- Offers Telehealth in New York, Massachusetts & Maine
Stay present in your life and prioritize what matters now.
You want to succeed in your career and still be present for the rest of your life.
Your career may be going well. You may even be proud of what you have built. But when work keeps taking the next available hour, other parts of life get pushed back. Dinner gets later. Exercise gets skipped. Weekend plans move. Time with your partner or children gets squeezed into whatever is left.
The goal is to decide what needs your energy right now, knowing those priorities will change over time.
We can look at what deserves more attention, what can be reduced, and what you may be carrying simply because you have always carried it. That can include boundaries, communication, delegation, routines, or letting some things go.
Work-life balance counseling may be a good fit if you want to stay ambitious while being more present for family, relationships, health, and personal interests.
Decide what needs your energy now and adjust as life changes.
Most people who come in do not want to become less ambitious. We start with what you want work, family, relationships, health, and personal time to look like together. Then we identify the habits, expectations, and decisions that make that difficult and choose practical changes to test in daily life.
In our sessions, we can:
Meet Paul
Success & Wellbeing was founded and is directed by Paul Sullivan, M.Ed., LMHC, LCPC, CGP. We work with thoughtful, capable adults who are successful in their careers and want more time for family, relationships, health, and the things they enjoy. Our style is collaborative, direct, and human. We ask questions, use humor when it fits, and bring practical tools you can use outside the session.
Our approach is humanistic at its core and draws from attachment, developmental psychology, mindfulness, and Nonviolent Communication. We look at the practical parts of your week and the bigger questions underneath them: what matters, what you want to prioritize, and how you want to live.
What We Offer:
We connect what you learn in therapy to changes you can use in daily life.
Our primary orientation is humanistic, and we draw from different approaches depending on what is getting in the way. Your goals help determine the tools we use.
The starting point is what matters to you, not somebody else’s idea of balance. We can talk honestly about ambition, family, relationships, health, money, and identity. Your priorities and real-life responsibilities become the basis for decisions.
What this can look like in sessions:
ACT can be useful when work is guided by rules you have stopped questioning. That might mean always being available, proving yourself through output, or waiting until everything is finished before you rest. We look at which rules still serve you and make choices based on the priorities you want to live by.
What this can look like in sessions:
CBT helps us examine the thinking that makes boundaries hard to use. A thought such as “If I say no, I am letting people down” can quickly turn into another late night or another commitment you did not really have time for. We slow that down, look at what is true, and test more useful ways of responding.
What this can look like in sessions:
Mindfulness is useful when checking, planning, or solving work problems has become automatic. You may open email or start thinking through a problem before deciding whether it needs your attention. It helps you notice that moment and choose what to do next.
What this can look like in sessions:
Making work and personal life fit often depends on conversations. You may need to ask for help, say no, change an expectation, or explain a limit to a partner, coworker, manager, or family member. Nonviolent Communication gives us a practical way to name what we need and make clear requests without turning the conversation into a fight or a long defense of our choices.
What this can look like in sessions:
Your goals help determine the tools we use.
A demanding career can affect your stress, relationships, health, and the time you have for the things you enjoy. Where we focus depends on what is getting in the way most and what you want to change.
A perfect split between work and personal life is hard to maintain because life keeps changing. A new baby, career goal, relationship, financial priority, or family need can change what deserves your attention. Thinking in terms of counterbalance can help you make those shifts deliberately.
Some seasons genuinely ask more of you. Having a baby or raising children can require a large share of your time and energy for years. A demanding period at work can do the same. The important part is recognizing that the amount you give each area of life can change as the season changes.
Your priorities will change as your life changes. Some responsibilities can be shared, delayed, automated, or let go of when they no longer deserve the same amount of attention. We can look at what still matters, what has changed, and what you can stop carrying simply because you have carried it for a long time.
Work can provide purpose, income, challenge, community, and a real sense of accomplishment. Those are good things. The question is whether your way of working also supports the relationships, health, interests, and time you want outside of it.
The first session is a chance to talk about what brought you in, what you want to be different, and whether our approach feels useful to you.
The first conversation is about getting clear on what you want to change and deciding where it makes sense to begin.
If you’re ready to have more time for the people and priorities that matter to you, let’s talk.
Work-life balance counseling looks at how your career, responsibilities, relationships, health, and personal time fit together in real life. Counseling can help you look at the habits, expectations, and decisions that keep your job taking more time than you want it to.
Counseling may include creating boundaries, changing routines, reviewing career and personal goals, managing stress, asking for help, or deciding what deserves your time. You may also see this described as work-life balance therapy, therapy for work-life balance, or support for work-life balance. The name matters less than the fit between the counseling and what you want to change.
Poor work-life balance can look different from person to person. A common sign is that work keeps taking time from sleep, exercise, family, friends, hobbies, or basic personal needs, even after you have decided you want that to change.
You may notice ongoing stress, irritability, exhaustion, trouble concentrating, difficulty switching off after work, or less interest in things you usually enjoy. Burnout can become part of the picture when overwork and chronic stress continue for too long. The useful question is whether your schedule still works for you, not whether it looks busy from the outside.
Work can bring income, purpose, structure, challenge, community, and a real sense of accomplishment. A good work life can be an important part of well-being. The problem comes when one part of life repeatedly pushes out the rest.
Work-life balance is about building enough harmony between professional goals and personal life that both can matter. That may mean more family time, better sleep, regular exercise, stronger relationships, time for friends, or simply having parts of the week that are not organized around the job. Balance does not have to mean equal hours. It means your schedule reflects what matters to you.
A counselor for work-life balance may be useful if you are doing well professionally but want a better way to handle the demands that come with it. This can include professionals, leaders, parents, caregivers, people changing roles, or anyone whose responsibilities have grown faster than the systems they use to manage them.
Work-related stress can sit alongside anxiety, burnout, performance pressure, relationship stress, parenting demands, or a major career or life transition. A work-life balance counselor does not have to treat balance as a diagnosis. The focus can stay on the patterns affecting your time, health, relationships, and personal fulfillment.
Counseling gives you a place to look at the full picture rather than treating the problem as a calendar mistake. We can identify the stressors, beliefs, habits, and relationship expectations that keep the same pattern repeating, and then decide what would make the biggest practical difference.
That may mean creating healthier boundaries, changing how you respond to requests, improving time management, communicating more directly, dividing responsibilities differently at home, or reviewing career and personal goals. Help for work-life balance challenges can also include small behavioral changes between sessions, so the plan is tested in daily life instead of staying as a good idea.
Start with the parts of your week that keep creating the same problem. A perfect schedule is less useful than a few changes you can keep using during a demanding month.
Useful changes can include:
Therapy can help you understand what is adding to stress and what keeps overwork going after you already know you need a change. That can include workload, perfectionism, guilt, difficulty saying no, job uncertainty, relationship expectations, or a habit of tying self-worth too closely to productivity.
If burnout is part of the picture, counseling can focus on both recovery and prevention. That may include reducing unnecessary demands, rebuilding routines that support sleep and health, noticing early warning signs, and changing the patterns that made exhaustion easier to repeat. Results vary, and therapy is only one part of the larger picture.
There is no single best type of therapy for every person dealing with stress or anxiety. The right approach depends on what is driving the problem, what you want to change, and how you tend to learn and make changes.
Our approach is integrative rather than built around one method. Depending on what is creating the pressure, we may draw from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mindfulness, attachment, or Nonviolent Communication. The approach is chosen around the person and the problem.
Yes, there can still be useful work to do even when the job itself stays demanding. Therapy cannot remove every deadline, staffing problem, leadership responsibility, or economic pressure. It can help you decide how you want to respond to those demands and what is within your control.
That may include changing availability, delegating sooner, communicating limits, questioning expectations you have placed on yourself, or protecting time that has been too easy to give away. Sometimes the external situation eventually needs to change. Sometimes the biggest improvement comes from changing how the current situation is managed.
A schedule that leaves little room for recovery can affect more than productivity. Ongoing work stress may contribute to anxiety, irritability, low mood, trouble concentrating, sleep problems, or a sense that you are always mentally at work.
The effects can also show up at home. A partner may get the last part of your attention. Family plans may keep moving. Friends and hobbies can gradually disappear from the week. Counseling can help you look at those tradeoffs directly and decide what you want to protect before stress or resentment becomes the only signal that something needs to change.
If you are looking for a counselor specializing in work-life balance, start with licensure, fit, and whether the therapist works with the kind of pressure you are dealing with. A counselor for work-related stress and balance should be able to explain how they think about boundaries, habits, work demands, relationships, and goals without promising a one-size-fits-all result.
These titles can reflect different training and license paths, but all may provide psychotherapy if they are appropriately licensed. If you search for work-life balance counseling with a licensed mental health counselor, check the license that applies where you live. In Maine, counseling is provided by an LCPC.
Be cautious about guaranteed results, unclear credentials, pressure to continue when the fit feels wrong, or a therapist who cannot explain the plan in plain language. You should be able to ask questions and understand what you are working on.
Online therapy can be a useful format for work-life balance because it removes the travel time around an appointment and can make counseling easier to fit into a demanding week. Whether it works well for you depends on privacy, therapist fit, the kind of work you are doing, and how comfortable you are meeting by video.
Success & Wellbeing offers online counseling across Maine. The same concerns can be addressed online, including boundaries, stress, routines, communication, career decisions, and the way work affects relationships and personal time. In-person sessions are also available in Brunswick.
There is no set timeline for work-life balance counseling. Some people come in with one clear problem, such as setting limits around a new role. Others are changing habits, relationship patterns, or beliefs about work that have been in place for years.
The length of therapy for stress also depends on what else is happening, how often the same pattern shows up, and what you want to accomplish. Our approach is practical and collaborative, so goals can be reviewed as counseling develops. A useful course of counseling should keep connecting the sessions back to what you want to be different in daily life.
Counseling can be useful when the problem is connected to habits, stress, boundaries, communication, priorities, or the way work has become tied to identity and self-worth. Outcomes vary from person to person.
The therapist relationship and the focus of counseling both matter. At Success & Wellbeing, counseling stays connected to concrete goals and real decisions in daily life. Progress may look like better limits, more usable routines, clearer choices, and more time for the people and parts of life you want.
Have a career you’re proud of and a life you have time to enjoy.
A free 20-minute consultation gives us a chance to talk about what you want to change and where to start. We offer online counseling across Maine, with in-person sessions available in Brunswick.
Start by deciding what deserves more of your time.
