If you work full-time, you already know how much time and effort it takes to master work-life balance. Add to that a relationship, and it becomes even harder.

As a psychologist who studies couples — and who has a working wife — I’ve faced these challenges firsthand. Thankfully, my job as both a researcher and husband has taught me how important it is to be intentional about how my wife and I spend our time, specifically on weekends.

Here’s how people in the happiest, most successful relationships spend their free time:

A couple who spends a lot of time together, but is constantly distracted by texts, emails or social media, probably isn’t as happy than a couple who spends less time together, but without their phones.

That’s why carving out one-on-one time without any interference from technology is so important. And how you spend that time is actually irrelevant. It doesn’t need to be extravagant or planned down to the minute. What matters is presence.

It could be a quiet morning coffee where you exchange unfiltered thoughts, a slow walk to fill the silence, or a good old wining-and-dining — as long as the phones and laptops are put away.

After a draining week of work, it’s normal and even healthy to crave solitude. But it can be hard to choose between “me time” and “we time.”

Luckily, there’s a way to satiate the need for both alone time and bonding simultaneously. “Parallel play,” a concept derived from child psychology, is when two people engage in their preferred activity separately, but alongside each other.

For couples, this might look like one partner reading on the couch, while the other plays their favorite video game next to them. They might not be engaging directly with one another, but they’re still intentionally sharing space and de-stressing with an activity they each enjoy.

It’s basically a way of saying: “I love you, but I also need to love me for an hour or two. Let’s do it together.” 

Relationships thrive on ritual. Coming home to your partner and knowing that the weekend will bring something familiar — something reliably yours — can be comforting.

In fact, research shows that rituals can help couples organize their lives in a way that allows for both change and stability to coexist. Individuals can merge into a shared identity that feels distinct from either person alone. You can ground yourselves together, no matter what chaos surrounds you.

What those rituals look like is completely up to you. Don’t shy away from cheesy. It could be Sunday morning pancakes, or board game night with a goofy scoreboard on the fridge. If you’re more practical, maybe it’s a weekly sit-down over a glass of wine to plan out the week, or tackling one nagging chore together with your shared playlist in the background. 

Studies show that couples who have a satisfying sex life are more likely to be happier in their relationships.

But with endless chores and errands, weekends can start to feel like a second workweek — with little time left over for intimacy. Sex quickly starts to feel like less of a priority.

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That’s why structured intimacy can be a good thing. Many people think it can diminish spontaneity, but if anything, it actually removes the mental fatigue of trying to make intimacy happen.

It’s also a great way for couples to engage without distraction, all while combating the emotional strain of work. So, make it intentional and set a time.

Playfulness, according to research, is one of the most reliable tools couples can use to strengthen their relationship. It can boost relationship satisfaction, ease conflict and break up the sense of monotony that partners can start to resent. 

During the week, we unknowingly train ourselves to look for things to stress over. But on weekends, we need to take those goggles off. The act of being silly — and being met with silliness in return — helps us reconnect with the childlike wonder we carry inside that gets buried beneath our responsibilities. 

So, look for joy on purpose. Maybe you pull out a trivia game with nonsense rules or challenge each other to a dance battle.

There’s no right or wrong way to be playful, and chances are, you already know how to make your partner laugh. You just have to remember to do it.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

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For the last 10 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of students and their parents as an extracurricular coach at Spike Lab. 

I’ve watched my students grow into exceptional and confident young adults, pursuing their passions, starting businesses, developing complex projects, fundraising, and winning awards.

They’ve also been accepted to many selective institutions, including Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. 

While coaching these students, I’ve had the chance to get to know their families, too. Here are four things parents of these highly successful kids never do: 

Parents often pin their hopes on selective schools, as though anything less is unacceptable. Then they work backwards with a singular obsession to achieve that goal, starting tests and application prep early.

Instead of fixating on acceptance to any one college, focus on what is within your power. Help your kid develop the initiative, planning, critical thinking, creativity and communication skills necessary to succeed, no matter where they go. These are the qualities colleges and employers look for anyway. 

College admittance should only be a happy byproduct of success. Don’t ask, “Will my child get into an Ivy League?” Try instead, “Will my child have the ability to succeed anywhere?” If the answer to the latter question is yes, the answer to the former will be more likely to be yes as well.

Teens are often swayed by their peers — but parents aren’t immune to that pressure either. I often see parents signing their kids up for an activity purely out of a competitive feeling of FOMO. But this habit can result in kids who have generic resumes and, more importantly, they don’t get to develop an independent sense of identity. 

When one of my students enrolled in a rigorous science course unrelated to his interests, his reason was that “everyone at my school takes it.” The class wasn’t a requirement, just a norm that neither he nor his parents had questioned. 

While it’s valuable for kids to socialize with their friends, they also must cultivate their own sense of self. What are they interested in? Where do they want to invest their time? You as a parent can mentor them through this one and also set an example. The old “if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you” adage does not just apply to kids. 

It’s common for parents to take on difficult tasks or solve problems on behalf of their kids as a “Snowplow” parent often try to solve their kids’ problems for them

I’ve heard stories from teachers who regularly receive parent emails about their kid’s bad grades or about an inter-student conflict. 

Sometimes an intervention is necessary. But before you take action, ask yourself whether this is something you need to take on. Sometimes, when a tough moment presents itself, it can actually be an opportunity for your kid to learn how to assert themselves. 

Snowplowing, however well intentioned, can undercut the development of agency. If teenagers think someone else will do something for them, they won’t learn to do it for themselves.

In our program, we have students review the defining moments of their lives. Alongside moves, new schools and other common milestones, students frequently list something like being turned down by a varsity team. Rejections give students the confidence to come back stronger or help them reframe how they see themselves. 

It also prepares kids for reality. So rather than discouraging them from taking a leap, teach them how to bounce back from disappointment. Challenge them to do their own version of rejection therapy as practice. 

Once they acclimate, rejection becomes less scary. A student of mine cold emailed 70 professors to find a lab internship. He received dozens of nos. But in the end? One came through. And he learned a lesson in resilience and humility.

Failure and rejection can be wonderfully instructive. And even when they’re not, kids develop grit and position themselves for future success. Moreover, your child might defy your expectations. We often project our own fears onto kids. Kids don’t need adults placing a ceiling on what’s possible. Let them surprise us.

Theo Wolf is a writer and educator, with a focus on passion and purpose development in young adults. He is on the founding team of Spike Lab, a coaching program for high school students, and helped build Snowday, a free search engine for high school summer and extracurricular programs. Theo is a graduate of Cornell University and a mentor at Harvard University’s Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. 

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Shao Chun Chen used to work more than 40 hours a week in his corporate career in Singapore. Now, he has a three-hour-a-week job that sustains his and his family’s life in Thailand.

The 39-year-old grew up in Singapore and spent most of his life in the city-state before moving to Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife in November 2024. Today, he “supercommutes” from Thailand to Singapore, flying over 1,200 miles once a week to work as an adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

He says he brings in about $2,000 to $4,000 Singapore dollars ($1,540 to $3,070) per month teaching a weekly three-hour digital marketing class, and the amount that he makes teaching the course is enough to cover his travels and all of his and his wife’s living expenses in Thailand.

“I’m gaming the system,” Chen told CNBC Make It. “Three hours of working in Singapore can sustain my entire expenditure in Thailand.”

It took a layoff to make Chen realize he was financially independent in early 2024, giving him the flexibility to change his life.

Over the course of almost a decade working at Google, he lived below his means and consistently set aside up to half of his paycheck for investments. So when he was unexpectedly laid off by the tech company in February 2024, Chen realized that the seven-figure portfolio he had built over the years meant he no longer needed to rely on a paycheck for a long time.

His portfolio was worth about $2 million at the time, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Using the 4% rule as a guideline meant that he could safely withdraw about $80,000 from his portfolio and that same amount, adjusted for inflation, in each subsequent year.

In theory, that amount would likely be small enough for his portfolio to support him for at least 30 years. Therefore, rather than jumping into another corporate role, Chen decided to give himself the opportunity to lead a different kind of life.

“I’ve been working for the last 14 years of my life, and because of the layoff, I was forced to take a break,” Chen told CNBC Make It. “It was very devastating, it was a huge blow to my ego, my identity, but it turns out, with time … it sort of mandated me to think [about] what I really wanted in life.”

Although Chen found that he could live off of the interest, dividends and capital gains from his investments, he chose to treat them only as a source of passive income, withdrawing money only when necessary to supplement his active income.

In the past year and a half, Chen created multiple new sources of passive and active income.

Along with teaching as an adjunct lecturer for three hours a week in Singapore, Chen also makes money by creating educational content on YouTube and from his coaching business, through which he says he can charge $500 an hour, depending on the client.

He also decided to try geographical arbitrage. By keeping his main source of income teaching at a university in Singapore, where the currency is stronger, Chen doesn’t need to work as much to support a comfortable life with his wife in Thailand where cost of living is much lower.

“Find a way to improve your skill sets, or to reach a position where you can charge a high per hourly rate,” Chen said. “If you combine a high per hourly rate with a low cost of living, you only need to work very few hours to cover your expenses.”

Cities and jobs that can pay a high hourly rate tend to be expensive areas, but that’s less of a problem now that digitalization has enabled remote work arrangements, he added.

While his job as an adjunct lecturer is enough to cover his and his wife’s living expenses, Chen’s other active income sources cover his discretionary spending. He says that in total, he spends between four and eight hours a week working, which includes his teaching, coaching and making YouTube videos.

Since moving to Chiang Mai with his wife in November, Chen says, his lifestyle and quality of life have become “so much better.”

“I’m also conscious that not everyone can do it, and the locals are not making as much as we are. [We are] earning in dollars, spending in baht,” he says. “I no longer feel the need to … be on that hamster wheel or to always be producing.”

″[Here] I make breakfast for my wife, and in my previous life, I didn’t even have that privilege. [I was] just rushing,” he added.

Along with not feeling as much financial or time pressure on a daily basis, Chen says, he no longer feels the need to “over-plan” his life. “For the first time in my life, I could just sort of … enjoy what Thailand has to offer,” Chen says.

In Singapore, he says, he was paying about about $2,450 a month for his two-bedroom condominium.

Now, he lives in a brand new one-bedroom condo which costs him $450 a month — and it’s much more luxurious. “I’m already overpaying because I’m [paying] on a monthly basis … If you sign a yearly lease, then it will be closer to $300,” Chen says.

“It’s a ridiculous condo,” Chen says. “It has multiple pools. It has a water slide … a fully equipped gym, a huge co-working space [and] its own Pilates studio,” he added.

As for other living expenses in Thailand, Chen says, he spends between $300 and $500 a month for food and groceries for him and his wife, and about $200 a month for transportation. He also spends about $250 for each round-trip flight to Singapore every Friday.

“The strategy for anyone who wants to live in a country like Thailand is to really embrace the local culture, the local options, the local way of life,” rather than try to bring your own lifestyle to the place, Chen says.

“I’ve actually met a few expats here, and they’re really not happy because they were only attracted to Thailand because of the cost of living,” he says. “They were complaining: ‘Oh, the croissant doesn’t taste as good as back home. They don’t use real butter here, they use palm oil’ … and then they need to find a specific cafe, and that’s actually more expensive.”

Instead, expats can save money by buying local products like Thai food, Thai medicine and Thai beer, Chen says. “Everything made in Thailand is cheap, but the moment you want to buy international options, like wine from France … it’s more expensive,” he adds.

Although the decision to leave the corporate world to live in Thailand has given him more time and flexibility to enjoy life and build up his different streams of income, Chen says, there are downsides.

For example, he no longer has the structure and predictability that corporate life once afforded him. And when it comes to supercommuting from Thailand to Singapore, traffic is often a big hurdle, as is the amount of energy that it can take to travel so often, he says.

But ultimately, he says, he’s happy with his life in Thailand, though he is open to moving back to Singapore if the right opportunity comes along.

Want a new career that’s higher-paying, more flexible or fulfilling? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work. Expert instructors will teach you strategies to network successfully, revamp your resume and confidently transition into your dream career.

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Former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama says she inherited her confidence from her mother, Marian Robinson.

During Obama’s childhood in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, Robinson dedicated much of her time with her two children to laughing at their jokes and listening to their ideas, Obama recalled on an episode of the “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” podcast that aired Wednesday.

Robinson’s interest her children’s ideas made them feel special, smart and capable at a young age, Obama said. In other words, Obama’s mother actively listened to Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson — paying attention to what they said, and asking thoughtful questions in response — which is an effective strategy for parents to help raise confident children, some experts say.

“That’s where confidence began for me, sitting at my kitchen table, me and my brother with a mom who really, really loved our voices,” said Obama, 61. “She liked to hear our thoughts. She thought we were funny.”

The confidence Obama developed as a child helped her navigate challenges as an adult, she added. ”[Her light] probably prepared me in ways I couldn’t have imagined for those White House years, that time in the spotlight,” Obama said. “I could handle a lot of the negativity. I could handle the stress and the pressure.″

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Asking questions — from “How was your day?” to, when necessary, “Why did you hit a classmate at school?” — can help parents build trust with their kids, without necessarily letting them off the hook for bad behavior. Such questions can also help children develop more self-awareness, child psychologist Becky Kennedy told CNBC Make It in January.

“It’s a really key part of raising children: Can we see them for who they are, accept them for who they are?” Kennedy said. “It’s really core to helping a child become a decent human being, one who can handle themselves and have confidence in themselves.”

Obama used another parenting tactic to help raise her own self-assured daughters: When her children Sasha and Malia fought growing up, Obama simply didn’t get involved, she said in an April 30 episode of her and her brother’s podcast “IMO.”

“I don’t want to play favorites,” Obama said. “I’m not sure who’s telling the truth. So, if I’m involved … play is shut down, doors closed, computers off, it’s over.”

Learning to resolve conflicts without tattling to their mother helped the siblings learn how to solve problems on their own so they could keep playing, Obama added.

People with successful careers typically have strong conflict resolution skills, the Harvard Business Review reported on October 21. And the younger kids learn how to communicate, the more easily they can regulate their emotions and build relationships as they grow up, according to the Child Mind Institute.

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Lisa Su has been the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for 10 years, taking the company from a struggling chipmaker to a $190 billion artificial intelligence powerhouse — and boosting her net worth to $1 billion in the process.

The turnaround wasn’t easy, but Su faced the challenge head on, she said during a commencement speech at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 10. The best piece of career advice she ever received was to “run towards the hardest problems,” said Su, 55. “That’s where you find the biggest opportunities, where you learn the most, where you set yourself apart, and most importantly, where you grow.”

The advice, which came from IBM executive John Kelly, is exactly what drew her to AMD, Su said: “When I joined, it was clear the company had a mixed track record. But I saw the potential, the people, the vision and the opportunity to help lead a company that mattered … It was actually my dream job.”

Su and her family immigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. when she was 3 years old. The daughter of a bookkeeper and mathematician, she graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986 and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, she received bachelor, master and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering.

She worked at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale before taking the helm of AMD in December 2014, according to her LinkedIn profile.

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Difficult challenges are worthwhile because emerging from them is the “most rewarding,” she said.

“Hard problems stretch you, they demand focus, creativity and determination … They give you confidence, they give you growth and they give you impact,” said Su. “When you choose the hardest challenges, you choose the fastest path to growth and the greatest chance to make a difference.”

She expects a similar work ethic from her employees, setting extremely high expectations for the people around her, Su told Time in December. Executives at AMD, including Su, occasionally review memos after midnight and attend meetings on weekends, Time reported.

Su’s advice doesn’t mean you should pursue something solely because it’s hard. Instead, look for opportunities to learn new, challenging skills that interest you and to “make an impact,” she said.

Doing work that you’re genuinely curious and excited about can motivate you to put your best foot forward and lead to longer-term happiness, rather than pursuing a hard major or prestigious job only because it looks good on your resume, for example. Rampant curiosity has helped business leaders from Bill Gates to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi bolster their careers and stand apart from their peers.

Su also recommended looking for challenges that require you to collaborate with like-minded individuals, allowing you to learn from other people’s perspectives and grow your network.

“You can’t solve big problems alone. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. The challenges we face today are too complex to be solved by one person,” said Su. “They actually really demand teamwork and collaboration because meaningful progress happens when people with different perspectives, skills and experiences work together to solve real problems.”

Want a new career that’s higher-paying, more flexible or fulfilling? Take CNBC’s new online course Make a Powerful Career Change and Land a Job You Love. Expert instructors will teach you strategies to network successfully, revamp your resume and confidently transition into your dream career.

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