Using Work to Outrun Your Feelings (Why Driven Women Are the Most Skilled at This)

BURNOUT & OVERFUNCTIONING • July 20, 2026

A Tuesday Night That Didn’t Need to Happen

It’s 9:52 on a Tuesday night, and Erika is still at her kitchen table with her laptop open. She’s 44, a director of client operations at a mid-sized logistics firm, and the email she’s answering could have waited until morning. She knows this. She’s telling herself this, even as she types. The house is quiet. Her husband went up an hour ago. The dishwasher finished its cycle a while back and nobody’s emptied it. She isn’t in crisis. Nothing is on fire at work. She just doesn’t feel like going upstairs yet.

In my work with clients, this is one of the patterns I see most often in driven women, and it’s one of the hardest to talk about honestly, because it doesn’t look like a problem from the outside. It looks like commitment. It looks like the thing that got Erika promoted four times in eleven years. Nobody at her office is worried about her. Her husband has mostly stopped commenting on it. The only person who’s started to wonder is Erika herself, mostly late at night, mostly alone with the laptop glow.

I want to be careful with the premise of this piece, because it’s easy to overstate. I’ve started to notice a pattern across many years of clinical work: driven women often become remarkably skilled at using productivity to keep certain feelings at a distance. That’s an observation from my clinical experience, not a diagnosis of any individual reader, and it’s absolutely not the only thing overworking can mean. Sometimes work is a place to avoid a feeling. Sometimes work is just work, and it’s a lot, and the two get confused with each other more often than people realize.

This piece is about untangling that confusion. Overworking can reflect emotional avoidance for some people. It can also reflect a demanding job, financial pressure, caregiving responsibilities you didn’t choose, discrimination that makes overperforming feel mandatory rather than optional, genuine ambition, a workplace culture that rewards burnout and calls it dedication, a neurodivergent brain that hyperfocuses under the right conditions, an anxious or depressed nervous system that finds tasks easier to tolerate than stillness, a substance use pattern that work happens to mask, or simply a habit built over twenty years of career life. Let’s look at the real differential, not the tidy story.

What Is Overworking, Actually?

Before we go further, it’s worth naming what overworking is not. It is not automatically workaholism. It is not automatically trauma. It is not automatically a sign that something happened to you in childhood. Those are all things overworking can sometimes point toward, and none of them is the default explanation. Treating every long workweek as evidence of a psychological wound tends to be just as inaccurate as treating every long workweek as harmless dedication.

Here’s a rough differential I use with clients, because the categories genuinely call for different responses.

• A temporary demanding season. A launch, a merger, a maternity leave you’re covering for a colleague, a home renovation on top of a full-time job. Intense, time-limited, and it ends.
• Workplace exploitation. Understaffing, unreasonable deadlines, a culture where saying no has real consequences. The problem here is structural, not personal, and no amount of individual boundary-setting fully solves it.
• Burnout. Chronic, unrelieved demand that has started to produce exhaustion, cynicism, and a drop in effectiveness, regardless of what’s driving the hours.
• A compulsive or avoidant pattern. Work that continues even when the external demand has eased, often because stopping brings up something the person would rather not feel.
• Ordinary career commitment. Genuinely enjoying demanding work, genuinely ambitious, genuinely fine. This category exists and gets erased too often in conversations like this one.

Most people I sit with are living in more than one of these categories at once, and figuring out which combination applies to them is the actual work, not a single label.

When Overworking Reflects the Job, Not the Person

Samantha is 39, a supply chain analyst, and when she describes her workweek to me it sounds less like a choice and more like a math problem with only one solution. Her company cut her team from six people to four last year and never adjusted the workload. She’s also the one who picks up her daughter from after-school care, because her husband’s schedule doesn’t flex the way hers technically should, on paper, but doesn’t in practice. “I’m not trying to prove anything,” she told me. “I just genuinely do not know how the work gets done if I don’t do the extra hours.”

This matters because a significant amount of overworking has nothing to do with an individual’s relationship to feelings. Cecilie Schou Andreassen, PhD, an organizational psychologist who has spent years studying workaholism at the University of Bergen, led a study with colleagues Ståle Pallesen and Torbjørn Torsheim that found work-related stressors were strongly associated with workaholism, explaining more than half the variance in workaholic behavior across the sample they studied (Andreassen, Pallesen, and Torsheim, “Workaholism as a Mediator Between Work-Related Stressors and Health Outcomes,” 2018). Read plainly, that finding says the job itself, not just the person doing it, is doing a lot of the work of producing overwork.

Job insecurity functions the same way. When people believe their position could be eliminated, working more becomes a rational hedge against that outcome, whether or not it’s a conscious calculation. Economic pressure operates similarly: a mortgage, tuition, aging parents who need financial support, a partner who’s between jobs. None of these require an unresolved feeling underneath them to explain the extra hours. They require rent.

Discrimination adds another layer that shows up constantly in my work with clients from underrepresented groups. Women, and especially women of color, often describe needing to overperform simply to receive the same recognition or benefit of the doubt that colleagues receive for ordinary competence. That’s not emotional avoidance. That’s an accurate read of an unequal environment, and treating it as a personal psychological pattern to fix, rather than a structural reality to name, risks blaming someone for correctly perceiving how their workplace actually works. If you’ve read my guide to good girl syndrome in driven women, you’ll recognize a related thread: the sense that competence has to be constantly re-earned rather than assumed.

Caregiving load belongs here too. Samantha’s extra hours aren’t just about her job. They’re about a household division of labor that leaves her doing more of the invisible logistics, which pushes her paid work later into the evening because the daytime hours are already spoken for. Overworking, in her case, is less a psychological pattern and more an arithmetic problem created by other people’s choices.

When Overworking Is a Compulsive or Avoidant Pattern

Erika’s version looked different when we got further into it. Her job wasn’t understaffed. Her income was stable. Nobody was requiring the hours she was putting in. What she described, a few sessions in, was harder to name: a specific restlessness that showed up the moment she sat down on the couch instead of at her laptop. “It’s not that I love the work,” she said. “It’s that if I stop, I have to just sit there. And I don’t love what shows up when I sit there.”

What shows up, for Erika, turned out to be a low hum of something between sadness and dread that she’d mostly avoided naming for years, connected to a marriage that had gone quiet in ways she hadn’t wanted to look at directly. Work gave her something to do instead of feeling that. This is one real version of overworking as avoidance, and it’s worth naming honestly, without turning it into a universal explanation for every long workday.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, a psychiatrist and trauma researcher, writes in his book The Body Keeps the Score about how people can become skilled at numbing their internal experience without necessarily using substances to do it, describing how some people learn to “hide from their selves” through constant activity rather than through anything more dramatic. I think about that phrase often in sessions like the ones I’ve had with Erika, not because everyone who overworks is doing this, but because when it is happening, it’s rarely conscious, and it’s rarely as simple as “I don’t want to feel my feelings.”

Pete Walker, MA, a psychotherapist who writes about complex trauma responses, describes a pattern he calls the flight response in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: a nervous system default toward constant motion and busyness as a way of managing internal distress. Walker’s framework doesn’t apply to everyone who works long hours, and I want to say that plainly, because it’s tempting to read a compelling framework and apply it everywhere. It applies to a specific subset of people whose activity has a driven, can’t-stop quality to it that persists even when there’s genuinely nothing left to do.

Gabor Maté, MD, a physician who writes about addiction, argues in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts that workaholism functions like other behavioral addictions in some people, in that the behavior temporarily relieves an uncomfortable internal state and gets reinforced by that relief, even as it costs the person something real over time. Maté’s argument is his clinical interpretation, not a settled diagnostic category, and I raise it here as one lens rather than the explanation, because that distinction matters for anyone reading this and wondering whether they have an “addiction” to work.

The tell, in my experience, isn’t the number of hours. It’s what happens when the hours stop. Some people relax. Some people feel restless, then anxious, then something underneath the anxiety that they’ll do almost anything to avoid sitting with. That second group is the one this section is actually describing, and it’s a real pattern, not the only one. If this pattern of staying constantly occupied sounds familiar, my guide to nervous system regulation covers some of what it can look like to build tolerance for stillness gradually, rather than all at once.

What Workaholism Is, and Isn’t

Workaholism is a real area of research, but it’s more contested and more specific than it sounds in casual conversation. Ko Matsudaira and colleagues, in a study of Japanese workers, found that people in the middle and high workaholism groups had significantly higher odds of depressive mood compared to a low workaholism group, with odds ratios of 1.93 and 3.62 respectively, along with elevated risk for disabling back pain and sickness absence tied to mental health problems (Matsudaira et al., “Workaholism as a Risk Factor for Depressive Mood, Disabling Back Pain, and Sickness Absence,” 2013). That’s a meaningful association, not proof that workaholism causes depression in every case, and not a reason to self-diagnose from a busy month.

Monica Molino, PhD, an organizational psychologist, along with colleagues Claudio Cortese and Chiara Ghislieri, studied the relationship between daily recovery and daily exhaustion, and found that the negative relationship between recovery and exhaustion was actually weaker in people with high workaholism than in people with low workaholism (Molino, Cortese, and Ghislieri, “Daily Effect of Recovery on Exhaustion: A Cross-Level Interaction Effect of Workaholism,” 2018). Their interpretation is worth sitting with: people high in workaholism may not benefit from recovery time the way other people do, possibly because they don’t fully disengage from work even during time off. That’s a different problem than simply not having enough vacation days.

None of this means every person who works a lot has workaholism, and none of it means workaholism, where it exists, is caused by any single thing. It’s worth saying directly: this article is not the place to diagnose yourself with workaholism, trauma, addiction, or nervous system dysregulation. Those are things a licensed clinician can help assess with you, ideally over more than one conversation, using more information than a blog post can ever have about your specific life. If a childhood pattern of overfunctioning feels relevant to your own story, my guide to childhood emotional neglect explores one possible thread, though it’s far from the only one worth considering.

Ambition, Neurodivergence, Mood, and Plain Habit

I want to widen this out further, because the conversation about overworking gets narrow fast, usually landing on either “you’re avoiding your feelings” or “you’re just ambitious,” when the actual field of possible explanations is much larger.

Ambition, on its own, is not a problem to be solved. Some people genuinely love their work, find it meaningful, and choose to prioritize it during a particular decade of their life. Treating every driven woman as secretly running from something does exactly what this piece is trying not to do: it pathologizes drive instead of examining it honestly. Erika loves parts of her job. That fact doesn’t cancel out the avoidance pattern she and I found underneath some of her hours. Both things are true about the same person.

Neurodivergence deserves real space here too. For some people with ADHD, work can provide a structure and stimulation level that’s genuinely regulating in a way that unstructured downtime isn’t, which can look identical to compulsive overworking from the outside while functioning very differently on the inside. Valeria Verrastro and colleagues, studying a sample of young Italian workers, found a complex interplay between childhood emotional abuse, neuroticism, perfectionism, and workaholism, with no significant differences by gender (Verrastro et al., “Childhood Emotional Abuse, Neuroticism, Perfectionism, and Workaholism in an Italian Sample of Young Workers,” 2024). I want to be precise about what that study shows: childhood emotional abuse was one factor among several in a complex model, not a required ingredient. Plenty of people in that same study likely scored high on workaholism without a childhood abuse history at all, through the neuroticism or perfectionism pathways alone, or through pathways the study didn’t measure.

Mood and anxiety symptoms complicate the picture further. Some people work compulsively because anxiety makes stillness intolerable, not because of a specific feeling they’re avoiding, but because their baseline anxious activation needs an outlet, and work is a socially rewarded one. Others use productivity to manage depressive symptoms, because accomplishing something, anything, provides brief relief from a flatness that unstructured time makes worse. And for some people, substance use is quietly present alongside the overwork, either as a way to come down at night or as a pattern that’s easier to hide inside a demanding schedule.

Finally, there’s habit, which gets almost no attention in conversations like this one and probably deserves more. Twenty years of a certain pace can simply become how a person operates, independent of any current emotional driver. If you built your identity and your nervous system’s baseline around a specific intensity level during your twenties, that pace doesn’t necessarily require an active psychological reason to continue into your forties. Sometimes the explanation really is closer to momentum than to meaning. If you recognize yourself in any of this, my piece on ambition as armor goes deeper into how these threads can coexist without one canceling out the others. And if perfectionism feels like part of your particular mix, my guide to perfectionism looks at a closely related pattern that often travels alongside overwork.

Both/And: Genuinely Demanding and Genuinely Avoidant

Here’s where I think most explanations of overworking go wrong: they pick a side. Either it’s the job’s fault, or it’s the person’s unresolved feelings. The more accurate answer, most of the time, is both/and.

Samantha’s situation illustrates this well. Her workload really is too heavy for her staffing level. That’s not in dispute. And, a few months into our work together, she also noticed something she hadn’t expected: even on weeks when the workload eased slightly, she kept finding extra tasks to fill the space. “I caught myself creating a project that didn’t need to exist yet,” she told me, sounding almost embarrassed. “The actual excuse for the hours went away for like ten days, and I just found something else.” Her overwork is genuinely structural. It also, some of the time, has a self-generated piece layered on top of the structural piece. Both are true, and neither cancels the other out.

Erika’s story runs the same both/and in the other direction. Her avoidance pattern is real. It’s also true that her company genuinely does reward extreme availability, that her director has explicitly praised her for answering emails at odd hours, and that turning down that reinforcement would have real career costs in her specific workplace. Removing the avoidance piece wouldn’t make her job stop rewarding overwork. Both pieces need attention, and neither piece, addressed alone, tells the whole story.

This both/and framing matters because it protects against two common mistakes. The first mistake is telling someone in a genuinely exploitative job that their overworking is really about their childhood, which lets the workplace off the hook entirely. The second mistake is telling someone with a real avoidance pattern that it’s purely their employer’s fault, which can leave the internal piece unexamined and unaddressed. Most people I work with need both conversations, not one instead of the other.

It’s also worth holding this: you can be proud of your work ethic and still wonder whether some of it is doing double duty as avoidance. Those aren’t contradictory positions. If you’re working through a related overfunctioning pattern in your closest relationships, my guide to boundaries covers ground that often overlaps with what shows up at work, and my complete guide to complex PTSD is worth a look if avoidance shows up in other areas of your life beyond work as well.

The Systemic Lens: A Culture That Rewards the Very Thing It Should Question

Samantha told me about a moment that’s stayed with me: her manager, during a particularly brutal quarter, sent the team a message praising everyone for “going above and beyond,” including a specific shoutout for people who’d answered emails over the weekend. “It was meant as a compliment,” she said. “And I remember reading it and feeling this weird mix of pride and dread, because I knew exactly what it meant for next quarter.”

This is where it’s worth zooming out from the individual level entirely. We work inside a culture that treats overwork as evidence of character, not as a symptom potentially worth examining. Busyness signals importance. Visible exhaustion gets read as commitment rather than as a warning sign. A person who works sixty hours a week is often more celebrated than a person who works forty and produces comparable results, regardless of what the extra twenty hours are actually accomplishing.

I think about that line often in the context of overwork specifically, not because every driven woman is addicted to her job in a clinical sense, but because it names something true about what gets lost when a life organizes itself entirely around production. A handmade, meaningful life includes rest, mess, unstructured time, and relationships that aren’t optimized for anything. Achievement culture has very little room for that, and it treats people who protect that room as though they’re underperforming.

Gendered expectations sharpen this further. Driven women are frequently rewarded for exactly the availability and overfunctioning that would be more actively discouraged, or at least more visibly noticed, in a male peer with the same title. Samantha’s manager didn’t send that message to punish anyone. He sent it because the culture around him has taught him that this is what good leadership sounds like. Nobody in that exchange was acting in bad faith, which is exactly why the pattern is so durable.

None of this erases the individual piece. It means the individual piece isn’t the whole story. A workplace culture that treats exhaustion as a virtue will keep producing overworked people regardless of how much individual therapy those people do, and individual therapy that ignores the culture a person works inside will keep running into the same wall every few months. My work with clients like Samantha and Erika usually has to hold both: what’s true about them, and what’s true about the environment they’re operating in. Neither conversation replaces the other.

When to Seek a Medical or Mental Health Evaluation

Most overworking, even the compulsive kind, doesn’t require an emergency response. A demanding quarter, a stretch of long hours during a life transition, a pattern you’re actively working on with a therapist: these are common, and they don’t automatically mean something has gone seriously wrong.

It’s worth getting evaluated by a physician, a licensed therapist, or both, if any of the following apply:

• You’re consistently sleeping five hours or fewer for weeks at a time and can’t seem to change that even when you try
• Your work pattern is causing real impairment: missed medical appointments, deteriorating relationships, physical health problems you’re ignoring, or a body that’s started sending clear warning signs
• You’ve noticed increased alcohol use, other substance use, or reliance on stimulants beyond your usual caffeine habit to keep going
• You’re experiencing persistent low mood, hopelessness, or a loss of interest in things you used to care about, alongside the overworking rather than instead of it
• People close to you have expressed real concern about your health, and part of you knows they’re not wrong
• You’ve tried to cut back and found that you genuinely cannot, even for a weekend, even when nothing urgent requires the hours

A good starting point is usually your primary care physician, who can screen for depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other medical contributors, and who can refer you to a therapist or psychiatrist if the picture points toward a condition that would benefit from targeted treatment. Persistent, severe overworking that resists change on your own is a reasonable and unremarkable reason to ask for help. It doesn’t require a crisis to justify the conversation.

If you’re having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or you’re worried about your safety, please reach out for support right now. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. If you’re outside the United States, please look up your local crisis line or go to your nearest emergency room. Severe depression can hide behind a demanding schedule for a long time, especially in people whose competence makes it hard for others to notice something is wrong. You don’t need to wait until the schedule collapses to ask for help.

What Tends to Help, Without Promising a Fix

I’m not going to close this piece with a five-step plan that resolves overworking, because for most people, that’s not an honest way to end it. What helps depends heavily on which category, or combination of categories, actually applies to you, and that’s been the point of this entire piece.

That said, a few things tend to help across most of the versions of this pattern. Naming the actual driver, rather than defaulting to the first explanation that comes to mind, tends to focus the work in a useful direction. If the driver is structural, workload, understaffing, discrimination, that work involves boundaries, negotiation, or in some cases a genuinely different job, not more self-examination. If the driver includes an avoidant piece, therapy that makes room for the feelings work has been keeping at bay tends to matter, alongside practical changes to the schedule. If a medical or psychiatric evaluation is warranted, getting one shortens the amount of time spent guessing.

Erika is still in the middle of this work. She hasn’t overhauled her schedule dramatically, and she told me she’s not sure she wants to, not yet. What’s changed is smaller: she’s started noticing the specific evenings when the extra hour at the laptop is about the work and the evenings when it’s about the couch. She doesn’t always choose differently once she notices. Some nights she still opens the laptop. But she told me recently that the noticing itself has started to feel like something, even on the nights nothing else changes.

Samantha’s path has looked different. She had a direct conversation with her manager about staffing, which didn’t fully solve the workload problem but did get her one additional part-time hire for the busiest quarter. She’s also started paying attention to the tasks she creates rather than the tasks that are actually required of her, which she describes as “annoying to notice and hard to stop.” Neither of these women has a finished story. That’s a more honest place to land than a promise that naming the pattern resolves it on a predictable timeline. For some people, understanding the driver changes the behavior fairly quickly. For others, the understanding arrives well before the behavior does, and the gap between the two is its own kind of work. Both are legitimate outcomes.

Warmly, Annie

If you’ve read this far and you’re still not sure which combination of causes applies to you, that’s a completely reasonable place to be. This is exactly the kind of pattern a good therapist helps untangle, over time, with more information than any single article can have about your specific life. If you’d like support thinking it through, you’re welcome to learn more about individual therapy or executive coaching, or to join the weekly conversation over on Strong & Stable.

Related Reading:

• Andreassen, Cecilie Schou, Ståle Pallesen, and Torbjørn Torsheim. “Workaholism as a Mediator Between Work-Related Stressors and Health Outcomes.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15, no. 1 (2018): 73. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29303969/
• Matsudaira, Ko, Akihito Shimazu, Tomoko Fujii, Kazumi Kubota, Takayuki Sawada, Norimasa Kikuchi, and Masaya Takahashi. “Workaholism as a Risk Factor for Depressive Mood, Disabling Back Pain, and Sickness Absence.” PLoS One 8, no. 9 (2013): e75140. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24086457/
• Molino, Monica, Claudio G. Cortese, and Chiara Ghislieri. “Daily Effect of Recovery on Exhaustion: A Cross-Level Interaction Effect of Workaholism.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15, no. 9 (2018): 1920. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30181447/
• Verrastro, Valeria, Francesca Cuzzocrea, Danilo Calaresi, and Valeria Saladino. “Childhood Emotional Abuse, Neuroticism, Perfectionism, and Workaholism in an Italian Sample of Young Workers.” Behavioral Sciences 14, no. 4 (2024): 291. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38667094/
• van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Lafayette, CA: Azure Coyote, 2013.

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