How Does Workaholism Protect You From Feeling Your Emotions?

How Does Workaholism Protect You From Feeling Your Emotions?

HIGH PERFORMANCE & TRAUMA RESPONSES • April 12, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

It’s 6:47 AM and You’re Already Running

The Uber smells like pine air freshener and the driver has NPR on low. Neha, 39, a chief marketing officer at a health-tech startup, doesn’t hear any of it. Her phone is already lit up with Slack notifications and she’s moving through them the way other people move through morning coffee — automatically, without tasting anything. The city slides past the window. She doesn’t look up.

There’s a recital tonight. Her daughter’s second-grade music performance, the one she circled on the paper calendar her husband still keeps on the refrigerator because he knows she ignores digital reminders. She scheduled a product roadmap call over it — not by accident, not because she forgot. She scheduled the call because the recital required sitting in a school auditorium for forty-five minutes with nothing to do but be present. Nothing to do but feel.

Her husband told her last week that he feels like a roommate. Not angrily — that would have been easier to dismiss — but quietly, in the kitchen, while she was half-listening and scrolling. She cried for thirty seconds in the bathroom. Then she opened her laptop and stayed up until 2 AM refining a Q3 strategy deck that didn’t need to be touched.

What Neha is doing isn’t unusual. In my work with clients across Silicon Valley and beyond, I see it constantly: the calendar as emotional armor, productivity as preemptive numbing, the brilliant and driven woman who has engineered her life so thoroughly that stillness — and the feelings that live in stillness — almost never get the chance to surface. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a system. And once you understand how it works, you can start to dismantle it.

I’ve written before about the neuroscience of work addiction and the dopamine loops that keep driven women locked in compulsive productivity, and about how workaholism functions as a flight response rooted in early relational wounding. This post is about something different: not why you became a workaholic, but how the avoidance works moment to moment. The mechanics of the emotional shield itself. What specific feelings are being blocked. And what it costs you when you can never just sit with yourself.

What Is Experiential Avoidance?

In clinical psychology, there’s a concept that cuts right to the heart of what’s happening in Neha’s Uber: experiential avoidance. It’s not simply avoiding a situation. It’s avoiding your own internal experience — your thoughts, emotions, memories, body sensations — when those experiences feel too difficult, too overwhelming, or too threatening to be with.

The idea comes primarily from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes, PhD, psychologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. What Hayes and his colleagues found is that experiential avoidance isn’t just a bad habit — it’s one of the most robust predictors of psychological suffering across virtually every diagnostic category. The more we try to suppress, escape, or control our inner experience, the more that experience tends to amplify, intrude, and ultimately define us.

Work is an exquisitely effective tool for experiential avoidance. It provides cognitive absorption — a demanding task genuinely does occupy the prefrontal cortex, which can temporarily interrupt emotional processing. It provides social legitimacy: you’re not hiding from your grief, you’re being responsible. And it provides the illusion of forward movement — the sense that you’re doing something rather than drowning in something. For many of the driven, ambitious women I work with, workaholism isn’t laziness or selfishness or even pure ambition. It’s a sophisticated, largely unconscious strategy for not feeling.

What’s important to understand is that experiential avoidance doesn’t require conscious intent. You don’t sit in the Uber and think, I will now avoid my grief about my marriage by checking Slack. The strategy runs so deep and so automatically that the emotion never fully surfaces to be recognized. You feel vaguely irritable, vaguely hollow, vaguely disconnected — but the specific feelings underneath that vague static remain unreached. And that’s precisely the point.

The Neurobiology of Emotional Numbing Through Work

The body has its own logic here, and it doesn’t lie. When you’ve grown up in an environment where expressing emotions was unsafe — where showing fear, grief, or anger reliably led to punishment, dismissal, or loss of connection — your nervous system learns to intercept emotional signals before they reach full conscious awareness. The wiring runs very deep, and it doesn’t disappear just because you’re now an adult with a corner office and a solid income.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how early relational trauma disrupts the brain’s capacity to process and identify internal emotional states. The relevant concept here is alexithymia — literally “no words for feelings” — and it’s far more common in trauma survivors than is generally recognized. When you’ve spent years suppressing your emotional life, you don’t just get good at suppression. You actually lose access to the somatic signals that emotions are built from. You know that something is happening inside, but you can’t name it, locate it, or metabolize it. Work fills that gap — or rather, it prevents the gap from becoming impossible to ignore. (PMID: 9384857)

Bryan Robinson, PhD, licensed psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and author of Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World, has spent decades studying workaholism as a clinical phenomenon. His research consistently shows that it’s anxiety-driven at its core — the compulsion to produce isn’t primarily about love of work but about the intolerable discomfort of not working. When work stops, anxiety floods in. And beneath the anxiety, for most of the women I see clinically, are older, rawer feelings: grief, loneliness, terror, emptiness, rage.

This is why you can’t just tell yourself to slow down and have it work. The slowdown isn’t merely uncomfortable — it’s neurologically threatening. Your brain reads stillness as danger, because stillness is when the feelings come. The flight response that organized around relational danger in childhood doesn’t retire gracefully once the danger is gone. It finds new vehicles. Work is the most socially rewarded vehicle available.

What I see consistently is that the women who work the hardest are often the most emotionally disconnected — not because they’re cold or shallow, but because their emotional lives were the least safe thing about their childhood. They learned to live in their heads, in their outputs, in their productivity. The body — where feelings actually live — became foreign territory. The goal isn’t excitement or achievement. The goal is never having to go home to yourself. My post on childhood emotional neglect goes deeper into the roots of this pattern.

How Work Becomes Your Emotional Anesthetic

Let me be specific about the mechanics, because “using work to avoid feelings” can sound abstract until you see the micro-level reality of how it operates. Neha’s story is a good map. Notice what she actually did: she scheduled a work call over her daughter’s recital. Not over a dentist appointment, not over a boring errand. Over a moment that would have required her to sit in a room with nothing to do but be a mother who feels things. The recital wasn’t avoided because she doesn’t love her daughter. It was avoided because love, when it’s felt fully, also opens the door to grief, longing, regret, and the terror of impermanence.

This is the mechanism: driven and ambitious women don’t just work hard. They schedule against vulnerability. They fill the pockets of time where feelings might surface — weekend mornings, evenings after the kids are in bed, the space between tasks — with more tasks. A fully booked calendar is an emotional fortress. There’s never a gap long enough for grief to gather itself. There’s never a Sunday afternoon quiet enough for loneliness to speak. The work isn’t just work. It’s architecture.

The cognitive absorption piece matters too. When you’re genuinely absorbed in a complex problem — a product strategy, a brief, a financial model — the prefrontal cortex is fully occupied. Emotional processing requires the same neural resources. You can’t really do both at once, and work always wins that competition because it produces immediate, tangible, socially rewarded outcomes. Grief doesn’t produce anything visible. Sitting with loneliness doesn’t move a metric. The brain goes where reinforcement is, and reinforcement lives in the work.

And then there’s the phone. The moment of emotional arrival — the moment when a feeling starts to rise — has a window of maybe three to five seconds before the impulse to check email, open Slack, or scroll a news feed becomes overwhelming. That impulse isn’t boredom. It’s the nervous system routing away from internal experience and toward external stimulation before the feeling can fully form. What I see consistently is that this happens so quickly, so automatically, that most clients don’t register it as a choice. They feel the vibration and they answer it. The feeling never lands. It gets filed under “I’ll deal with that later” — and later never comes, because the phone always has more.

There’s also a subtler layer: the busyness identity. For many driven and ambitious women, particularly those who grew up in households where their worth was conditional on performance, being busy is not just a behavior — it’s who they are. It’s proof that they matter. Stopping, resting, or even slowing down doesn’t just feel anxious-making. It feels like ceasing to exist. When the work is the self, the prospect of a quiet Tuesday with nothing to produce isn’t peaceful. It’s annihilating. And no one consciously volunteers for annihilation, so the work continues. This dynamic is something I explore in depth in the context of perfectionism and trauma — because the two are almost always entangled in the same root system.

What specific feelings is all of this avoiding? In my clinical experience, the most commonly buried emotions in compulsively productive women are: grief — often about childhoods cut short, or longings for a parent who was never emotionally available; loneliness — the specific kind that comes from being surrounded by people who know your accomplishments but not your inner life; rage — at systems that demanded too much too soon, at caregivers who needed rather than nurtured; existential terror — the kind that says if I stop, I will fall and there will be nothing to catch me; and the hollow emptiness that follows every achievement and can’t be sated by more achievement. These aren’t signs of pathology. They’re signs of a person who was never given permission or safety to feel.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your relationship to productivity is neurologically driven, this self-assessment on whether your nervous system is running your career can be a useful place to start.

What Happens When the Shield Comes Down

Elaine, 44, is a corporate litigation partner. She spent twenty years building one of the most demanding careers available, logging seventy-hour weeks as a matter of course, developing a reputation for being unflappable in high-stakes depositions, and constructing a life in which there was simply never any time for the interior. She was, as she put it in our first session, “extremely functional.” And she was — until her firm’s wellness initiative offered her a two-week mandatory sabbatical, and the shield came down whether she wanted it to or not.

By day three, Elaine was having panic attacks. Not about anything specific — about the nothing. About the quiet of the house after her kids left for school. About the absence of a case to prepare, a brief to file, a crisis to manage. She reorganized her entire garage — alphabetically, by category. She deep-cleaned the grout in her master bathroom with a toothbrush. She assembled a “personal development reading list” and color-coded it in a new app. She signed up for a language learning platform and set daily goals with reminders. She was, in other words, productively processing her sabbatical. She had turned the vacation itself into a productivity project.

When her therapist asked what she was actually feeling during those two weeks, Elaine said “frustrated.” It was the only emotion word she could readily access — and it was a secondary emotion, a cover story. The real feeling underneath was grief. Grief about her mother, who had been emotionally absent throughout Elaine’s childhood — not cruel, not neglectful in the observable legal sense, just gone behind her own anxiety and preoccupation, unavailable for the particular kind of attunement that a child needs to develop the capacity to know and tolerate her own inner world. Elaine had spent twenty years building a career specifically designed to ensure she would never have to sit with that grief. The sabbatical removed her tools. And the grief was waiting.

This is what I mean when I say there’s a critical difference between thinking about feelings and actually feeling them. Elaine wasn’t unaware that her childhood had shaped her. She’d read the books. She could give you the framework — conditional love, anxious attachment, overachievement as emotional regulation. She could articulate it clearly at dinner parties. But articulating a feeling is not the same as experiencing it in your body, in the present moment, with all the visceral reality of a wave moving through you. Thinking about grief is an intellectual exercise. Feeling grief is a full-somatic event — the tightness in the throat, the pressure behind the eyes, the way the chest collapses slightly, the sound that sometimes comes out before you can stop it.

The sabbatical panic is one version of what happens when the shield comes down. Retirement is another — one of the more unexamined mental health crises among driven, ambitious women, who often discover that the identity scaffolding they’ve built over forty years is simply gone. Forced stillness through illness or injury is a third. In all these scenarios, what surfaces first isn’t clean, workable grief — it’s anxiety, irritability, and a compulsive reach for new productivity structures. A different kind of shield made from the same material. The actual feelings require time, safety, and a therapeutic container to become accessible. They surface slowly, the way water comes up through soil after a long rain.

Elaine’s story reflects a pattern I return to often when thinking about high-functioning anxiety — which is, in many cases, the psychological infrastructure that makes workaholism possible. The anxiety keeps the engine running. The work keeps the anxiety organized. And both of them, together, keep the deeper feelings permanently underground.

What I see consistently in my work with driven women is that emotional numbing — whether through overwork, compulsive productivity, or relentless achievement — is not a character flaw. It is a learned survival response, often developed long before these women entered their careers.

What I see consistently is that the women who hit these walls — sabbatical panic, retirement grief, illness-forced stillness — aren’t fragile. They’re the opposite of fragile. They’ve maintained extraordinarily high function under extraordinary internal pressure for years. What they haven’t built is the capacity to be with themselves when the pressure lifts. That capacity is not a luxury. It’s, ultimately, what determines whether life feels meaningful or merely accomplished. Understanding the recovery arc from C-PTSD can provide useful perspective on why this capacity takes time to build — and why that’s not a failing, just a reality.

Both/And: You Can Be Genuinely Passionate About Your Work and Still Be Using It to Avoid Your Inner Life

One of the most common defenses I encounter when I start talking about workaholism as emotional avoidance is this: “But I genuinely love my work. I’m not hiding — I’m thriving.” And I want to be clear: I believe that. I’ve worked with enough driven and ambitious women to know that the love of the work is real. The intellectual engagement is real. The sense of purpose, the craft, the meaning found in solving complex problems — all of that is genuine and worth honoring.

The Both/And framework asks you to hold two things at once: you can love what you do, AND you can be using it as a shield. These aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, the most effective emotional avoidance strategies are the ones that provide genuine reward alongside their protective function. If work were purely unpleasant, you’d stop doing it eventually. It’s precisely because it offers real engagement, real achievement, and real identity-reinforcement that it works so well as an anesthetic. The medicine tastes good. That’s what makes it hard to put down.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, psychotherapist and author of It’s Not Always Depression, offers a framework that I find particularly useful for naming this dynamic. Her Change Triangle distinguishes between core emotions — the biologically wired primary feelings that all humans carry — and the defensive structures that prevent us from accessing them. Core emotions include sadness, fear, anger, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement. Defenses are the behaviors, thoughts, and habits we deploy to avoid the discomfort of those core emotions. Work — when it functions as avoidance — is a defense. A highly sophisticated, deeply rewarded, culturally celebrated defense. But a defense nonetheless.

The Both/And lens matters because it removes the false binary that makes self-recognition so threatening. If acknowledging emotional avoidance means your passion was fake, or your achievements don’t count — the stakes are too high to look honestly at the pattern. But if it simply means you’ve been carrying more than you needed to carry, that there’s more of you available than you’ve been able to access — that’s something you can sit with. Both/And doesn’t diminish the work. It expands the person doing it.

This is also where the connection between workaholism and relational trauma becomes important to name. Many of the women I work with have experienced betrayal — by parents who were unreliable, by partners who withdrew — and the turn toward work is, in part, a turn away from the vulnerability intimacy requires. Work is loyal. Work doesn’t abandon you. Work rewards you in direct proportion to what you put in. For a woman whose early experiences taught her that love is conditional and unpredictable, work is the most trustworthy relationship available. That’s adaptive intelligence, not character flaw.

The Systemic Lens: Why We Reward Emotional Avoidance in Women Who Produce

I can’t talk about how workaholism functions as emotional avoidance without naming what the culture is doing while all of this is happening. Because the individual mechanism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a context that actively rewards it, celebrates it, and makes alternatives nearly invisible.

Women who produce at extraordinary levels are held up as models of success and leadership. The language used to describe them — “tireless,” “relentless,” “unstoppable” — borrows from the vocabulary of machines rather than humans. The implicit message: to the extent that you function like a machine, you’re admirable. The moment you become fully human — needing to grieve, to rest, to be present to your marriage or your body — you become a liability. A woman crying in the conference room is embarrassing. A woman who works through her father’s funeral is inspiring.

This isn’t accidental. The systems that extract maximum productivity from ambitious women are well served by those women’s emotional avoidance. When the culture praises a woman for “never taking a day off,” it’s rewarding a symptom of unresolved trauma — and doing so at scale.

There’s also a gendered emotional labor dimension worth naming. Women are socialized to read the room, manage the feelings of partners and children and colleagues, and be emotionally available for everyone in their orbit. Many driven and ambitious women become so attuned to other people’s emotional states that they have almost no attentional bandwidth left for their own. They’re consummate emotional managers for everyone except themselves. The inner life goes unattended not because they’re incapable of feeling, but because tending to others’ emotions has been so thoroughly internalized as their job that there’s nothing left over for the interior.

Neha knows everything about her husband’s workload, her daughter’s social dynamics, and her CEO’s state of mind. She doesn’t know what she’s grieving. The culture didn’t just fail to give her the tools to access that grief — it actively trained her to direct her attention outward, into productivity and service, and away from anything that might slow her down. This is not individual failing. It is a systemic feature of how emotionally intelligent, driven women are shaped and used.

For women in leadership, the stakes of emotional visibility are particularly high. Showing vulnerability can still — in many corporate and startup environments — be read as weakness or unsuitability for senior roles. So the women who most need permission to feel are operating in environments that make feeling professionally dangerous. The emotional avoidance isn’t just a private coping mechanism. It’s a rational adaptation to a context that hasn’t evolved fast enough to hold the full humanity of the women thriving within it.

How Therapy Helps You Feel What You’ve Been Running From

If you’ve read this far and you recognize yourself in Neha or Elaine — in the packed calendar, the bathroom cry, the sabbatical panic, the emotion word that only comes out as “frustrated” — I want to say something clearly: the goal of healing isn’t to become less productive or less driven. The goal is to develop the capacity to choose. To work because you want to, from genuine engagement and agency, rather than because stillness is unlivable. The work you do from that place is different, cleaner, more sustainable. And it doesn’t cost you your marriage, your body, or your sense of who you are outside the office.

The modalities most effective for this pattern work with the body and with actual present-moment emotional experience — because the problem isn’t that you don’t know about your feelings intellectually. The problem is that you can’t get to them somatically. Talk therapy that stays in the cognitive register often replicates the avoidance: it’s one more way to think about feelings rather than feel them.

Somatic therapy is foundational here. Work that helps you learn to track your body’s signals — the constriction in the chest that is actually sadness, the stomach tightening that is actually fear — builds the capacity to identify and tolerate emotions that have been bypassed for years or decades. It’s slow, careful work done in small increments, because the nervous system needs to learn that feeling is survivable before it will consent to more. Clinicians call this titration: moving toward difficult experience in manageable amounts, with enough resourcing to keep the nervous system out of survival mode.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is particularly well-suited to this pattern. It offers a compassionate framework for understanding the compulsive worker as a protector — a Manager, in IFS language — genuinely trying to keep you safe from the Exile’s pain. Working with that protector, understanding its positive intent, negotiating with it rather than attacking it, is far more effective than trying to override it with willpower. The Manager isn’t the enemy. It learned to protect you when you were small and the available tools were limited. It just needs to know that other tools exist now.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) addresses the specific attachment wounds underlying the avoidance pattern — experiences of emotional abandonment, longings for attunement that never came, early lessons about which emotions were permissible. These are stored not just as memories but as somatic templates shaping present-day responses. EMDR helps the brain process and update them, so that sitting still doesn’t trigger the same nervous system alarm it once did in childhood.

ACT offers a complementary approach: rather than trying to eliminate difficult emotions, it develops the capacity to have those emotions without fighting them. The goal, in Hayes’s framework, is psychological flexibility — the ability to be present to your experience, whatever it is, in service of what actually matters to you. For women whose workaholism is driven by the avoidance of grief or loneliness or rage, ACT’s values clarification work is often clarifying in the deepest sense. What matters to you beyond your productivity? That question, sat with rather than deflected, tends to change things.

If you’re wondering what beginning this work looks like, individual therapy with Annie or trauma-informed executive coaching are both designed for exactly this. Fixing the Foundations, Annie’s signature course, offers a more self-paced route for the woman whose schedule makes regular weekly sessions difficult. And the Strong & Stable newsletter is the Sunday conversation many readers describe as the most honest mental health writing they’ve encountered.

The feelings you’ve been running from aren’t going to destroy you. They’re going to complete something. They hold information about what you actually need, what you actually lost, what you’ve been carrying. They’re part of you — the part that was too inconvenient, too unsafe, too messy to have while you were building everything you’ve built. They’ve been waiting. And they can wait a little longer, until you have the support and the container to meet them. That’s what good therapy provides: not a flood, but a way through.

I want to end by saying something to the woman who read this post and recognized herself — who felt the familiar flicker of something true before the impulse to close the tab and get back to work arrived. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You built a extraordinary life using the tools you had, and one of those tools was the ability to move faster than your feelings. That tool served you. It kept you going when going was the only option. But you’re reading this because some part of you knows that there’s more available — more presence, more aliveness, more genuine connection — on the other side of finally slowing down long enough to feel what’s there. That part is right. And it’s not too late to listen to it.

If any of this lands close to home and you’re ready for clinical support, you can explore whether working together is the right fit.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. 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. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Iwakabe S, Edlin J, Fosha D, Thoma NC, Gretton H, Joseph AJ, et al. The long-term outcome of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy: 6- and 12-month follow-up results. Psychotherapy (Chic). 2022;59(3):431-446. doi:10.1037/pst0000441. PMID: 35653751.

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