The key is to know your limits and know your priorities. Sadly, most people are terrible at both.
I've written before about priorities, and it really is the crux of the matter.
If your health and family life really are your priority, then they must take precedence over your career, period.
What a lot of people call "trying to prioritize exercise" is really them trying to cram exercise in on top of their existing work demands. That's actually the opposite of prioritizing it. Squeezing something in without actively making room for it isn't making it a priority, it's making it an afterthought.
I strongly discourage your from labeling yourself a "career oriented individual" as it's a self label that intrinsically makes your career your preeminent priority. Instead, conceptualize yourself as someone fiercely committed to living their best life, whose best life includes a major career component, but balance is the preeminent priority.
That's where knowing your limits comes in.
@use2betrix mentions always exercising no matter how many hours he works, and that's great, he's found a way to make space for exercise and can still manage a demanding career on top of that priority. Well, not everyone can, and this is where it can be a real gut-punch to find out what you can't sustain.
We're talking about this quite a bit in a burnout thread right now, how working well past your limits is really only sustainable temporarily, and eventually your system will start failing until it totally crashes. That's burnout, and there is no honour in it.
You must respect your limits, if you try to muscle past them, you will suffer the consequences.
That said, back to
@use2betrix 's example, you can usually expand your limits BY prioritizing your own wellness. He might not even be able to sustainably manage those 60 hr weeks were he not so committed to being active in the first place. My own DH was not thriving in life or career when we got together, and since he put his wellness and fitness first, his career has dramatically improved.
Me, I'm different, when I was working 60hrs of my physically demanding job, I was well past my adaptive capacity and there simply was no room for wellness, so I started breaking down rapidly and had to cut back by over 50% to find a balance that I could sustain.
@cangelosibrown put it very succinctly, the instinct when stretched thin is to drop the ball on wellness because it feels optional. Well, it is optional, temporarily, for survival, but the longer you stay in survival mode, the quicker your resources are depleted and the quicker everything that actually matters starts to fall apart. The things that actually make life good are the easiest to neglect, so this is where we circle back to priorities. You will never stop instinctively letting the most important things in life slide unless you consciously put them first.
Now...why the hell is that??
Why is it so easy to neglect what really matters? Why is it so natural to put things like career first? Why does that feel so *right*??
Well, it's actually pretty fucking simple: because no one gives a shit about your happiness except you and your loved ones.
All of those weighty pressures you feel to put more energy into work, to push yourself past your limits, etc, that's all external pressure that you've chosen to internalize.
There is no force in this world that will push you to live a good and healthy life, so making that a priority means not only going against the grain of societal pressure, it also means going against the grain of your own internalized scripts of every time you were rewarded for succumbing to that societal pressure.
Fun times, right?
Only you can change that script and create an internal pressure to set your own priorities.
OR
You can just accept compromise and a lack of balance.
