How do you stop working in your head once the working day is over?
Your laptop is closed. The working day is over, at least on paper. But your mind has not received the memo. In the shower, you think of a better sentence for the email you are going to send tomorrow. Over dinner, you catch yourself rehearsing a conversation with a colleague that will not even happen until the day after tomorrow. And at half past eleven, just as you are drifting off to sleep, you suddenly sit bolt upright: there is that one appointment you still need to reschedule.
Sound familiar? You are certainly not alone. Research shows that around eight in ten employees struggle to switch off mentally after work. People who work from home find it even harder than those who work in an office, because the place where they work and the place where they live physically overlap.
The problem is rarely a lack of willpower or discipline. It has more to do with the way the brain works and the way modern work is organised. In this article, you will discover why it can be so difficult to switch your mind off, and what our coaches say can genuinely help in practice. No vague advice, no unrealistic lifestyle rules, just a number of things that can start making a difference within a week.
Why does your mind keep going?
The brain does not like unfinished business. Anything incomplete keeps running in the background until it has either been finished or written down. A busy working day creates dozens of these loose ends: an email waiting for a reply, a decision that still needs to be made, a conversation that still needs to happen. Closing your laptop only closes the screen, not all those unfinished pieces in your head.
There is another factor that many people underestimate. For more and more of us, work is no longer a physical place but a mental mode. In the past, work coincided with being at the office; the moment you got into the car, the transition to your private life began. Today, you may work at the same table where you eat in the evening, use the same phone for work emails and family conversations, and never pass through a physical gateway that marks the end of the working day. Your brain does need that gateway, though. If you do not provide one, it can remain in a kind of standby mode.
Habit also plays a part. If you work at a high pace for months on end, you train your nervous system to remain alert by default. A quiet moment no longer feels relaxing, but uncomfortable. You feel restless precisely when there is nothing you need to do. That is not a character flaw, but a physical habit you have developed, which means it can also be changed.
What works temporarily, but does not really help
Almost everyone has their own distraction routine. Netflix, a glass of wine, endless scrolling on your phone, an evening of gaming. These things can make you feel as though you are relaxing, but in reality you are simply distracting your mind from the stream of work by replacing it with another stream. As soon as that stream stops and you are lying in bed, all the work-related thoughts return. Often with interest.
There is an important difference between temporary distraction and genuine rest. Distraction is a plaster, not recovery. To truly disconnect, something else needs to happen.
Five things that really help:
Give your mind an answer in writing
Unfinished tasks do not disappear from your mind simply because you try not to think about them. They disappear when your brain feels that an open loop has been dealt with. Writing things down is a surprisingly effective way of sending that signal. Use the final five minutes of your working day to write down what needs your immediate attention tomorrow, what is still outstanding, and which questions are still unresolved. It does not need to be a polished plan; just make a rough list.
The effect is that your mind knows there is a place where that information now lives. It no longer has to keep turning it over. Many coaches refer to this as emptying your brain. It works particularly well if you write the list somewhere you will see it first thing the following morning, so it is immediately there when you return.
Create a transition moment
In the past, the journey home automatically created a transition between work and private life. Now that the office is often next to your kitchen, you need to create that transition yourself. A ten- to fifteen-minute walk after work is ideal. Not primarily for the exercise, although that is a bonus, but because while walking you are literally creating distance from the place where you worked and signalling to your brain that you are moving into a different mode.
Walking not your thing? A shower, a short bike ride, or even five minutes sitting on a bench nearby without your phone can work just as well. What you do matters less than the ritual itself. The important thing is to do it in roughly the same way after every working day. Your brain then learns to recognise the transition, in much the same way that brushing your teeth becomes a ritual that automatically prepares you for sleep.
Set boundaries around your availability
As long as your work email is on your phone, your working day is technically not over. Every notification that comes in with a ping, even if you do not open it, tells your nervous system: there may be something here that requires a response. That keeps your system in a low-level state of alert.
A few practical things that can help:
Turn off notifications from work apps after a set time. Not just the sound, but the notifications themselves.
If you have a work phone, leave it in a different room from where you spend your evening.
Agree with your colleagues and manager which hours you will not be available, and stick to them. Making an exception once is often the beginning of a new norm.
This rarely goes perfectly straight away. Ease yourself into it gradually, and accept that colleagues may need some time to learn that an email sent at half past eight in the evening will no longer receive a reply.
Do something rather than nothing
A common mistake is to think: I will do nothing for a while, then I will relax. For an exhausted brain, that can have exactly the opposite effect. Sitting still without anything to do gives your mind the freedom to bring every work-related topic waiting in the queue straight to the surface. Activities that require a light level of mental effort often work much better: cooking, exercising, playing an instrument, gardening, doing something creative, or having a good conversation with someone who has nothing to do with your work.
The mechanism behind this is simple. The brain can only give its full attention to one thing at a time. Give it something that requires your attention without creating work-related stress, and the work stream will naturally move into the background. This is also why many people come home from exercise feeling mentally clear and refreshed. It is not simply the exercise itself, but the focus it requires.
Learn to tolerate emptiness too
This is the opposite of the previous point, and just as important. If you fill every spare minute with activity, your brain never learns that it is genuinely allowed to switch off. So build in small moments of complete emptiness: five minutes on the sofa without your phone, fifteen minutes on a bench in the park, or three minutes with your eyes closed before brushing your teeth in the evening.
At first, those moments may feel uncomfortable, because that is precisely when your brain tries to bring all your work-related thoughts back to the surface. That is part of the process. Over time, you will notice that these quiet moments begin to feel less crowded too. Your mind learns that it does not always need to be switched on.
If this happens every evening, there may be more going on
A few busy weeks during which your mind remains active in the evenings are a normal part of periods of intense work and are not necessarily a cause for concern. But if it becomes a pattern, your brain may be trying to tell you something else.
Ask yourself honestly:
How long has this been going on? A few months, or longer?
Does rest still help? Or do you still feel tired after a weekend or a holiday?
Do you still enjoy things outside work, or does your free time also feel like something you simply need to get through?
If the answer to more than one of these questions is essentially “not anymore”, things may have gone further than is healthy. At that point, it is no longer simply a matter of improving your evening routine. It is about looking at what makes your working day so full, and what makes it difficult for you to step away from it.
To learn which warning signs to look out for, read our article ‘5 early signs that you may be heading towards burnout’.
When a coach can help
A coaching conversation is not treatment, nor is it a commitment to a longer programme. It is an hour in which someone from outside the situation helps you look at things that have become difficult to see clearly from the inside. Many people who come to us later say: I was surprised by how much I already knew, but had never actually said out loud.
For the topic discussed in this article, these are some of the questions that commonly come up: why do I find it so difficult to switch gears? What remains unresolved during my working day? And how do I deal with the voice in my head that keeps telling me I could still do more?
At Lifeguard, you can speak to an NOBCO-certified coach within 48 hours. Each session lasts 60 minutes rather than 45, as is common with many other providers, because the questions that really matter often only surface in the second half of the conversation. Everything is confidential, so your employer will not be told what you discussed.
