Philomena Tan knows all about stress. By her early 30s, she was a successful, highly paid market research consultant who sometimes worked till 10 p.m. 'We had a lot of meetings and deadlines; we had to win projects, so I was writing proposals, making presentations, supervising staff.' she says.

For a long while, she loved her job and there were perks - lots of travel, for instance- but it was never what she had planned to do with her life. Like so manu others, she just got involved in a career that had started accidentally.

Tan had studied psychology, and she was also good with statistics and computers. In the early 1980s, these were a rare and valuable combination of skills, so Tan made steady progress up the corporate ladder. But the turning point came the year she spent the entire week of her husband's birthday in Brisbane running market research groups while he was home alone in Melbourne.

It made her examine her life and think about what she was really contributing to society. Tan planned her escape carefully. She saved money and returned to study. A decade later, it has all come together, and she is happy. The research she did for a doctorate in psychology not only added to her qualifications as a psychologist and psychotherapist, but gave her the raw material for her first book, Leaving the Rat Race to Get a Life, a handbook for anyone seriously considering changing the pace of their lives.

These days, Tan is in private practice in her local community, does yoga and chooses her own hours. She rarely works more than four days a week and, because she sees clients in the evening, she keeps her afternoons free to catch up with reading, meet with friends or research her next book. She is happy. 'When you are working up to 70 hours a week, you don't have time for this,' she says.

From http://www.theage.com.au