center;gap:14px;margin:18px 0 28px 0;padding:14px 0;border-top:1px solid #E0DAD3;border-bottom:1px solid #E0DAD3;font-family:inherit;”> By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed July 2026

Workaholism as a Trauma Response: What’s Really Driving Your Need to Produce

WORKAHOLISM & TRAUMA • July 16, 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT. Educational content, not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment.

Her Calendar Was Full. Her Apartment Was Almost a Stranger’s.

Angela’s phone lit up at 5:47 a.m. Before the alarm, before the light through the blinds, before she’d fully surfaced from sleep, she was already composing an email in her head.

She’d been awake for twenty minutes by the time her feet hit the floor. Coffee, laptop, Slack notifications, in that order, every day, for longer than she could easily remember. The apartment was a beautiful rental in a walkable part of the city, all exposed brick and good morning light, chosen four years ago for its proximity to the office. She’d barely sat on the couch in three years. There was no time for that.

At 48, Angela ran engineering for a mid-size health-tech company, the kind of senior role she’d spent two decades building toward. She shipped releases, mentored a team of nine, and sat on the leadership council that decided who got promoted next. By any external measure, she was extraordinary. But at the end of every long day, when the Slack threads finally went quiet and the meeting blocks on her calendar finally ran out, something in her chest would tighten. If she stopped, she’d have to feel it. Whatever “it” was. So she didn’t stop.

In my work with driven women over more than fifteen years and several thousand clinical hours, I’ve watched a specific pattern repeat across women in their forties and fifties who are two, sometimes three decades into demanding careers: a relationship to work that has quietly crossed from engagement into compulsion, and a body that started keeping score long before the mind caught up. Angela is a composite drawn from patterns across many clients; her details are changed to protect confidentiality, and no single detail identifies a real person. But her experience mirrors what I see in my private practice with real regularity: driven women who can execute brilliantly under pressure but can’t sit still on a Sunday afternoon, who schedule rest like a task and then cancel it, who feel a low static of guilt whenever they aren’t producing.

This isn’t about laziness or a discipline problem. And to be direct about something important before we go any further: not everyone who works long hours, feels ambitious, or loves their career is describing a trauma response. Some of it is just a demanding job. Some of it is genuine passion. What follows is educational information, not a diagnosis of you or anyone in your life. If you recognize yourself in Angela, I want you to know this guide was written with women exactly like her in mind.

What Is Workaholism, and Is It Actually a Diagnosis?

Here’s the first thing I want to name clearly, because it matters clinically and ethically: workaholism is not a diagnosis in the DSM-5. Unlike substance use disorders or gambling disorder, work addiction has no formal diagnostic criteria in the manual clinicians use. The term itself is genuinely debated among researchers, some of whom prefer “work addiction,” others “problematic overworking,” and others who argue the whole framework borrows too heavily from substance-addiction language without enough evidence to justify it. I’m naming this upfront because I don’t want this guide to hand you a label that sounds more official than it is.

What does exist is a body of research describing a recognizable pattern: a felt compulsion to work, difficulty stopping even when a person wants to, and work habits that persist despite negative consequences. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis pooling data from more than 71,000 people across 23 countries estimated that roughly 1 in 7 people show elevated signs of this pattern, though the authors were careful to note that measurement tools vary widely and more representative sampling is needed (Andersen et al., 2023). That range, and that caveat, matters. This is a real and researchable pattern. It is not, at this point, a settled clinical category with agreed-upon boundaries.

The distinction between a demanding job and a compulsive relationship to work is both simple to state and easy to miss in your own life. Someone with high job demands, a resident physician, a trial attorney during a case, a startup founder during a launch, might work extraordinary hours because the role genuinely requires it, and still be able to rest fully when the demand lifts. A workaholic pattern looks different: the hours persist even when the external demand eases, and stopping itself becomes the hard part.

What’s particularly hard to see clearly about this pattern is how normalized, even celebrated, it is in the cultures driven women tend to inhabit. Tech, medicine, law, finance, academia: these are environments where overwork gets called “commitment,” where exhaustion functions as a quiet status symbol, and where the person who logs off at 6 p.m. can feel like the one being judged. A compulsive relationship to work doesn’t just go unnoticed in these environments. It often gets rewarded, which makes it genuinely hard to name as a problem until the body starts insisting otherwise.

Gabor Maté, MD, physician and addiction researcher and author of a widely read book on addiction and its roots in emotional pain, has written that addiction is best understood not primarily by the substance or behavior itself, but by the function that substance or behavior serves in a person’s life. I’ve found his framework, that addiction is a response to emotional pain rather than a moral failing, useful for thinking about compulsive overwork, even though work addiction itself remains a debated and unofficial category rather than a diagnosis Maté’s own writing was built around. The clinically useful question isn’t “why can’t she stop working?” It’s closer to: what is working giving her that she hasn’t learned to get any other way? And for a meaningful subset of the driven women I sit with, the honest answer traces back to childhood.

What Does the Nervous System Have to Do With Overwork?

To understand why a compulsive relationship to work takes hold the way it sometimes does, it helps to understand what can be happening physiologically when a driven woman sits down at her laptop at 11 p.m., not because a deadline requires it, but because the anxiety of not working has become genuinely hard to tolerate.

Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University Bloomington, and creator of Polyvagal Theory, describes three broad nervous system states in his 2025 update on the theory’s clinical applications: ventral vagal, meaning safe and socially engaged; sympathetic, meaning mobilized and activated; and dorsal vagal, meaning collapsed or shut down (Porges, 2025). In Porges’s framework, a compulsive relationship to work often functions as a sympathetic strategy, a way of staying in a state of activation that keeps dorsal collapse at bay. For some people I work with, the felt opposite of work isn’t rest. It’s a kind of low, formless depression. Which helps explain why they keep moving.

I want to be careful here about what this research does and doesn’t say. Porges’s work describes the physiology of nervous system states broadly; it doesn’t specifically study workaholism, and I’m applying a general framework to a clinical pattern I see, not citing a study that measured workaholic clients directly. That’s an association I’m drawing from clinical observation, not a proven causal chain, and I think it’s more honest to say so than to imply otherwise.

Cortisol matters here too. A 2018 study of nearly 1,000 Norwegian employees found that unfavorable working conditions were strongly associated with workaholism, and that workaholism in turn was positively associated with anxiety and insomnia, somatic symptoms, emotional exhaustion, and social dysfunction, with workaholism fully or partially mediating the relationship between work stressors and health outcomes in the large majority of pathways tested (Andreassen, Pallesen, and Torsheim, 2018). A separate study of 757 employees at a Japanese company found that workaholism was directly and positively associated with poorer health, and that the coping style workaholics tended to use mattered: active coping was linked to better health and performance, while emotional discharge, using work to offload difficult feelings, was linked to worse health (Shimazu, Schaufeli, and Taris, 2010). Neither study proves that overwork causes disease in any individual person. Both describe a consistent association, across large samples, between a compulsive work pattern and self-reported physical and psychological strain.

None of this, when it’s present, is a character flaw. For some driven women, it’s a nervous system that learned, in the most reliable way available to it at the time, how to keep functioning under conditions that demanded constant adaptation. When that’s true, the difficulty isn’t that the strategy worked once. It’s the cost of the strategy still running now, years after the original conditions changed.

How Does Childhood Relational Trauma Create Adults Who Can’t Stop?

When we talk about the roots of a compulsive relationship to work, we have to talk about childhood, not because parents are always the villains of these stories, but because the nervous system forms in relationship, and the early relational environment shapes, at a foundational level, how a person learns to manage their internal world.

Judith Herman, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, and author of Trauma and Recovery, has written that chronic childhood trauma, the kind that unfolds across years of relational experience rather than in a single event, produces a specific kind of adaptive reorganization of the self. In a 2009 paper on the developmental effects of cumulative trauma, Herman and colleagues describe how children exposed to chronic relational adversity develop exquisite attunement to caregivers’ emotional states as a survival strategy, along with a compensatory sense of competence that can become a primary source of worth and felt safety (Cloitre et al., 2009). That paper studied complex trauma symptom patterns broadly; it wasn’t designed to study workaholism specifically, and I want to be clear that I’m drawing a clinical connection, not citing a study that measured overwork itself.

This is the developmental soil from which a compulsive relationship to work can grow, in the clients where that’s true.

Consider what happens in a home where love feels conditional, where parental approval was available when a child performed well, got good grades, was helpful, was easy, was no trouble, but seemed to withdraw when the child showed need, disappointment, or ordinary human imperfection. Some children in that environment learn, at the level of the body, that being valuable is the price of admission to relationship. That production is one currency of love.

Carry that blueprint into adulthood, and it doesn’t just produce someone who works hard. For some people, it produces someone who works compulsively, because somewhere underneath the deliverables and the deadlines, an old equation is still quietly running: if I keep producing, I’ll be okay; if I stop, I might disappear.

Rana’s story illustrates this with particular clarity.

Rana is a 41-year-old internist at a large hospital system in the Bay Area whose clinical competence is, by all accounts, exceptional. She’s the doctor other doctors refer their complicated cases to. She runs two research projects alongside her full clinical load. She hasn’t taken a full vacation in six years. (Rana is a composite drawn from patterns across clients; details are changed to protect confidentiality.) She arrived in my office describing herself, in her words, as “fine on the outside, hollowed out on the inside.” She sat with her white coat still on, her badge clipped to the pocket, twenty minutes past when her shift technically ended.

“I thought I loved medicine,” she told me that first session, turning her badge over in her fingers without seeming to notice she was doing it. “And I do. But I also can’t stop. Even when I’m exhausted to the point of feeling nothing, I take on one more patient, one more study. I don’t know how to be a person without a to-do list.”

Sitting across from Rana that afternoon, I felt the particular quiet that comes when someone extraordinarily capable finally says the thing underneath the competence out loud. As we worked together over the following months, a picture emerged of her early years. Her parents were immigrants who had sacrificed enormously to provide opportunity for their children, and their love was real and also heavily threaded through with achievement. The family’s story about itself was organized around academic and professional success. Rana’s A grades brought warmth. Her struggles brought a worry that felt, to a young child, close enough to disappointment to learn from. She came to understand early that being impressive was the safest way to be loved.

This is one way childhood relational trauma can express itself in adult behavior, not the trauma of a single dramatic event, but the trauma of a proverbial house of life built around performance rather than steady presence. It’s worth naming, too, the possible role of insecure attachment in this kind of picture. Anxious attachment, the style that can develop when caregiving is inconsistent rather than absent, sometimes produces adults who are highly attuned to external feedback and who organize a piece of their self-worth around others’ reactions. Work, with its visible metrics and external validation, can become an arena where that pattern plays out. A glowing performance review doesn’t just feel good in that case. It can feel, briefly, like safety itself.

Understanding this doesn’t mean staying stuck in a story about childhood. But when a compulsive relationship to work has roots like these, genuine change usually has to address the relational pattern underneath, not only the schedule or the habits. A better calendar app helps about as much as rearranging furniture in a house with a cracked foundation.

Ambition, Job Demand, Burnout, or Compulsion: How Do You Tell Them Apart?

One of the things that makes a compulsive relationship to work so hard to name in driven women is how easily it can look, from the outside and often from the inside, like plain virtue. Overwork can look like ambition, dedication, leadership, and the culture around a driven woman will often confirm that reading at every turn.

It helps to hold four things apart, because they get collapsed into one category constantly, and they are not the same. Job demand is when a role genuinely requires long or intense hours for a defined period: a surgical residency, a legal trial, a product launch. Engaged ambition is a hard-working orientation that comes with energy, choice, and the ability to fully rest when the work allows it. Burnout is a state of depletion, usually from sustained stress or an unsustainable workload, marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and a drop in a sense of effectiveness. Compulsive work is a felt inability to stop, disconnected from whether the external demand still requires it, and it’s the pattern most closely tied to what researchers mean by workaholism.

These four can overlap in a single person’s life at a single time, which is part of why the distinction is genuinely hard to make about yourself. A resident physician can have real job demand and burnout and a compulsive relationship to work all at once. That’s an association worth sitting with, not a tidy chart with four separate boxes.

Engaged ambition has a quality of expansion. You’re drawn toward something, a project, a goal, a creative challenge, because it genuinely interests you. The work energizes you even when it’s hard. You can take breaks without falling apart. You can finish a project and actually feel the completion of it, briefly, before moving to the next thing. There’s a groundedness to work like this. It feels like running toward something.

Compulsive work has a quality of contraction. You’re fleeing something: the anxiety, the emptiness, the sense that without the work you don’t quite know who you are. The work doesn’t fully satisfy; it temporarily quiets an alarm. You finish one project and immediately need the next one, not because you’re excited about it but because the space between projects is hard to tolerate. The to-do list functions less like a tool and more like a life raft. This feels like running away from something.

A 2012 longitudinal study of nearly 2,000 Japanese employees, measured seven months apart, found that workaholism and work engagement, while weakly and positively correlated with each other, were oppositely related to well-being and performance over time: workaholism predicted an increase in ill-health and a decrease in life satisfaction, while work engagement predicted a decrease in ill-health and increases in both life satisfaction and performance (Shimazu et al., 2012). I find that study clinically useful because it gives some empirical weight to something I’d otherwise only be able to say from experience: engagement and compulsion can look similar on a resume and still be pulling a person’s health in opposite directions.

If you recognize several markers of compulsion in yourself, not as occasional events but as a consistent pattern, that’s worth taking seriously. Not as a diagnosis, and not as evidence of failure, but as information your nervous system may be giving you about what it needs. It’s also worth naming that a compulsive relationship to work and genuine passion for work aren’t mutually exclusive. Rana really does love medicine. Angela really is energized by hard engineering problems. Compulsion doesn’t erase real engagement; for some people it layers on top of it, using the real love as cover for something that has quietly stopped being only about the love.

Mary Oliver’s question lands differently for someone caught in a compulsive pattern with work. Because if she’s honest, the answer is often: I plan to work. Not because work is the whole of a wild and precious life, but because anything outside of work can feel like standing in a field with no cover, exposed, uncomfortably close to something she’s been outrunning for a long time. The body sometimes registers the difference between engaged ambition and compulsion even when the mind doesn’t. Sustained compulsive overwork is associated with the physiological markers of chronic stress, disrupted sleep, a tight jaw, an elevated resting heart rate, in a way that engaged, well-boundaried ambition typically is not.

Both/And: Can You Love Your Work and Still Be Harmed by It?

One of the most important clinical moves I make with clients like Angela and Rana is refusing to collapse a complicated truth into a simple story. The simple story about a compulsive relationship to work goes one of two ways: either work is good and you’re admirably dedicated, or work is bad and you’re damaged and need to stop. Neither is useful. Neither is quite true.

The more accurate, and more compassionate, framing is the both/and. You can love your work AND be harmed by your relationship to it. You can be genuinely skilled and passionate in your field AND be using that field to avoid your interior life. Your work can be genuinely valuable to the people it serves AND be costing you your health, your relationships, and your capacity for joy. These aren’t contradictions that need resolving. They’re simultaneous truths that need holding.

Angela had been in therapy with me for about four months when she finally said it out loud. “I think I’ve been using work to not feel lonely,” she said, turning her coffee mug slowly on the table between us. “But I’ve also built genuinely good systems that thousands of people rely on every day. I’m proud of that. Both things can be true, right?”

Yes. Both things can be true.

What changes when you hold the both/and isn’t that you stop working or stop caring about your career. What changes is the quality of your relationship to the work. You stop needing it to do everything: to prove your worth, to regulate your nervous system, to answer the question of whether you matter. The work gets to be what it actually is: meaningful, demanding, something you’re good at, something that takes up real time and energy. Not a life raft. Not a drug. Work.

For driven women, this reframe is often quietly radical. It means acknowledging that you can be competent AND wounded, successful AND struggling, impressive to the outside world AND running low on the inside. The both/and frame doesn’t strip you of your accomplishments. It gives them back to you, made more yours, because you’re no longer compelled to achieve them.

It also means sitting with a question that can feel destabilizing at first: who are you when you’re not producing? Not as a threat, but as genuine curiosity. Recovery-oriented work with workaholism, where that framework fits a person’s experience, doesn’t require becoming less ambitious. It asks you to test, directly and slowly, whether your worth was ever actually contingent on your output in the first place. I can’t promise that testing resolves quickly, and I won’t promise a guaranteed outcome. What I can say, from years of sitting with women doing this work, is that the question itself tends to loosen something that felt fixed.

The Systemic Lens: Why Do We Celebrate the Thing That’s Hurting You?

Individual psychology doesn’t happen in a vacuum. A compulsive relationship to work among driven women, and it shows up often enough in my caseload that I no longer think of it as rare, can’t be fully understood without looking at the cultural, economic, and structural systems that produce it, tolerate it, and often actively reward it. This is not your unique failing. It’s a pattern, and the pattern has a structural origin.

The structural force worth naming plainly is an economic system that treats human beings largely as productive units. The language of that system, optimize, scale, invest in yourself, has moved into the most intimate corners of people’s lives. Productivity gets treated as virtue. Rest gets treated as waste. The driven woman who works eighty hours a week is not an aberration inside that system. In many workplaces, she’s close to its idealized product.

The mechanism works like this: these systems treat the nervous system as a resource to be managed, not a body to be inhabited, and they measure a person’s worth almost entirely by visible output. For women specifically, and particularly women of color moving through predominantly white professional environments, overwork is often not only internally driven but externally required. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, PhD, professor emerita at UC Berkeley, who coined the term “the second shift,” documented how women who work full days still carry the majority of domestic and emotional labor at home, meaning the overworking woman is frequently working everywhere, all the time, in ways rendered invisible by the assumption that her availability is simply part of what her role requires. A 2023 Lithuanian study of 964 employees found that perceived work addiction in parents and managers was associated with higher work addiction in employees, and that this association was notably stronger for women than for men, suggesting the modeling and expectations women absorb from both family and workplace may shape compulsive work patterns more heavily than they do for men (Morkevičiūtė and Endriulaitienė, 2023).

Now, back to the individual, with the absolution this deserves: you’re not broken, and you didn’t invent this pattern by yourself. The overworked woman is often celebrated rather than questioned. Her exhaustion gets called dedication. Her inability to stop gets called drive. Some of what feels like personal failure is the predictable cost of being a capable, emotionally unprotected woman inside systems that will take everything offered without ever asking if she’s okay.

And here’s the sensation test, because a structural point that stays abstract isn’t much use to you on a Tuesday. This shows up as the seven browser tabs still open at midnight. As the vacation you finally booked and then worked through anyway, laptop propped on a hotel desk. As the reflexive apology for taking a full lunch break. Naming the systemic dimension isn’t about letting go of individual responsibility for change. It’s about accuracy, about not asking a woman to heal in a vacuum from something actively reinforced by the water she swims in every day.

What Does Recovery-Oriented Support Actually Look Like?

I want to be direct about the limits of what I can promise here: there’s no research-backed guarantee that any particular approach resolves a compulsive relationship to work, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What research and clinical experience together suggest is that support tends to work at more than one level at once, and that healing, where it happens, tends to be gradual rather than sudden.

Support aimed at the nervous system level often involves learning to tolerate stillness without treating it as a threat. This sounds simple and is, in practice, one of the harder things many driven women have tried to do. The tools here are largely physiological: somatic practices, breath work, body-based therapies such as EMDR or sensorimotor psychotherapy, and a gradual reintroduction of rest as a felt nervous system experience rather than a permission a person grants herself cognitively. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist, trauma researcher, and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has argued across decades of clinical writing that trauma-related nervous system adaptations are encoded somatically, not only narratively, which is part of why talking about a pattern is necessary but often not sufficient on its own. His more recent research, including a 2024 study on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, continues to explore how directly engaging the body and nervous system, rather than cognition alone, changes traumatic self-experience over time (van der Kolk et al., 2024). That study examined a specific therapeutic intervention for PTSD; it wasn’t designed to test workaholism treatment, and I’m citing it here for what it says about body-based mechanisms of change generally, not as evidence for any specific workaholism protocol.

Support at the relational history level, where a compulsive work pattern traces back to childhood, often involves something like what Judith Herman calls the reconstruction of a trauma story, not rehearsing pain for its own sake, but making meaning of it, developing compassion for the adaptive strategies that once served a person, and slowly disentangling worth from performance. This work tends to happen best inside an actual therapeutic relationship, because the pattern being addressed is itself relational. A workbook can offer insight. A genuine therapeutic relationship offers something a nervous system can feel directly: the experience of being seen and valued as a person, not a producer.

Rana’s shift, six months into our work, showed up first in small, almost boring ways. She started leaving the hospital by 7 p.m. twice a week, then three times. She let a colleague cover a research call she would previously have taken herself. “I keep waiting for something bad to happen when I leave early,” she told me. “Nothing has happened yet.” I felt something loosen in my own chest hearing her say “yet,” the honesty of it, the refusal to promise herself more certainty than she actually had.

Support at the present-day level usually involves deliberate, often countercultural, structural changes to how a person inhabits her work: setting and protecting real limits, not because limits are morally superior, but because a dysregulated nervous system has a harder time settling while it’s in near-constant activation. It also often involves an honest look at which relationships, roles, or environments benefit from the compulsion and have a stake, consciously or not, in keeping a person inside it.

For Angela, the early stage of this work looked almost anticlimactic from the outside. She started taking twenty-minute walks without her phone on Sunday mornings. She began a standing Sunday evening call with her sister that she committed to protecting. She stopped checking Slack after 9 p.m., not because the impulse disappeared but because she decided, deliberately and imperfectly, to practice a different choice. None of this was graceful. She slipped back into fourteen-hour days more than once. But she also, for close to the first time in her adult life, started to notice what she actually felt, what she actually wanted, who she actually was when the calendar emptied out and the laptop closed.

“I’m starting to think I might like her,” she told me one day, meaning herself. “The version of me that doesn’t have anything to prove.” She said it while looking past me, out the window, the way people sometimes do when they’re not fully ready to watch your face react. Her coffee had gone cold on the small table between us. She didn’t reach for it.

If you recognize your own patterns in this guide, the most useful thing I can offer isn’t a promise of resolution; I can’t give you that honestly. What I can tell you is that support is available, that a compulsive relationship to work is a legitimate thing to bring into a therapy room, and that you don’t have to have a formal diagnosis to justify getting curious about it. Of course this is hard to look at directly. The habits that built your calendar built your career, too. That doesn’t mean they get the final word.

Related Reading

Aziz, Shahnaz, and Ciara Covington. “Beyond the 9-to-5 grind: workaholism and its potential influence on human health and disease.” Frontiers in Psychology 15 (2024): 1345378. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39569089/.

Andersen, Filip Borgen, Merjem Emma Torlo Djugum, Victoria Steen Sjastad, and Stale Pallesen. “The prevalence of workaholism: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2023): 1252373. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10643257/.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. Penguin Books, 2012.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. PMID: 40735382.
2. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. PMID: 38198456.
3. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. PMID: 19795402.
4. Aziz S, Covington C. Beyond the 9-to-5 grind: workaholism and its potential influence on human health and disease. Front Psychol. 2024;15:1345378. PMID: 39569089.
5. Andreassen CS, Pallesen S, Torsheim T. Workaholism as a Mediator between Work-Related Stressors and Health Outcomes. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2018;15(1):73. PMID: 29303969.
6. Shimazu A, Schaufeli WB, Taris TW. How does workaholism affect worker health and performance? The mediating role of coping. Int J Behav Med. 2010;17(2):154-160. PMID: 20169433.
7. Andersen FB, Djugum METS, Sjastad VS, Pallesen S. The prevalence of workaholism: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Front Psychol. 2023;14:1252373. PMCID: PMC10643257.
8. Shimazu A, Schaufeli WB, Kubota K, Kawakami N. Do workaholism and work engagement predict employee well-being and performance in opposite directions? Ind Health. 2012;50(4):316-321. PMID: 22673364.
9. Morkeviciute M, Endriulaitiene A. Explaining work addiction through perceived behaviors of significant others in a family and organization: Gender differences. 2023. PMID: 38071445.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. Penguin Books, 2012.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

Work With Annie

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