As many hours as we spend at work, we still manage to bring a fair amount home with us. It's a symptom of giving an actual damn about doing your job well.

Lying in bed at night, finally, and instead of trying to sleep you're going over your days performance in your brain. Looking at pictures, listening to audio, or watching video of your work, wondering how you could improve. Meanwhile the chores, family, and personal projects get ignored. It's a hard thing to turn off. Separating work from home life, though, is incredibly, incredibly important to our day-to-day sanity and our long-term mental health.

Looked at on a long enough timeline, the job we are doing is just another step in our career. At some point we may stop working at the location we're currently employed. We may decided to jump ship entirely and pursue something different. But it's important to remember that our job is not our life. Even if you had no family and virtually no friends or other hobbies, taking a mental break each day from our work role is vital to our health.

For one, you need a sense of who you are and what you enjoy outside of your career. And if I could advise you, I'd suggest finding hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with your line of work. You hobbies can make your money or they don't have to. They can involve friends and family or you can do them alone. What really matters is that they give your mind a small vacation from constantly thinking about your professional life.

If you do visually creative work, maybe try finding a hobby that involves writing or exploring nature. If you work in front of a computer, find something to do that avoids electronics altogether. The idea is two-fold. Developing a hobby or a pastime that both distracts you from work, and even better, feeds your creativity in ways you couldn't feed it at work.

As an illustrator, I find an incredible amount of relaxation and inspiration in walking nature trails. The organic nature of everything around me in those settings is pure brain-food when I feel creatively drained. There are no clients in nature to respond to. Instead, I reconnect with nature. I study leaves and birdcalls. I let my imagination run wild about what I might come across. I find balance in walking and jogging among the trees and mushrooms and birds. And if at all possible, I bring my daughter so that she can both experience it herself, as well as watch how I experience it.

Your hobbies and home-life are likely completely different than mine, but what is common is that work saps our energy from us. Even in the most creative of careers we are, in a way, expected to act like a machine, constantly churning out creative content and improving our skills.

Your home-life should nurture the other half of you. The half that needs freedom, family-time, great food and nightlife, exploring, and seeing the world. Limiting yourself to one mode of thought (work) is the quickest way to tunnel vision and stress, and I don't recommend it. Draw the line!