You pull up on the drive, turn off the engine and sit there for a minute longer than you need to. The working day has officially finished, but your head is still in the meeting that went sideways, the email you haven’t answered and the job that needs doing first thing tomorrow. You walk through the door, someone asks how your day was, and you hear yourself say “busy” while your mind is somewhere else entirely.
Plenty of the men I work with describe exactly this. They’re physically at home but mentally still on shift, and the people around them can tell. It usually isn’t because they care more about work than family. It’s because nobody ever showed them how to come down from a day spent running at full speed.
I know this one from the inside. I used to be regularly distracted by the situations my clients were facing, still thinking about how I could help when I should have been with my family. It was my children who told me. They said I wasn’t paying attention, and it had upset them, which isn’t an easy thing to hear from your own kids.
Your body doesn’t know the day has ended
When you’ve spent eight or ten hours solving problems, dealing with people and keeping several plates spinning, your whole system is geared up for it. That state is useful at work, where it keeps you sharp, but it doesn’t disappear because you’ve closed your laptop or locked the van. You carry it home with you, and it shows up as restlessness, impatience and an inability to sit through a film without picking up your phone.
Trying to force yourself to relax rarely works, because you’re asking your body to go from a hundred to nothing with no gear in between. What most men need is a way of stepping down gradually rather than a better attempt at flopping on the sofa.
Unfinished business keeps knocking
Your mind also hangs on to whatever is unresolved. A job that’s finished tends to leave you alone, whereas an open loop keeps tapping you on the shoulder until you do something about it, which is why you remember the phone call you forgot to make just as your head hits the pillow. If you finish the day with twenty things held in your head, your head will spend the evening reminding you about them.
A few things that help
The simplest change is to create a clear end to the day. Before you finish, spend five minutes writing down what’s still open and what the first job is tomorrow. It sounds almost too small to matter, but once it’s on paper your brain can stop treating it as something it has to remember, and many men notice the difference within a week.
The second is to build a gap between work and home. If you drive, leave the radio off for the last ten minutes, or park up and take a short walk before you go in. If you work from home, the gap matters even more, so shut the door on your workspace, change your clothes and go round the block as if you were coming home from somewhere else. It feels a little daft at first, but you’re giving yourself the commute your body needs.
Then decide how you want to walk through your own front door. You might give yourself one small intention, such as putting your phone down for the first twenty minutes or asking your partner or your kids one proper question, and let that be the whole of it. Being fully present for twenty minutes will do more for your relationships than being half there all evening.
For me this has been a gradual process over the past few years rather than a single change. I walk my dog Teddy, go to the gym, watch comedy or sport on TV, help out at my daughter’s girls’ football team and read historical fiction. None of that is remarkable, but each one gives my head something else to do.
If this sounds like your evenings, you don’t have to work it out alone. Book a free 30-minute discovery call
When it’s more than a busy patch
Everyone has weeks when work follows them home. It’s worth paying closer attention if it has become your normal, if you’re sleeping badly, snapping at the people you love or relying on a drink to take the edge off most nights. If your sleep or mood has changed and you’re worried about it, your GP is a good place to start.
Coaching can help with the patterns behind it. We’d look at what you’re carrying, where the pressure is really coming from and what needs to change, then turn that into practical steps you can use in the week ahead. I see men in Tavistock and Saltash, online, or out walking on West Dartmoor if that suits you better.
Book your free 30-minute discovery call
On the call you can say as much or as little as you like, and by the end you’ll have a clear sense of whether coaching is right for you, with no obligation either way. You can also read more about 1:1 performance coaching.
I’m not a crisis service. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 999. For urgent mental health support, call NHS 111 and choose option 2, or call Samaritans free on 116 123, any time.
Photo by Jake Willett on Unsplash