Every professional knows the feeling: you close your laptop, but your mind continues to work long after the day is done. Psychologists refer to this as cognitive rumination – the tendency to continue thinking about work long after the workday has ended. Our bodies may have left the office, but our minds haven’t.  

Cognitive rumination disrupts recovery, sleep, and mood. Left unchecked, it can increase stress, strain relationships, and harm overall wellbeing. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 report, 59% of employees worldwide report finding it difficult to “switch off” mentally after work, and more than half experience stress during the day. 

The World Health Organisation now classifies burnout as an occupational syndrome, emphasising how chronic stress leads to exhaustion and disengagement. 

Work-life boundaries have become more porous in the post-pandemic era, as remote and hybrid setups blur the lines between the two realms. The same phone that handles the family chat also pings with a late-night “quick question.” The work-home interface is now less of a physical barrier and more of a revolving door. When the doorway never closes, recovery suffers, even if the total hours haven’t increased, because the quality of our downtime declines.

None of this, however, means technology or flexibility is to blame. Rather, we need better ways to manage the mind’s habit of carrying work into life and life into work. This is why Severance is such a resonant metaphor for our times. 

Is Severance the ultimate solution to work-life balance? 

The Emmy Award-winning series Severance offers a compelling solution to the above: by cutting the brain, personal memories are stored at home, and work memories remain at the office.  

In the show, a surgical procedure creates two separate selves – one that’s aware only of work, and the other only of life outside of it. It’s the ultimate take on rumination: there’s nothing left to dwell on because there’s no knowledge of what happened at the other location.  

But the show makes it clear that strict separation inevitably backfires. The “innie” (or work self) still seeks connection but cannot extend relationships beyond the office, and so, loses meaning because work cannot link to a fuller identity. While the “outie” (home self) lacks purpose because they don’t understand their role at work, and forfeit relationships formed there. Ultimately, neither of the selves thrive.

Real life tempts us with other, less elaborate versions of this idea: strict rules that prevent thinking or talking about work after a specific time, or a belief that only complete separation counts as “healthy.”  

Such rules may help us some of the time, but they can also block what’s valuable about work – pride, purpose, and the occasional creative insight that comes when the mind finally has space to ponder and daydream. The lesson isn’t that boundaries are bad; it’s that boundaries alone can’t do all the work. 

Beyond balance versus integration

The series highlights the danger of chasing perfect balance: by isolating one area, we create more fragmentation. In reality, there is no clear neurological divide between work and non-work, but we often try to soften that separation. We become so focused on eliminating job stress that we also block out what makes our work exciting.

Ironically, time away from the office often makes us more productive. It helps us appreciate work, think creatively about problems, and relieve stress. We need the break to come back and face the work refreshed. This is one reason why an increasing number of scholars champion the idea of “work–life integration”, suggesting that work and family roles can, in fact, support each other, leading to an increase in wellbeing. 

Research by my colleagues and me found that people who adopt what we call a paradox mindset – the ability to accept life’s inherent tensions as natural and even energising – perform better and innovate more under pressure.  

Subscribe to BusinessThink for the latest research, analysis and insights from UNSW Business School

This includes accepting tensions between wanting work-life balance or separation and wanting work-life integration. Instead of attempting to resolve these tensions, the most successful employees learn to manage them in a productive manner. They don’t ask “either balance or integration?” but “when do I need more of each, and how do I move between them?” 

For leaders and teams, this reframing matters. Policies that promise absolute balance (for example, no emails (ever) after 5pm) or unlimited integration (work remotely anywhere, anytime) can misfire if they ignore these underlying tensions.  

More helpful are norms that legitimise choice with some guidelines: shared quiet hours most days, explicit exceptions when needed, and a quick acknowledgment when the boundary is crossed (“Flagging late – no reply needed until tomorrow” etc). 

How to embrace the push and pull of work and life 

In other work, my colleagues and I examined how people navigated work-life tensions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homes suddenly turned into makeshift offices and schools. 

We found that those who thrived didn’t seek perfect balance; instead, they moved smoothly between roles, letting boundaries bend and recover. One parent described switching between helping a child with homework and joining a client call, then finding warmth and humour in the first moment to make the second easier. This flexible movement, rather than a fixed point, supported resilience. 

The evidence, therefore, suggests that we need balance, which looks like deliberate detachment and recovery. We also benefit from integration – letting positive experiences spill over into other domains. The tempting answer is to schedule balance on some days and integration on others. If it were that easy, Severance wouldn’t resonate so widely. 

Here are four practical ways to do just that, grounded in the evidence and consistent with a paradox mindset: 

1. Differentiate with rituals. Create small, repeatable cues that tell your brain you’ve switched roles: a short walk, a clothes change, closing tabs and writing a “shutdown line” for tomorrow. Micro-boundaries work because they train attention, not because they outlaw thought. 
2. Integrate the upside. Deliberately transfer positives both ways. Treat the satisfaction of solving a client problem as fuel for patience at home; let curiosity sparked by a child’s question inspire a fresh perspective at work. Not all spillover is negative; positive spillover can be an asset. 
3. Balance dynamically. Each week, name one domain that needs a firmer boundary and one that can afford more integration. Adjust again next week. Dynamic balance beats fixed rules because your life is dynamic. 
4. Tame rumination, don’t fight thought. When work thoughts intrude after hours, jot a one-line note and gently return attention to the present. Mindfulness here is practical: noticing, naming, and redirecting, rather than forcing the mind to be blank. 

Leaders can scaffold these habits by making expectations explicit (what “responsive” means in their team), modelling boundary rituals, and praising outcomes and the healthy processes – the recoveries, hand-offs, and resets – that keep performance sustainable. 

Learn more: Is it normal to be super stressed at work before the holidays?

Taking this approach allows us to accept that perfect balance and perfect integration are both impossible, and that chasing a tidy compromise rarely works. Instead, the healthiest path is to strike a balance between work and life – to protect time for rest while embracing the overlap that gives life richness and meaning.  

Seeing work-life balance as a paradox – contradictory yet interrelated – means recognising that balance and integration can’t be solved in isolation; they must be navigated together, continuously.  

While Severance entertains us with a dystopian fantasy of perfect separation, real life is much messier, and all the more richer for it.  

Josh Keller is an Associate Professor in the School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School. His primary research interest is in studying how managers respond to strategic paradoxes, including how to cooperate and compete, how to learn from new endeavours and leverage knowledge from existing ones, and how to be both global and local.