I Can’t Stop Working: Therapy for Workaholism

WORK & IDENTITY • July 21, 2026

The Laptop That Never Fully Closes

In my work with driven women over the past fifteen-plus years, I’ve sat across from a specific kind of exhaustion often enough that I’ve started to recognize its shape before the woman describing it has found the words for it herself. It isn’t the exhaustion of doing too much for too long, exactly, though that’s part of it. It’s the exhaustion of not being able to stop, even when stopping is available to her, even when she wants to stop, even when the stopping itself has started to feel like the thing she’s most afraid of.

Stacy is 42, the chief operating officer of a logistics startup she helped build from nine employees to ninety, and she’s sitting on her back porch on a Sunday evening in late September, laptop open on the patio table, a glass of wine going warm beside it because she forgot to drink it an hour ago. Her husband and kids are inside watching a movie without her. She can hear the muffled sound of it through the sliding door. She isn’t working on anything urgent. There’s no deadline tonight. She’s just reviewing a vendor contract that could wait until Tuesday, because reviewing it feels marginally better than sitting still, and sitting still, lately, feels like standing at the edge of something she doesn’t want to look at directly.

“I know how this sounds,” she tells me, weeks later, in our second session. “I built something real. I’m proud of it. And also I can’t remember the last time I finished a Sunday and felt like the day belonged to me instead of the company. I keep telling myself I’ll close the laptop after this one thing. There’s always one more thing.”

Sitting with Stacy that second session, I felt the pull of a question I try to slow down before answering, because it matters which door you open first. Is this a founder in a genuinely demanding entrepreneurial season, doing what founders do. Is this something closer to a compulsion that’s costing her more than she’s willing to name yet. Is it both, layered on top of each other in a way that no single framework fully explains. I didn’t know yet. That not-knowing is, I’d argue, the most honest place to start.

This guide exists because what’s happening to Stacy, and to the driven women I hear from who describe some version of the laptop that never fully closes, is rarely just one thing. It can be a business that genuinely requires this season of intensity. It can be financial pressure that isn’t optional. It can be a nervous system that learned, a long time ago, that stillness wasn’t safe. It can be depression wearing the costume of productivity, or an attention pattern that makes stopping mid-task feel physically impossible, or a dozen other things a blog post cannot diagnose. What this article can do is give you real language for a pattern researchers have been studying for decades, without pretending that language is the same thing as an answer about you specifically. If you’re also noticing this show up as a broader inability to downshift, I’ve written separately about the nervous system patterns underneath chronic overactivation, which is worth reading alongside this piece.

What Workaholism Actually Is, and Isn’t

I recently spent an afternoon rereading Malissa Clark, PhD’s research. She’s an industrial-organizational psychologist at the University of Georgia who directs the Healthy Work Lab, and her 2016 meta-analysis is one of the most-cited attempts to bring some order to a field that had, until then, been using a dozen different definitions of the same word. What stayed with me was her insistence that workaholism has to be measured on two separate axes: working excessively, meaning the sheer hours, and working compulsively, meaning the inner drive that makes it hard to stop even when the hours aren’t required. A person can score high on one and not the other. A surgeon in a demanding residency might work excessively without the compulsive piece. A person working a standard forty-hour week from home might still be unable to mentally close the laptop, in Clark’s framework, and that’s a meaningfully different problem.

This distinction matters enormously, and it’s the reason I want to say clearly, before going any further, that this article does not diagnose anyone. You cannot diagnose workaholism from hours worked alone, or from a feeling of guilt when resting, or from an inability to relax, or from a checklist you find online, including checklists I might describe here. Those are observations, not conclusions. A licensed clinician evaluating you directly, over time, with your full history, is the only person positioned to tell you what’s actually happening in your particular life. What follows are patterns, described by researchers and by what I’ve observed clinically, offered so you have language, not so you have a verdict.

Many Roads Into the Same Pattern

One of the most common mistakes I see, both in popular writing about workaholism and in the way driven women talk to themselves about their own overwork, is the assumption that there’s one explanation underneath it. Usually the assumed explanation is childhood trauma, or perfectionism, or a nervous system stuck in a threat response, or capitalism, or some tidy combination of all four. Sometimes one or more of those things is part of the picture. I want to be careful here, because I don’t think any responsible clinician can tell you, from a blog post, that your overwork comes from your childhood, or your attachment style, or a stress hormone, or an economic system, without knowing you. What I can offer instead is the range of roads that, in my clinical experience and in the research literature, tend to lead people into this same destination.

Employer demands are a real and sufficient explanation on their own for many people. Some jobs, and some seasons of some jobs, genuinely require more than a sustainable pace allows, and no amount of internal work changes the structural reality of an understaffed team or an unreasonable client expectation. Financial necessity is another. For a lot of people, especially those supporting family members, carrying debt, or working multiple jobs, overwork isn’t a psychological pattern to be examined so much as an accurate response to what survival currently costs. Caregiving responsibilities, whether for children, aging parents, or a partner with a health condition, can push someone into a schedule that looks identical to workaholism from the outside while having nothing to do with an inability to rest and everything to do with there being no one else to do the work.

Entrepreneurship has its own rhythm. Founders and business owners often move through genuine intensity cycles, a launch, a fundraise, a hiring crunch, that are time-limited and appropriate to the business’s actual needs, even when they look unsustainable from the outside. Cultural, class, and immigration-linked pressures shape this too. Someone who is the first in their family to hold a white-collar job, or who is sending money home, or who has watched a parent lose everything in an economic downturn, may relate to work and rest in ways that come from a real and reasonable read on how precarious stability actually is, not from a wound that needs fixing.

Then there are the clinical and neurological pieces, which deserve to be named without collapsing into each other. ADHD can make it genuinely difficult to stop a task once started, or to transition attention away from something absorbing, in a way that has nothing to do with willpower or unresolved feelings about achievement. Anxiety and obsessive-compulsive patterns can turn work into a place where checking, controlling, and redoing offer temporary relief from an intolerance of uncertainty. Depression sometimes hides inside overfunctioning, where staying busy is easier to tolerate than the flatness or hopelessness underneath it. Trauma-related symptoms, including hypervigilance and dissociation, can make constant activity feel safer than the stillness in which unwanted feelings or memories surface. Insomnia plays a role too. Plenty of people work at midnight not because they’re compulsively driven but because sleep simply isn’t available to them, and work is at least a productive use of wakefulness. Hypomania and mania can produce periods of intense, driven productivity that look like ambition but are a medical pattern requiring evaluation, not a personality trait. Stimulant medications, certain prescriptions, and substance use can also alter a person’s relationship to focus, sleep, and the ability to disengage from work in ways that deserve a doctor’s attention rather than a therapist’s alone.

And sometimes, the most honest answer is the simplest one: some people genuinely love their work, find real meaning and energy in it, and are not suffering, even if their hours would alarm an outside observer. Ordinary ambition is not a disorder. Part of what makes this topic hard to write about responsibly is resisting the urge to pathologize drive itself. The differentiation that matters clinically isn’t how many hours someone works. It’s whether the person doing the work still has access to choice, to rest, to relationships, and to a version of themselves that exists outside of output. If you’re trying to sort out which of these roads might apply to you, that sorting is genuinely difficult to do alone, and it’s part of what a licensed clinician, not a blog post, is positioned to help you think through.

How Compulsive Overwork Shows Up in Driven Women

Stacy came back for our fourth session with a spreadsheet. Not a metaphorical one. An actual spreadsheet, shared with me on her laptop screen, mapping every hour of her previous two weeks in fifteen-minute increments, color-coded by category. “I wanted you to see it,” she said, “because I don’t think I’m explaining it right when I just talk about it.” The spreadsheet showed what I’d already suspected: there was almost no white space. Even the categories labeled “family time” had a note attached, most of them some version of “answered email during.”

“My therapist before you told me I needed better boundaries,” she said, not quite meeting my eyes. “And I know that. I’ve read the books. I could write the boundaries book at this point. Knowing what a boundary is and being able to actually stop typing at eight p.m. are two completely different skills, and nobody’s explained to me why the second one is so much harder than the first.”

I felt something sit heavy in my chest, listening to her. Not because the spreadsheet surprised me. Because I recognized, underneath the businesslike presentation of it, a woman who had built an extraordinarily competent life on top of a habit she couldn’t locate the off-switch for, and who had started to suspect, correctly, that the problem wasn’t information. She already had the information. What she didn’t have was an explanation for why information wasn’t enough, and that gap is exactly where I’ve come to think the real clinical work happens. Not in teaching someone what a boundary is. In understanding what happens in her body and her history when she tries to hold one.

What I notice most often in driven women specifically is the way compulsive overwork gets protected by its own success. Stacy’s company was thriving. Her team respected her. By every external measure, whatever she was doing was working, and that’s precisely what makes it so hard to interrupt. Nobody stages an intervention for someone whose overwork is producing promotions. The costs, when they show up, tend to show up privately and slowly: a marriage that’s grown quietly distant, a body that’s stopped signaling hunger or fatigue reliably, a friendship that faded two years ago and she genuinely can’t remember when. None of that shows up on a performance review. This is part of why I think it’s worth reading about how burnout and overwork intersect for people in high-responsibility roles, since the two patterns often travel together without being identical. It’s also worth understanding how these patterns can trace back to earlier developmental experiences, not as a certainty about cause, but as one thread worth examining alongside everything else.

What the Body Does When It Can’t Turn Off

I want to be precise about what I mean when I say the body is involved in this, because it’s easy for that phrase to become a vague gesture rather than something specific and useful. Stephen Porges, PhD, the psychologist and neuroscientist who developed Polyvagal Theory, has spent decades mapping how the autonomic nervous system shifts between states of safety, activation, and shutdown, largely outside of conscious control. Reading his work, I keep coming back to one implication for the driven women I sit with: a nervous system that has spent years in a mobilized, task-oriented state can start to treat stillness itself as the unfamiliar, even threatening, condition. Not because rest is dangerous. Because the body has stopped recognizing it as safe. I’ve written at more length about how Polyvagal Theory explains this shift in plain language, since the concept is more useful once it’s translated out of academic terms.

Peter Levine, PhD, who developed Somatic Experiencing, and Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, both emphasize something I see constantly in my practice: change that happens only at the level of insight, without attention to what the body is doing in the moment of the pattern, tends not to hold. This is especially true for workaholism, which so often lives in the body before it shows up in a to-do list. The tight jaw. The braced shoulders. The shallow breath of someone perpetually bracing for the next demand. In sessions, we sometimes slow down enough to notice what a client’s body is actually doing right before she reaches for the laptop at eight p.m., not to interpret it, but simply to build the kind of awareness that creates a pause where there used to be none. That pause, small as it sounds, is often where change becomes possible. Not in a rule about hours. In the moment just before the automatic pattern takes over. This is also where somatic approaches to trauma treatment tend to focus, working with what the body is doing rather than only what the mind is thinking.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, who founded Internal Family Systems, writes about the mind as containing many internal parts, each formed for a reason and each carrying its own logic, rather than a single unified self making every decision. I find that framework useful, cautiously, when I think about the part of someone that keeps reaching for work at eight p.m. even when she consciously wants to stop. It’s rarely accurate to call that part lazy or broken or self-destructive. More often, in my experience, it’s a part that learned, at some point, that this behavior served a purpose, and that hasn’t yet been shown convincing evidence that the purpose is no longer needed. I’m describing a way of thinking about the pattern here, not prescribing a specific treatment, because what actually helps any individual person is something only that person and their own licensed clinician can work out together, over time. For readers curious about this framework specifically, I’ve written a separate piece on how Internal Family Systems concepts show up in work with driven women.

Both/And: You Can Be Excellent at Your Work AND Something Underneath It Needs Attention

Robyn is 44, a hospital administrator overseeing patient intake for a regional health system, and she came to our first session with a specific complaint: her sister had told her, at a family dinner, that she “never really left work,” and Robyn had spent the two weeks since turning that sentence over, unable to decide if it was unfair or exactly right. She’s been the primary earner in her household since her husband’s disability claim was approved four years ago. She also sends money to her mother most months. When she describes her schedule, there’s no single villain in it. There’s a genuinely demanding job, a genuine financial responsibility to two households, and, somewhere underneath both of those true things, something that Robyn herself named before I did: “Even on the one Saturday a month I have completely free, I find something. I don’t think it’s just the money anymore. I think there’s a part of me that doesn’t know how to be a person who isn’t producing something.”

I want to sit inside that sentence for a moment, because it captures something I think gets lost in a lot of writing about overwork, which tends to want a single, clean story. Robyn’s overwork is not only financial necessity, though the financial necessity is completely real and I’m not going to pretend it away. It is also not only a psychological pattern, though the pattern she’s describing, the discomfort with unproduced time, is real too. Both things are true at once, and neither one cancels the other out. She can be someone whose work genuinely, structurally cannot shrink right now, financially, given her family’s needs, and also be someone who might, with the right support, come to relate to the unavoidable hours differently, and find more room inside the smaller margins that do exist.

This is the heart of Both/And thinking, and it matters enormously here because the alternative, an Either/Or framing, tends to produce one of two unhelpful outcomes. Either the person concludes that because her overwork has a real structural cause, there’s nothing to examine internally, and she misses a chance to build more capacity for rest inside the constraints she does have. Or she concludes that because there’s an internal pattern worth examining, the structural pressures aren’t real, and ends up chasing a work-life balance that her actual financial and caregiving circumstances don’t currently support, which just adds shame to an already full plate. Robyn is not required to pick one explanation. She’s allowed to hold her financial reality and her relationship to stillness as two separate, simultaneously true threads, and to work on the one that’s actually workable without pretending the other doesn’t exist. This is the same Both/And logic I return to often when I write about complex trauma more broadly, where structural and internal explanations sit side by side rather than competing.

What we’ve been doing together, slowly, is smaller than either of us expected going in. Not a plan to quit her job, or hire more help she can’t currently afford, or achieve some fantasy of balance that doesn’t map to her actual life. Just noticing, in real time, the moment she reaches for a task on the one Saturday she has. Not stopping her. Just noticing, out loud, with someone else in the room. “I did the thing,” she told me recently, describing a Saturday where she caught herself opening her laptop an hour after promising herself she wouldn’t, and closed it again. “I don’t know if that counts as progress. It felt like something, though.” I told her it counts.

The Systemic Lens: What the Culture Actually Rewards

None of this happens in a vacuum, and I think it’s worth naming directly, in a section of its own, how much of the professional culture surrounding driven women is structured to reward exactly the symptoms that concern us clinically, while calling them virtues. Dedication. Commitment. Going above and beyond. A woman who answers email at eleven p.m. gets praised as reliable. A woman who takes her full vacation and is genuinely unreachable sometimes gets quietly read as less committed, even when nobody says that out loud. That mismatch between what gets rewarded and what actually sustains a person over a career and a life is not something any individual woman created, and it’s not something she can dismantle alone by working on her own habits. Some of what I see clinically overlaps with what I’ve described elsewhere as learning to recognize a nervous system’s old survival logic rather than treating every hard feeling as a problem to eliminate.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist and trauma researcher, has written about how entire cultures, not just individuals, can organize themselves around chronic activation, treating constant busyness as normal rather than as a signal worth examining. I think about that claim often in the context of professional environments that run on a founder mythology, a hustle-culture Instagram feed, or a client-service industry where availability at all hours has quietly become the unwritten job requirement. Recognizing that pressure is structural, not a personal failing, doesn’t make individual change unnecessary. It does mean a person can stop blaming herself entirely for a problem that was never hers alone to create, and it means any real solution has to include, at some level, honest conversations about what a workplace or an industry is actually asking of the people inside it.

I’ll also say, because it matters for accuracy, that I’m not claiming this dynamic affects only women, or that every driven woman experiences it the same way. What I can speak to, from the specific population I work with clinically, is that many of the driven women I see are working inside professional cultures where the reward structures and the health costs of overwork are frequently misaligned, and that naming the structural piece tends to relieve a layer of shame that was never doing anyone any good. If this systemic thread interests you, I’ve written more broadly about why so many driven women stay disconnected from their bodies as a related pattern worth understanding.

When to Get Immediate Help

Before I move into what therapy and coaching can offer, I want to be direct about something more urgent. Nothing in this article is designed to help you assess an emergency, and if any of the following apply to you right now, please seek immediate medical or emergency evaluation rather than continuing to read: new or severe sleep loss that has gone on for more than a few days, chest pain or other symptoms that could indicate a cardiac or medical emergency, symptoms of mania or psychosis, a substance use crisis, thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or any situation where you feel unable to function or keep yourself safe. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, or call 911 if you or someone else is in immediate danger. These situations require licensed, in-person evaluation, not a blog post, and there is no shame in needing that level of care.

What Therapy and Coaching Can Actually Offer

I think it’s important to end this piece with honesty about what support can and cannot promise, because overpromising is its own kind of harm, especially to women who are already used to being sold certainty. Therapy can offer a structured, confidential space to look at your relationship to work, rest, and identity, with a licensed clinician trained to help you understand your own patterns more clearly. It can help you build capacity for the moments of stillness that currently feel unbearable. It does not guarantee that you will work fewer hours, sleep better, improve a relationship, or advance your career. Those outcomes depend on far more than what happens in a session, including circumstances a therapist has no control over.

Coaching, including the executive and personal coaching I offer, is a different kind of support entirely. It’s educational and developmental, not a diagnostic or treatment service, and it isn’t a substitute for therapy or medical care when those are what’s actually needed. What it can offer is a structured thinking partnership around sustainability, leadership demands, and the decisions in front of you right now, with someone trained in trauma-informed practice who isn’t going to hand you a generic productivity framework.

What I keep coming back to, watching women like Stacy and Robyn do this work over months rather than weeks, is that the goal was never to become a person who works less as a performance for someone else’s approval. It was to build enough internal room that when the laptop is finally, actually closed, some part of her can be present for what’s on the other side of it. That’s a slower, less dramatic outcome than the internet’s promise of a hustle-culture detox in thirty days. It also happens to be the only version I’ve seen actually last.

If any part of what you’ve read here felt uncomfortably familiar, that discomfort is worth paying attention to, not as a verdict on who you are, but as information. You don’t have to have a complete explanation before you’re allowed to ask for support. You’re allowed to start with the discomfort itself. If part of what you’re noticing involves difficulty holding limits with people who take more than you can sustainably give, that pattern often connects to what I’ve written about boundaries and why they’re so much harder to practice than to understand intellectually, and to the broader question of how relational trauma therapy approaches this work over time.

Warmly, Annie

Related Reading

• Andreassen, Cecilie Schou, Mark D. Griffiths, Jørn Hetland, and Ståle Pallesen. “Development of a Work Addiction Scale.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, no. 3 (2012): 265-272. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68-78. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Clark, Malissa A., Jesse S. Michel, Ludmila Zhdanova, Shuang Y. Pui, and Boris B. Baltes. “All Work and No Play? A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Correlates and Outcomes of Workaholism.” Journal of Management 42, no. 7 (2016): 1836-1873. journals.sagepub.com
• Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

Medical Disclaimer