Introduction

It’s 6:15 on a Friday night, and you’re coming home at the end of a hard week…

Not the kind of week where all the lights turned green and everyone laughed at your jokes, but sadly a regular kind of week, where you tried to spin all the plates and some of them crashed to the floor. You’ve been through the wringer, and let’s be honest: it shows. Trudging through the front door, you drop your bags and toss your keys onto that little shelf with a mirror (technically, it’s called the foyer mirror). You can’t help but catch a glimpse of yourself in that mirror, with tired eyes but bravely holding it together. Then you swiftly move on because it’s Friday night, damn it, and you’re determined to get as much “happy time” as possible. Bring on the Chardonnay!

But wait. Something happened there, and you missed it. Rewind the tape.

That glance into the mirror was the critical dividing line between your work life and your personal life. Let’s pause right here and give this moment its due. What did you see when you looked at yourself in the mirror? It’s natural to look a little haggard because the week was a battle. But did you feel like you were the winner of that battle, lending your struggle dignity and purpose? Or were you the loser, returning home under a cloud of shame and self-doubt?

I playfully call this the Foyer Mirror Test. That moment when you enter through the door and set down your keys, you are at a critical fork in the road: This is where you decide whether you won the week or lost it.

For most people this happens unconsciously, but this tiny decision has monumental ramifications. If you decide that you were victorious, you go on to treat yourself like a hero returning from a glorious battle. Putting your phone on its charger, you eagerly embrace home life. You change into comfy clothes and blast your favorite playlist. Pouring a glass of wine, you toast to yourself, and that first sip is pure celebration. Despite the exhaustion (or maybe because of it), there’s a sense of accomplishment and pride. If you think about work at all, it’s to exult in your victory and possibly brag to your partner. Feeling genuine closure on the week, you give yourself permission to become a person again, not just some employee on the eighteenth floor. This is the best version of yourself at the end of a week, and if this were how we all felt on Friday, the world would be a much better place.

Sadly, this isn’t the way this story goes most of the time. There’s a “defeated version” that goes more like this:

That moment you look in the foyer mirror, you unconsciously decide that you lost the week. You can’t put your finger on it, but a faint cloud of guilt and anxiety follows you around. You keep replaying scenes from the week in your mind—your brain’s way of trying to get closure. But it’s not working. Despite your best attempts to shake it off, you can’t stop thinking about work—which is ironic because at work you couldn’t focus on the task at hand for wanting to think about anything else. Now back at h