the life part of the work-life balance.
Before we continue, I want to thank all of you who continue to support PassionStruck and share these conversations with others. One of the biggest themes in today's episode isn't that burnout doesn't happen all at once. It happens gradually, through stress, disconnection, and living on autopilot for too long.
That's exactly why I created a companion workbook for this episode with Dr. Guy Winch, along with weekly reflections and tools. through the Ignited Life newsletter on Substack. You can download the workbook and explore more at theignitedlife.net. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.
You're listening to PassionStruck right here on the PassionStruck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Dr. Guy Winch. I completely relate with you. I'm in the final stages of finishing my second nonfiction book called The Mattering Effect. And as you, when you write these things, you typically write them far in advance before they even go to the editor.
And I remember last year, I was writing this thing on the weekend because that's when I had time to do a lot of the work. And then this year, as it's gone through developmental editing and then copy editing, I've fallen into the same thing. So I've been working all these weekends. And this past week, I turned the manuscript in for the last time and
About a week later, I got to go to Colorado for a few days and it was a Thursday. And I just said, I'm giving myself the day off. And I went to this thing called Colorado National Monument. It's a national park. It's like a slightly smaller version of going to the Grand Canyon. And I just felt this complete. release that, man, I have needed for so long.
One, to just stare at the beauty and be in awe for a moment, but two, to just get away from it, because I think you don't realize sometimes how much you're in it when you're in it. And this brings me to one of the surprising things I learned reading your book. And that is even people who love their work are just as vulnerable to this as people who don't.
So why doesn't passion protect us given we're on the Passion Struck podcast?
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Chapter 6: What practical strategies can help with burnout recovery?
It makes us move forward, but it takes our eye off our lives. It makes us pay less attention to what we're all doing it all for in the first place. It makes us pay less attention to our personal lives, to our relationships, to our family lives, to our health, to our mental health, to our friendships, to all these sources of who we are.
It makes us turn away from the things that make us feel like us. hobbies and our passions and certain amount of our friends all get pushed to the side because there's no time for them. And we think temporarily, but it ends up being not temporarily. It ends up taking too long. So yeah, when you're very passionate about what you do, you're more at risk, in fact.
I would agree with that. And the issue is you don't have to be gone from your friends for very long before you stop getting the invites and the connection and the phone calls and everything else disappear.
Right. And you don't need to be checked out from your family life before your kids stop telling you what's going on because you're not available to them. And your passion in your relationship can dry up as well because you're so preoccupied. It's just, you're not connecting. You're just becoming very transactional in your communications with your partner.
It's just about who needs to do what thing is, but it's not, you don't have time to sit and talk about hopes and dreams and feelings and this. That emotional drifting can begin. There are all these consequences.
Guy, in my first book, Passion Struck, I have a chapter called The Conscious Engager. And I go into depth here about the difference between living unintentionally and living intentionally. And I used the analogy of living the unintentional life as being the pinball in the game of pinball. And I used being intentional is learning how to play the game again.
So you're controlling the ball instead of being bounced off of it. And you use a similar analogy. In the book, describing stress as a pinball bouncing off every area of our life. Why does stress spread so easily from work into everything else?
Number one, because when we are at work, a modern workplace for many people is the equivalent of the modern day battlefield. Because you have to get in there, your livelihood, your reputation, your ability to provide all your needs and your family's needs depend on your job. So the stakes are quite high. So it's not a mild thing.
You're like, and there are cuts everywhere and there are threats from AI taking jobs. And they're the internal politics of this one trying to step on your turf and this one trying to stab you in the back. And you have to prove yourself and you're in competition with all these other people and all these pressures really significant. So we are activated a lot of the times when we're at work.
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Chapter 7: How can one intentionally recover from work stress?
But one month later, you can walk through like people screaming and then doesn't touch you because you're used to it. So our stress tolerance is quite adaptable and it's quite elastic. And so we can adapt to certain situations and the ones we are more familiar with, we adapt well to, and we can get deal with stress and then come down from it quickly. And the ones
that we don't, we're going to have a much poorer response to.
So another character in the book is a woman named Sally. And Sally's parents died, unfortunately, within a very short period, one from it appeared to be causes from being in the military and the other one from cancer. But you use her to talk about rumination. Can you expand upon that?
Yes, to ruminate means to chew over. That's the literal meaning of the word. It comes from how cows digest food. They chew things over. They swallow. They regurgitate, chew. That's how they extract nutrition. When we ruminate, we brood, dwell. So ruminate is the psychological term for that. We tend to do it about distressing, upsetting things.
And we tend to do it in a way that's extremely unproductive. So if you had an altercation with somebody, a big argument with a co-worker in the office, because they literally... they were trying to stab you in the back or they were trying to do something underhanded and you get home, you're going to brood about that. You are going to ruminate about that. It's going to be really upsetting to you.
Your boss shoots you down in a meeting. It was embarrassing. You feel humiliated. You're going to get home. You're going to, and the way we churn, the way we do that rumination is extremely unhealthy because what makes it unhealthy is we just go over the upsetting part. We just relive it. We think it, we imagine it from different angles. We imagine you have fantasy arguments that we'll never do.
We imagine, oh, I wish I could go back there and tell off my boss and say, you know what? I hate you and everyone hates you and we are terrible. We're never going to do it, but we can spend hours imagining mic drop moments that will actually never happen. What happens when we ruminate in that way is we actually are stressing ourselves out.
We are flooding our body with cortisol and we are reactivating all the upset that the incident caused. The incident might have lasted two minutes and we were upset at that point for two minutes. So we're going to be upset for two hours at home because we're rethinking and reliving and relitigating. And then we'll rumination surf.
We'll think of all the other times the boss said the bad thing and we'll get upset about that and we can spend hours. And what makes it very unhealthy is there's no product that comes of it. It is literally churning in an emotional hamster wheel. We're not getting anything out of it.
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Chapter 8: What role do boundaries play in managing work-life balance?
And before I would just keep going to the next thing, I'm aware that I need to plan my evening so that even if I plan to do nothing but veg out, it's an intentional vegging. rather than the default one, a mindless one, because I'm giving myself that evening to veg out because the next day I'll do something that's more active and recharging, etc.
It's just leading a more mindful life and a much more rewarding one for that.
And last question for you, what does it mean for you to live a passion-struck life?
For me, it means to be able to stoke. I'm a kind of person, I'm very fortunate, I think, in certain ways, because I have passions about many things. Some people, there's just one thing they're interested in. There are many things that excite me. There are many things that interest me. There are many things that spark my curiosity. There are many goals I'd like to have.
For me, a passion-struck life is being able to pursue these things as much as possible and as many of them as possible. And I'm very thoughtful in how I curate the things I take on at work, the stuff that I do. In my personal time, in my family life, I am very thoughtful because I want to, passion to me is a driving force. It's what it's about. That's what gives you meaning.
It's the engine, right? It's where you get everything from. So stoking that and being aware of that and cultivating that and addressing that and discovering that in new places, that's what that means to me.
I love it. Guy, where's the best place people can learn more about you and everything that you do?
That's G-U-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com. Do you forget that? Just remember Guy and put in Guy, psychologist, and there's just not a ton. My name will pop up at some point. They can see I have three TED Talks. They can see my TED Talks. This is my fourth book. They're in 30 languages. You can find links to them through my website. You can link to my social media.
I have a Substack newsletter that comes out every couple of weeks. You can find that. So that's the best portal to find out more about me.
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