Why You Can’t Stop Working on Vacation
Why can’t so many driven women actually stop, even on vacation? Annie Wright, LMFT walks through the clinical story of Meredith, a physician who hadn’t taken a full day off in four years, to explain why the compulsion to keep producing is a nervous system alarm , not a mindset problem, and not a character flaw.
You’re on vacation. You are, at least technically, on vacation. You planned this trip seven months ago. You told your clients you’d be unavailable. You’re sitting in the airport about to head off to a beautiful European city and your laptop is open, tethered to your phone and you put your kids on the iPad so you could clear out the inbox.
Or…
Maybe you took the vacation and you didn’t open the laptop. You’ll tell people you unplugged completely , and in the technical sense, that’s true. What was also true: you spent the majority of the first four days worrying, feeling antsy, and calculating. Thinking constantly about the revenue you weren’t generating. The projects that would need to be caught up when you returned. The specific math of how much the trip cost against what the week would’ve earned.
You weren’t present on the vacation. You were arguing with the vacation in your head.
Or maybe for you it isn’t travel. Maybe it’s the Saturday morning that’s genuinely free , nothing on the calendar, nowhere to be, all reasonable obligations addressed , and you can’t sit in it. The restlessness starts within the first hour. The project that could be advanced. The email that could be sent. The forward motion that feels, when it’s not there, like something wrong.
You have a life most people would call successful. You can’t stop running inside it.
Look, this isn’t ambition. Or not only.
This is the specific exhaustion of a nervous system that never got the update that stopping was safe , that the floor wouldn’t open the moment the productivity stopped. It learned, in a household where instability was the weather, that movement was protection. That earning and proving and staying ahead of the moment you’d need to explain yourself wasn’t optional.
It was survival. And survival does not take vacations.
we were always in survival mode long after we didn’t need to be
, Rupi Kaur, Home Body, 2020
The house of our working lives , the income we’ve built, the reputation that arrived through sheer refusal to stop , sits on a foundation that was poured when the ground was still moving.
The relentlessness. The body that learned busyness was safety and that the moment you stopped would be the moment the original danger caught up with you.
That foundation doesn’t update when the account hits the savings target. It doesn’t know that the conditions have changed , because it was built before the conditions were conditions, before they were something you could leave behind.
It just knows what it learned: keep going.
And so you keep going. Everywhere you go.
Meet Meredith
(Names and identifying details in client vignettes have been changed for confidentiality.)
She mentioned it the way you mention something you’ve decided is just a personality trait.
What she mentioned was that she hadn’t taken a full day off in four years. Not sick days , she’d had sick days, technically. She meant a day where she hadn’t worked at all. Even vacations, the few she’d had, she’d been available. She’d brought the laptop. She’d checked in. The forward motion never quite stopped, which meant the vacation never quite qualified as one.
Meredith is 46. Family medicine physician in Hartford. Seventeen years in practice. Primary earner in a marriage with two teenagers and a household that functions because she makes it function.
She was good at her job in the specific way of women who learned early that competence was the safest available position. She was also, she told me, tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. She’d been trying to describe this to her internist and hadn’t found language for it.
Honestly? Not depression. Not burnout exactly. It was more like she couldn’t remember what it felt like to stop.
Her childhood had been defined by a father whose business failures had restructured the family’s life twice before she was fifteen. Not catastrophically , but consequentially. The moves. The way the household reorganized itself around the new math each time.
She remembered the specific choreography of the moves. The boxes labeled in her mother’s handwriting. The new schools where she’d learned to say her last name twice because no one caught it the first time. Her father in the kitchen with the phone book open, running numbers on the new area code.
She’d learned, without being taught, that the floor could open. That the only reliable protection was to earn enough, fast enough, to stay ahead of the moment it opened again.
She’d been doing this for 30 years. She was very good at it. She was also, she said in our third session, not sure she knew how to be a person who wasn’t doing it.
“I have the savings,” she said. “I have more savings than I probably need. I know that. And I still wake up…” She paused. “Like the first thought is always about money. What needs to be covered. What I need to make sure is funded. And I’m already running numbers before I’m even out of bed , and the numbers are fine , and I can’t stop running them.”
The running-before-out-of-bed.
That’s not a productivity habit. That’s the alarm. The same alarm that kept her safe when the floor was unreliable , running now in a body that’s rebuilt the floor and can’t feel what it built.
The Alarm That Won’t Turn Off
“As long as their map of the world is based on trauma, abuse, and neglect, people are likely to seek shortcuts to oblivion.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
Shortcuts to oblivion.
Translation: when the body’s default setting is threat, it’ll find ways to stay in motion , because motion is what it knows how to manage.
Think of it like a body that’s learned to use its own output the way another body might use a glass of wine at 9pm. A regulating substance. Not a choice.
Which is why, on a Tuesday afternoon, you can be in the school pickup line with your daughter in the backseat asking what’s for dinner , and your hand still goes to your phone before it goes to her hand. The reach for productivity isn’t moral failure. It’s pharmacology.
The nervous system is dosing itself.
A term from Pete Walker, MFT, describing one of the four trauma-response types in his framework (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) , the pull to always be producing as a way around the stillness that once felt unsafe.
In plain terms: if stopping has always felt dangerous, staying constantly busy is a way of managing that danger without ever having to name it.
The work isn’t only work. It’s the distance she keeps from the original silence where the original danger lived. And the silence is everywhere stopping would put her , including the airport she’s sitting in right now.
What this looks like on a regular weeknight: it’s 10:47pm. She’s already taken her supplements. She’s in the silk pajamas she bought on the recommendation of the Instagram account she follows about sleep hygiene. And she’s in bed with her phone, refreshing Slack , because being horizontal without input feels physically intolerable.
The laptop stays open because the laptop is between her and the silence.
And the silence is where the floor might open.
This was Meredith at 11pm on a Tuesday, three months into our work.
“I can’t fall asleep,” she said, “until I’ve checked the portal one more time. There’s nothing to check. I just have to look at it before my body will lie down.”
The portal was the laptop in the airport. It was the Saturday morning she couldn’t sit in. It was, in clinical terms, the substance her nervous system reached for so she wouldn’t have to feel what resting would make her feel.
Gabor Maté, MD, names the mechanism with a clarity I haven’t found anywhere else: “Despite all our love for our children, we did not know how to provide the stable milieu they required, having lacked some essential aspects of nurturing in our own early years.”
He’s talking about parenting. But what he’s describing , I see it in the consulting room constantly.
What we didn’t receive , the experience of a floor that held when you rested on it , we don’t know how to give ourselves. The body never learned that rest was possible. So it puts productivity where rest was supposed to go.
And the productivity works. It keeps the alarm quieter. It keeps the question of what’s underneath from getting loud enough to hear. So the body keeps reaching for it the way it would reach for anything that has reliably managed a threat.
For a lot of the women I work with , and I don’t know how else to say this , this pattern isn’t really a workaholism thing. It’s an alarm system that learned to fire before they could put words to what it was warning them about. And by the time they get to me , usually somewhere between 40 and 55 , it’s been firing 24 hours a day for so long they can’t remember what their baseline feels like without it.
You cannot be a mystic when you’re hustling all the time.
You can’t be a poet when you start to speak in certainties.
You can’t stay tender and connected when you hurl yourself through life
like being shot out of a cannon,
your very speed a weapon you wield to keep yourself safe.
, Shauna Niequist, Present Over Perfect
Where the Alarm Came From
Now here’s the ground that made the alarm this loud.
Meredith’s inability to stop wasn’t only her father’s business failures and the way her nervous system got wired by that instability. It was also a professional culture that has, for decades, built its productivity on top of women’s already-firing alarm systems.
The female physician who never goes off-call. The consultant whose worth gets measured by how always-on she is.
These aren’t coincidences. They’re structures that found a nervous system already running and put it to work.
Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back is the book I keep coming back to on this. She shows how professional cultures that rely on women’s labor have gotten the most out of them by trading on their commitment to the work , to the care that the work pretends to be about.
They didn’t need to create Meredith’s alarm. It was already running. They just gave it a performance review and wrote exceeds expectations in the comments section.
The alarm that fires before she’s out of bed is doing a job she’s never been paid for , and the institution has never named.
Both produced her. And both are counting on her to keep going.
What Changes When the Alarm Learns to Rest
I’m not saying the alarm was a mistake. I’m not saying stopping is simple, or that the silence isn’t real, or that the answer is a sabbatical this month.
What I’m saying: the relentlessness made sense AND it’s now running in a life where the original threat has largely passed. The alarm that read as ambition in public is running 24 hours a day in a body that built enough floor to rest on.
AND , stopping for an hour won’t open the floor. It never did. The body doesn’t know that yet. And it won’t know it from reasoning. It’ll only know it from experience , from stopping briefly and finding that the floor holds.
So OF COURSE you can’t stop. Of course you can’t.
What becomes possible when the nervous system begins to learn this: the Saturday morning can just be a Saturday morning. The first thought of the day isn’t a number.
Meredith described it eight months in. She was in her backyard on a Sunday afternoon, not doing anything, and she realized she’d been sitting there for twenty minutes without running the numbers.
“I wasn’t composing an email,” she said. “I wasn’t calculating anything. I was just… there.”
That’s what it feels like when the nervous system updates. Not a cure. Twenty minutes on a Sunday afternoon, the floor holding while she rested on it.
It is right and proper that women eke out, liberate, take, make, connive to get,
assert their right to go home.
Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings
not necessarily sustained in the mundane world:
wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry,
freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking.
, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves
A Practice for the Floor
Before you open the laptop on the vacation , before the Saturday restlessness sends you looking for something to do , try this.
Place both feet flat on the floor. Feel it. The actual floor. The one that’s holding you right now, in this moment, in this body that’s earned enough to rest on it.
Place one hand on your sternum. Hold it there for one breath.
Then, very quietly: The floor is not going to open. It never was going to open from resting. I can stay here for one more minute.
Then one more. And then one more.
The stopping doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in the minutes that pile up, where the floor held , and the alarm was wrong , and the body got, one more time, a piece of information it has been waiting to believe.
Q: Why can’t I relax, even on vacation?
A: For many driven women, the compulsion to keep working isn’t about ambition. It’s a nervous system alarm that learned, often in an unpredictable childhood, that stopping wasn’t safe , and that alarm doesn’t automatically update just because your adult life is stable now.
Q: What is the “flight type” in trauma responses?
A: A term from Pete Walker, MFT, describing a pattern of coping with early instability by always staying in motion and producing, as a way of avoiding a stillness that once felt unsafe.
Q: Is this just workaholism?
A: It can look identical to workaholism from the outside, but the underlying driver is often a nervous system that hasn’t learned it’s safe to stop, not a character trait or a lack of discipline.
Q: Why do driven women in caregiving and helping professions struggle with this so often?
A: Professional cultures in medicine, law, and other high-responsibility fields often reward being constantly available, which can reinforce an already-overactive nervous system alarm rather than questioning it.
Q: What actually helps someone learn to rest?
A: Not a sabbatical or a single vacation, but repeated small experiences of stopping and noticing that nothing bad happens , often supported by trauma-informed therapy that helps the body build that evidence over time.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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