I also have to admit that until very recently, I had fallen into the same pattern, so I really understand what it is like. Though a psychotherapy practice is not a tech start-up, I found that grad school, licensing exams, work at other jobs while building my practice, and supporting my family while living in this area with its high cost of living, required me to work for years at or above the 60-hour per week mark.

So, as a therapist, husband, and father of three, I have had to find some solutions to the relationship challenges posed by Silicon Valley work schedules. This post lists five solutions to the work-life balance challenge in Silicon Valley: Values Clarification, Practical Decision Making About Happiness, Massed Time Together, Reallocation of Financial Gains, and Relationship Rituals.

Values Clarification

Sometimes, the client wants to change their work-life balance, but they aren’t sure how to identify which changes to make. One way of trying to resolve a work-life balance problem is to call to mind the values that you have. Do you value money, success, and accolades or family, connections, and your relationship more? Many of my clients will answer a question like this by saying, “Both!” The question, though, is intended to help with the process of allocating the temporal resources first to those things that matter the most. I have seen it time and again in my therapy office where a short-term effort to support and improve career, like grad school, a big project, or vying for the next promotion, becomes a never-ending sacrifice of family time and energy for the next career move that will finally, “Get us to where we need to be.” The work efforts continue because the people in the relationship don’t ever reallocate their time and energy. Maintaining the career trajectory or the current salary becomes a never-ending task. Clarifying your values can help you bring your behavior in line with your goals. Questions like, “What do you want people to say about you at your funeral?” can help with this process. Then, you just work backwards from there by asking questions like, “What do I need to do with my time and energy today in order to contribute to those words at my funeral?”

Practical Decision Making About Happiness

Another way to consider this question is to acknowledge that at least one reason to continue to pursue career achievement is based on the idea that, “If I get just a little bit more money, I’ll be able to stop chasing it anymore.” Yet, research consistently shows that there is a threshold above which more money won’t make you any happier. In one analysis, that number for California is $92,000 per year (read the original research here). Even if we allow that dollar figure to be fudged a little bit higher for the higher cost of living in Silicon Valley, ask yourself if you are already at that level. If so, yet you still feel unhappy, you may need to ask whether or not the source of that unhappiness is internal. That is, do you feel unhappy with your life because it is hard for you to appreciate what you have and to be content with it? Are you negatively comparing yourself or your life to others? If you have answered yes to these questions, you might want to refocus your happiness improvement efforts inward instead of outward. By tipping your work-life balance toward more life, you may find that you are better able to enjoy your family, relationships, and the beauty of nature. This may help you feel happier and more content, even if it means that you have less money.

Massed Time Together

If none of the above considerations moved you to consider a change and you are still determined to work 60+ hour work weeks, then you would be in good company with the majority of my clients and with me for many years in the past. Work can be very rewarding. Yet, no matter how rewarding, that 60+ hour work week will take a toll on your relationship unless you do something to counterbalance it.

One suggestion that several couples that I have worked with have found helpful is to plan for punctuated breaks in the crazy schedule. Product launch coming up? Great, plan for a week off afterward. Use some of the wealth you have earned to go on a beautiful vacation that emphasizes the kinds of activities that the two of you did when you fell in love.

Reallocation of Financial Gains

Especially if you didn’t grow up with the kind of wealth that is now available to you in Silicon Valley, you may need to learn a different way to distribute your financial resources. For example, you may find that you are having a hard time finding the time to spend with each other because between the work schedule, caring for the kids, and household maintenance, there isn’t a lot of time left over to spend with each other.

This process can be intensified if you grew up poor. You may have gained a “do-it-yourself” attitude that helped to conserve money at times when it was scarce. So now you save and work almost as hard at home as you do at work. However, if you do things like hire a nanny to help with child care, hire someone to assist with housecleaning, etc., you may find that you are better able to maximize the quality of the time that you have at home with your partner.

There is a caveat to this solution. As you spend more of your financial resources trying to free up time for your relationship, you may find that it creates additional pressure to maintain your income and career trajectory.

Relationship Rituals

Okay, so you work a 60+ hour work week. If you can identify a sacrosanct time for you and your partner, that nothing can violate. Not the product launch, not the deadline for China, and not the International Flight, then you will be showing your partner that s/he is a priority for you all the time. That may sound impossible at first, but it need not be. There are just 3 steps to making this work.

First, you identify the day and the time in the week that your regular time to foster your relationship with your partner will be. I recommend at least 2 contiguous hours without interruption.

Second, if something does come up that you have no control over and that really is a non-optional career requirement, like the product launch, the deadline for China, or the International Flight, you don’t just skip that time. Instead, you move the time preferably to before the interfering event, not after it. This way, you are showing your partner that nothing can take away the time you have for them.

Third, you keep to it. You need to tell your boss and/or your team about this time so they know when you are simply unavailable. They need to understand that keeping this time sacred and that your job satisfaction is related to their support of that time. Hopefully, you don’t put that relationship time at 5 pm on Tuesday if that is the optimal time for the teleconference with China. If travel is a consistent work requirement, you have to make it a point to be home for a few hours before a departure.

Conclusion

People in Silicon Valley are often talking about changing the world and making “life-hacks”. But the easiest and most definitive way to change the world is to start with yourself. The changes to create work-life balance aren’t always easy. After I propose these changes, I may hear about corporate culture or requirements for advancement. I sometimes hear the argument that my client fears not reaching their optimal career achievement. But I rarely hear people talking about their complicity in perpetuating those corporate cultures, or optimal relationship development, or even optimal happiness. Much of my work is about helping people find meaning in their lives after having sacrificed that meaning for money and success, or helping them put their relationships back together after years of neglect. “Most fast and break things” is indeed an apt motto for the area, but from my side of the therapy room, when “things” become “people” and “relationships,” it is less laudable than lamentable.

I want to end on a personal note. I mentioned that I have reduced my working hours after years of working above 60 hours per week. Now I’m at less than 50 per week. The day that I announced to my kids that the schedule was ending and I would be home more, they literally jumped up and down, cheering, and then held a celebratory procession through our home. The corresponding reduction in income never crossed their minds (though they are old enough to understand the correlation). That moment of celebration confirmed for me that I was more valuable to them than what I could earn to give them. I encourage you to believe that you are more valuable to your partner and/or children than what you can earn.

First, a reminder. I don’t write about any specific clients in my blog. The examples below are composites from multiple clients. I am presenting common issues that I have seen among many clients.

Anxiety

The myth high-achieving people have about anxiety is that they shouldn’t have it or that it should be under control. The reality is that their anxiety has served them, and their career may even be encouraging anxiety. In therapy, we can find other, more sustainable ways to fuel a positive feedback loop for success while reducing the ancillary suffering that is caused if anxiety is the fuel.

Many people with the drive to be high achievers build an expectation for themselves of ever-rising success. In fact, some of them have never experienced a significant failure. They have found themselves propelled into situations of increasing responsibility, not just for themselves and their own success, but the success of their team, their product, and then their shareholders, investors, or a whole company. When you have had a rocket-like career trajector,y the fast pace, the demands, the staggeringly fast changes from concept to product launch, from start-up to IPO, or from untouchable golden-child to a career crash and burn can be shocking, disorienting, and can rock the foundations of identity.

The clients who come to me for therapy for anxiety issues have often experienced multiple changes, identity or role confusion in their companies, demands for work pace or perfection that aren’t sustainable, and more. One thing that often happens is that because the person’s abilities really are phenomenal, when faced with what would for most people be an impossible task, the high-achiever doesn’t admit that possibility. She or he just identifies what it will take to make it happen. The ensuing lack of sleep, loss of relationship, loss of perspective, coupled with the accolades of a shower of money for success, high compliments, and further expectations for even more results in the future, can all become fuel for anxiety.

Eventually, the highly successful person may begin to experience anxiety for a number of reasons.

• Simply experienced so much stress for so long that they don’t find it easy to calm down.
• Fear that they have been a fake all along, and the next task will be the one that reveals that they really aren’t as smart or skilled as the world-class peers next to them.
• Attached so much identity to their habit of success that the risk of failure threatens the core of their understanding of who they are.
• They may have become successful because, like many successful and intelligent people, they have beneficial obsessive or compulsive tendencies. But those tendencies have recently begun to spin out of control.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it reveals that there are a lot of possible ways that a high-demand career and a high-achieving personality can ignite a positive feedback loop of anxiety and success.

Relationship Challenges

The myth high-achieving people have about their relationships is that if they are high-achieving in one domain of their life (i.e., career), they will be high-achieving in other domains as well (e.g., relationships). The reality, though, is that high achievement in any domain takes practice and expertise, and relationship therapy can provide the tools and practice to become more expert in the domain of relationships.

One characteristic of high career achievement and advancement is a single-minded willingness to pursue a goal. Anyone who has completed graduate school knows that it is important at certain times to sacrifice body, sleep, healthy food, healthy exercise, and even relationships with a partner or kids to surmount the next hurdle. Now take that same pace of demand, concentrate it, attach to it the promise of huge amounts of money, and put that cycle on perpetual repeat. . .that is work in Silicon Valley. No wonder so many companies call their sites a campus.

I want to identify two ways that I have seen this work pattern interfere with relationships. First, from an attachment perspective, the amount of time spent together is essential for a high-quality attachment. In my experience, when a client works more than 60 hours per week, there is little chance that they have much energy left afterward to give to their relationships. Most of the time, when they come home, they simply try to refresh their energy and attention stores. Maybe they have a little left over for kids, but for partner and sex, the likelihood is small. Yet, beyond that, I have worked with clients who work 80 or even 100 or more hours a week for some periods of time. What I have seen is that the more hours a person works over 60, the more and more hyper-focused they become. If at 60 hours per week the high-achiever has less to give to their partner, it becomes increasingly likely that by 80 hours of work per week they are actually demanding more from their partner. Unable to sympathize, they fixate on the mission to complete the next work hurdle. Much more work than that, and the person on my couch feels to me like a walking zombie. They have a very difficult time connecting to me as a person; even talking and following a conversation thread with them becomes a challenge.

Another aspect of this ability to sacrifice single-mindedly for a purpose is asynchronous personal development. That is, the person in the relationship may be a world-class expert in software whiz-gigs or business howsie-dos, but the expertise to develop a long-term relationship remains in its early stages. In the meantime, the partner, especially if they are not working in the tech industry, may be developing relationship expertise all the time by relating to friends and community members and filling up with relationships to compensate for the time alone that the high-achieving partner’s work demands take.

Sometimes, this high achievement is also paired with personality traits that can make relationships harder, too, like those that emphasize precision and deemphasize empathy or interpersonal warmth. In some cases, this might simply be alexithymia (a lack of awareness of and words for emotions), which is easily remedied in therapy with some mindfulness skills, somatic focusing exercises, and emotional vocabulary building. Other times, the personality traits are much deeper, and the person has difficulties forming deeper relationships with friends, work colleagues, and long-term relationship partners, too.

A First Setback

The myth high-achieving people have about failures is that high-achieving people don’t fail. Most know that this is false intellectually, but dealing with the emotional reality of a big setback for the first time can be hard, and therapy can help.

Sometimes clients come to see me after a first failure. It might be being fired from a job, a poor performance evaluation, or the closure of a start-up. I have seen time and again that when a client has put a lot of stock in their personal identity in their perpetual and unmitigated success, a first failure can be a real blow. Very literally, such an event changes their perception of their place in the world and history. To some, that might sound a bit grandiose, but the reality is that people in this area are world-changers. When you think you are in line with your company or your ideas to be a part of an industry or world-changing event, and the journey suddenly takes a left turn, then the story you are telling needs to be updated.

Was the challenge caused by being too trusting in a cutthroat world? Was the challenge that you weren’t collaborative enough? Maybe even worse was what went wrong, simply not in your control, revealing to you that your perception of yourself as invulnerable wasn’t as accurate as you hoped? When I work with clients around issues like a first failure, I try to help them focus on what they can learn from the experience, identifying what is and is not in their control, and on what they want to change that is in their control. Most of my high-achieving clients really like this part of the work because it plays right into their usual high-achieving mind-frame. Find the problem and fix it.

However, there is also another thread that I try to introduce into the therapy. I try to ask questions about what they want to build with their life, who they really want to be, and what their values really are. These questions often shift the conversations in therapy away from “What happened and how do I fix it?” to “What do I really want from here?” This second set of questions is also important because it allows a reorientation in life priorities and source of identity so that career setbacks won’t have the potential to cause instability in the future.

Therapy for Development

The myth high-achieving people have about their relationships is that if they are successful, they don’t need therapy because nothing is wrong. But therapy isn’t only about what is wrong; sometimes it can focus on what can be better.

Sometimes, clients come to therapy not because there is something wrong, but because something can be better. High-performing clients are sometimes looking for a person to help them in relationships, career, or self-regulation in a way that requires a therapeutic lens. For example, even when a relationship is good, it can sometimes be beneficial to have a therapist help you figure out how to deepen the emotional bond, or a client planning a pitch to a VC firm might want to exude comfort, not just remove anxiety. Sometimes, the right person for those developments might be a professional coach. Other times, the challenge comes from a psychological source with deep roots, and it helps to have a therapist who can help you embrace the present by more fully letting go of the past.

Conclusion

I have spent most of this post identifying the common challenges that high-achieving clients bring into therapy. I hope that this post exposed the myths about both high-achieving people and therapy. High-achieving people face unique stressors. The illusion that high achievers don’t need help is false. I often ask my clients who are comparing themselves to other high-achievers if they know anyone else in therapy, and they say “no”. Then I ask them how many of their friends they have told that they are in therapy, and they say, “None”. This shows that high achievers are often comparing their insides with other people’s outsides, which is an unfair comparison. Finally, therapy isn’t only for people with mental illness. Though it can also help people with more serious issues, therapy can also help clients who are facing new challenges, who need help with managing the unique stress of rapid career advancement, or who experience some relationship challenges because they have focused so much on developing business skills that they need to balance their life skills.

Contact me and we’ll have a conversation to make sure your needs and my services are a good fit.