Recognize
See the pattern.
Begin recognizing the beliefs, triggers, experiences, and habits shaping your relationship with work, achievement, and yourself.
Featured in Forbes
Imagine being successful—and not thinking about work all the time.
You’ve built a successful career. But maybe your mind never really leaves work. A difficult meeting follows you home. A critical email can ruin your evening. You accomplish something important—and before you’ve had time to enjoy it, you’re already thinking about what’s next.
For years, experiences like these have been called burnout, stress, anxiety, perfectionism, or simply the price of being ambitious. But what if those labels don’t tell the whole story?
In The Great Unraveling, clinical psychologist Dr. Angélica Pérez-Litwin explores why work can have such an extraordinary hold on the minds, emotions, and identities of high achievers—and offers a new way to understand what’s happening.
Finally, understand what’s happening. Then learn what to do about it.
Available now on Amazon
Does this feel familiar?
You’re successful. But work has become hard to leave at work.
- You replay conversations long after they’re over.
- A critical email can change your mood for the rest of the day.
- You reach an important goal—and almost immediately start thinking about the next one.
- You take time off, but part of your mind stays at work.
- You can be sitting at dinner with people you love while mentally preparing for tomorrow.
And underneath it all, there can be a quieter question:
Why does what happens at work have so much power over how I feel?
Maybe you’ve called it stress. Maybe you’ve wondered if you’re burned out. Maybe you’ve told yourself this is simply what it takes to be successful.
But what if these experiences aren’t separate problems? What if they’re part of the same pattern?
The breakthrough
Finally, a name for what so many high achievers have been experiencing.
For years, experiences like these have often been understood separately—as stress, anxiety, perfectionism, overworking, burnout, or simply the price of ambition.
But after more than two decades of listening to accomplished professionals describe what was happening in their careers and lives, Dr. Pérez-Litwin began to see something else:
A pattern.
She calls it:
Career Distress Response
Career Distress Response is the chronic activation that can develop when career, achievement, identity, and self-worth become so deeply intertwined that what happens at work begins shaping how you feel about yourself and how you experience the rest of your life.
Suddenly, experiences that may have seemed disconnected begin to make sense.
- The overthinking.
- The inability to switch off.
- The emotional reaction to criticism.
- The relentless pressure to prove yourself.
They may not be separate problems. They may be parts of the same pattern.
When you finally have language for the pattern, you can begin changing the pattern.
Meet the author
Dr. Angélica Pérez-Litwin, PhD, MBA
Dr. Angélica Pérez-Litwin is a clinical psychologist, author, and founder of the Career Health Institute.
For more than two decades, she has worked with accomplished professionals—including physicians, attorneys, executives, founders, and other high achievers—who appeared extraordinarily successful on the outside but were struggling with the emotional and personal costs of their careers.
Again and again, she heard versions of the same story: people who couldn’t stop thinking about work, whose self-worth rose and fell with professional success, who achieved more but never quite felt they had done enough, and who had gradually become disconnected from parts of themselves and their lives outside of work.
The more she listened, the clearer it became: burnout didn’t fully explain what she was seeing.
That insight became the foundation for Career Distress Response—and eventually, The Great Unraveling.
BA, Columbia University · PhD, Clinical Psychology · MBA, Innovation & Entrepreneurship · Featured in Forbes, The Today Show, NPR, CNN, and PBS
The way forward
Knowing what’s happening changes everything. Knowing what to do next changes your life.
- Imagine finishing your workday—and actually leaving work behind.
- Walking into an important meeting grounded rather than bracing for what might happen.
- Receiving criticism without allowing it to define your entire day.
- Celebrating what you’ve accomplished instead of immediately moving the finish line.
- Taking a vacation and actually being on vacation.
- Being fully present with the people you love.
Having interests, relationships, pleasure, rest, and a sense of self that exist independently of your professional success.
That’s Career Harmony.
Career Harmony is not about becoming less ambitious, caring less about your work, or walking away from the career you’ve built.
It’s about changing your relationship with work and achievement so that success no longer requires sacrificing the rest of your life.
The Ten Practices of Career Harmony
After years of working with high achievers and studying these patterns, Dr. Pérez-Litwin created the Ten Practices of Career Harmony—a practical formula for helping readers move from recognition to change.
The practices help you recognize the patterns shaping your relationship with work, regulate the internal activation that keeps you constantly “on,” reconnect with yourself and the people and parts of life that matter most, and realign the way you work with the life you actually want to live.
Regulate
Change how you respond.
Learn ways to respond differently to the urgency, overthinking, vigilance, and emotional activation that keep you constantly “on.”
Reconnect
Come back to your life.
Reconnect with your body, relationships, interests, pleasure, rest, and the parts of yourself that achievement may have crowded out.
Realign
Build a different relationship with work.
Make more intentional choices about how you want to work, achieve, lead, and live.
The Ten Practices give readers something concrete to return to—not only while reading the book, but throughout different seasons of their careers and lives.
The goal isn’t to care less about your work. It’s to build a life in which your work matters deeply without becoming everything.
Inside The Great Unraveling
Part psychology. Part self-discovery. Part roadmap.
This isn’t simply a book that names the problem. It’s designed to help readers understand their own patterns and begin doing something differently.
Part One
Understand what’s happening.
Discover why some forms of professional distress aren’t fully explained by burnout and how achievement, identity, self-worth, workplace experiences, and personal history can become deeply intertwined.
Part Two
Learn what to do about it.
Move through the Ten Practices of Career Harmony and begin changing the patterns that have allowed work and achievement to occupy too much of your mind, identity, and life.
Part Three
Apply it to real life.
Explore what Career Harmony can look like during career transitions, leadership challenges, reinvention, job loss, entrepreneurship, retirement, and other moments when work and identity collide.
A book designed to be used
Reflect
Reflection questions throughout the book help you recognize your own patterns and connect what you’re reading to your life.
Practice
The Ten Practices give you a practical formula for moving from insight toward meaningful change.
Return
The practices are designed to be revisited as your work, life, priorities, and definition of success evolve.
A special gift for readers
Go beyond reading. Start practicing.
Purchase The Great Unraveling by September 30 and receive Out of Office, the companion Career Harmony journal, free. The journal includes 100 experiential practices designed to help you reconnect with play, curiosity, rest, relationships, pleasure, and the parts of yourself that exist beyond work.
Praise for The Great Unraveling
A new language for an experience so many people already know.
Dr. Pérez-Litwin offers language and insight that I believe will become foundational in how we understand the intersection of work, career, identity, and well-being. I can envision this work shaping how future psychologists are trained.
Tatiana Vera, PsyD
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Angélica Pérez-Litwin gave a name to a pattern I'd been witnessing for years but could never fully explain. Some books teach you something new. Others change the way you see yourself. This one does both.
Pamela Slim
Author of Body of Work and The Widest Net
Reflecting intellectual rigor and hard-earned wisdom, this book provides a practical framework for greater self-awareness and personal growth. A timely and important contribution for physicians, advanced practice providers, and healthcare leaders.
Francine R. Gaillour, MD, MBA, PCC
Executive Director, Physician Coaching Institute
Dr. Pérez-Litwin's Career Distress Response model is directly applicable to so many of my high-achieving coaching clients. I believe these ideas have the potential to become foundational for how coaches support high-achieving professionals.
Laura Welch Nevarez, MBA, PCC
Founder, Anavah Leadership
Understand the pattern. Learn the practices. Build a richer life.