Therapy for Workaholics: When Work Becomes a Coping Mechanism
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Therapy for Workaholics: When Work Becomes a Coping Mechanism

7 March 2026
•
12 min read

You're the last to leave the office. You check emails at 11pm. On holiday you still work "just for a couple of hours." Your partner says they feel like they come second to your job. And you know they're right.

But you don't know how to stop.

This isn't ambition. Ambitious people choose to work hard. What you're describing is compulsion—a pull towards work that operates less like a decision and more like a reflex. Something that fills you with unease when it's not happening. Something that has crowded out other things—rest, intimacy, pleasure, yourself—and that you've tried, more than once, to change without lasting success.

That is workaholism. And it responds well to therapy.

Therapy for Workaholics: When Work Becomes a Coping Mechanism

Contents

What Workaholism Actually Is

Workaholism is not having a demanding job. It is not working hard during a busy period. It is not genuine dedication to meaningful work.

The defining feature of workaholism—as distinguished from legitimate high performance or even healthy passion for work—is its compulsive quality. The workaholic isn't primarily choosing to work. They are driven to work, often against their own better judgement, in a way that produces anxiety or distress when curtailed.

Bryan Robinson, professor and psychotherapist who has studied work addiction for decades, describes it as "an obsessive-compulsive type of behaviour" in which work is used not for the pleasure of work itself but as a mechanism for managing internal states. When you strip away the cultural narrative of success, what you often find is a person running from something—anxiety, emptiness, fear of intimacy, a sense of fundamental inadequacy—and using busyness as an anaesthetic.

The clinical term "work addiction" is increasingly used in psychological literature, though it doesn't appear as a formal DSM diagnosis. Research by Cecilie Andreassen at the University of Bergen produced the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, which assesses workaholism against criteria including: thinking about how to free up more time to work; spending more time working than originally intended; working in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness, or depression; being told by others to reduce work without heeding that advice.

By these criteria, workaholism is meaningfully distinct from high ambition—and meaningfully similar to other behavioural addictions.

How Common Is It?

Prevalence estimates vary, but studies suggest somewhere between 8% and 17% of working adults meet criteria for workaholism, with higher rates in certain professional cultures—finance, law, medicine, tech, and academia particularly.

What makes workaholism distinctive is that it tends to be celebrated rather than flagged as a problem. We live in a culture that rewards overwork, that treats exhaustion as a badge of commitment, that has in recent years coined "hustle culture" as an aspiration. This cultural backdrop makes workaholism very difficult to recognise—both for the person experiencing it and for those around them.

It also means that seeking help for workaholism can feel counterintuitive, even embarrassing. People find it easier to seek therapy for depression or anxiety than for a behaviour that most of their professional community would consider admirable.

What's Really Driving It

Understanding workaholism requires looking underneath the behaviour. What function is the work serving?

Managing anxiety

For many workaholics, work is primarily an anxiety management strategy. Staying busy prevents the mind from settling into the rumination, dread, or emptiness that emerges in stillness. There is always a next task, a next email, a next project. The treadmill must keep running.

The problem is that this strategy provides only temporary relief. The anxiety returns whenever work stops—which drives more work, which provides brief relief, which is followed by more anxiety. It's a loop that tightens over time.

Identity investment

"What do you do?" is often, in professional circles, shorthand for "who are you?" When work becomes the primary vehicle for identity—when your sense of who you are is inseparable from what you achieve professionally—you can't stop working without facing the terrifying question: who am I, if not this?

This is particularly common among high-achieving people in high-status fields, and among those whose families or communities placed significant weight on professional achievement.

Worth through productivity

Closely related to identity is the equation of worth with output. The belief—usually not consciously articulated but deeply felt—that you are only valuable insofar as you are producing. That rest is earned, not inherent. That being without a task means being without value.

This often has roots in conditional approval in childhood—a sense that love and recognition were given in response to achievement and withheld in its absence. The adult workaholic has simply internalised this dynamic and now administers it themselves.

Avoiding intimacy, relationships, and feelings

Work is an excellent escape route. Being busy provides a socially acceptable reason to be unavailable—to your partner, your children, your friends, yourself. It fills the space where intimacy would otherwise be, and where difficult feelings would arise.

For people who find closeness threatening, or who carry unprocessed emotional pain, workaholism can serve as highly effective avoidance.

Perfectionism

Many workaholics are also perfectionists. The work is never quite done; it can always be better. Another revision, another check, another hour. Perfectionism drives working beyond reasonable limits and makes stopping feel unsafe. Our piece on perfectionism and self-worth explores this overlap in detail.

Family modelling

Some people simply grew up in households where overwork was normal—where parents modelled work as the primary adult activity, where the implicit message was that hard work was the most important virtue. This isn't necessarily damaging on its own, but it becomes problematic when it's the only model available.

Signs You Might Be a Workaholic

The following aren't meant as a clinical assessment—but if several resonate, it's worth looking more carefully.

  • You feel anxious, guilty, or restless when you're not working
  • You regularly work beyond what the job actually requires
  • You check work communications first thing in the morning and last thing at night
  • You struggle to be fully present in non-work contexts because work is on your mind
  • You cancel or cut short social engagements for work reasons, regularly and without much distress
  • Holidays feel uncomfortable rather than restorative; you often work on them
  • You measure days by what you achieved, and feel bad about yourself on "unproductive" days
  • You use work as a way to avoid difficult conversations or situations at home
  • You've been told by people you care about that you work too much
  • You've tried to change this—to work less, to disconnect—and found it consistently difficult
  • You feel a sense of emptiness or purposelessness when work isn't available (weekends, holidays, illness)
  • Your physical health is suffering—sleep problems, exhaustion, physical symptoms related to stress

The True Cost of Workaholism

Despite the cultural rewards it receives, workaholism extracts significant costs.

Health: The link between chronic overwork and physical health problems is well-established. Cardiovascular disease, immune function, sleep disruption, digestive problems, and elevated cortisol levels are all associated with sustained overwork. A major study in The Lancet found that working 55 or more hours per week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of heart disease compared with working 35–40 hours.

Relationships: Workaholism creates consistent unavailability. Partners feel neglected and secondary. Children grow up with an absent parent who is physically present but elsewhere. Friendships atrophy from neglect. The relationships that tend to matter most in retrospect—at the end of a life—are precisely those that workaholism damages most.

Creativity and performance: Paradoxically, the workaholic often underperforms compared to their potential. Creativity requires rest and incubation. Problem-solving improves with breaks. Sustained overwork degrades concentration, judgement, and innovative thinking. The extra hours often produce diminishing or negative returns.

Eventual burnout: Workaholism that continues long enough produces breakdown. The body and mind have real limits. Burnout is not weakness—it is the predictable endpoint of sustained overload. You can read more about stress, burnout, and therapy in our dedicated guide.

How Therapy Addresses Workaholism

Therapy for workaholism isn't about being told to work less. It's about understanding what the work is for—and developing a relationship with yourself, and with work, that isn't driven by anxiety or compulsion.

Person-centred therapy: exploring identity beyond productivity

Person-centred work creates space to sit with the question of who you are when you're not achieving. This can feel deeply uncomfortable at first—which is itself informative. The discomfort reveals how much identity has been bundled into professional output.

Gradually, through the experience of being accepted in the therapeutic relationship precisely as a person rather than as a set of accomplishments, it becomes possible to develop a sense of self that isn't entirely contingent on performance.

Transactional Analysis: recognising Driver scripts

TA identifies a set of unconscious motivational patterns called Drivers—automatic scripts absorbed in childhood that shape how we believe we need to behave to be acceptable. Three are particularly relevant to workaholism:

  • "Be Perfect": The relentless pursuit of flawlessness, the sense that anything less than perfect is failure.
  • "Try Hard": The sense that effort itself is virtuous, that you must always be working or trying, that achievement is less important than the act of striving.
  • "Please People": The need to meet others' expectations, to deliver what's asked, to avoid disappointing anyone—which in a work context can manifest as saying yes to everything and never adequately protecting your own limits.

Understanding which Drivers are active, where they came from, and how to relate to them more consciously is often central to change.

Gestalt: what is work helping you avoid?

Gestalt therapy asks directly what's happening in the here-and-now—including what happens in the body when work is taken away. What feelings arise in stillness? What does the workaholic encounter in absence of activity that's so threatening it must be covered over?

This might be grief, loneliness, anxiety, existential emptiness, or the echo of an old experience of worthlessness. Bringing these into awareness—with the support of a therapist who can help contain them—is often more transformative than any amount of time-management strategy.

Humanistic: intrinsic worth vs conditional worth

The humanistic tradition distinguishes between intrinsic worth—value that exists because you exist, as a human being—and conditional worth—value that must be earned through performance, achievement, and approval.

Workaholism is driven by conditional worth. The long work of humanistic therapy is building a sense of self-worth that isn't at the mercy of the next achievement—that persists through stillness, through failure, through a day when nothing productive happened. This is the kind of work that setting boundaries also requires: the belief that you have a right to limits.

The Anxiety Underneath

Most workaholism, when examined carefully, has anxiety at its centre. The busyness is a way of staying ahead of the anxiety—of keeping the internal noise below the threshold at which it becomes impossible to ignore.

This is important therapeutically because it means that addressing the anxiety—rather than simply addressing the work behaviour—is often where the most durable change occurs. When the anxiety becomes manageable by other means, the compulsive pull of work naturally reduces.

This doesn't happen overnight. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of stillness, to develop other ways of managing anxious feelings, and to gradually build trust that nothing catastrophic will happen if you stop—this takes time and consistency. But it's the kind of change that actually lasts.

Workaholism and Childhood

Many of the patterns that drive workaholism have their roots in early experience. Some questions worth sitting with—perhaps in therapy:

  • Was love or approval in your family conditional on achievement or "being good"?
  • Were one or both parents workaholics? What message did that send about how adults should live?
  • Was busyness modelled as the only acceptable state—was rest treated as laziness?
  • Did you learn that your worth was something that had to be demonstrated rather than assumed?
  • Were emotions discouraged in favour of getting on with things?

These aren't questions to answer with blame—families are complicated and parents are people. But they're worth exploring, because the patterns absorbed in childhood continue to run until they're examined.

What Change Looks Like

Change in workaholism doesn't look like becoming a different kind of worker overnight. It's more gradual, more internal, and more interesting than that.

Early signs of change often include: beginning to notice the anxiety without immediately acting on it; being able to stop work for the evening without it feeling like an emergency; finding that the restlessness in stillness has slightly less grip.

Later shifts often involve a clearer sense of identity separate from professional role; more authentic presence in relationships; the ability to genuinely enjoy rest or leisure without guilt; and a relationship with work that is motivated by meaning and genuine engagement rather than compulsion.

The goal isn't to work less, necessarily—some people do genuinely love their work. The goal is freedom from compulsion: doing what you choose, not what you can't stop doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is workaholism a real addiction?

Psychologically, yes—in the sense that it shares core features with other behavioural addictions: compulsive engagement despite negative consequences, withdrawal symptoms (anxiety, restlessness) when the behaviour is stopped, failed attempts to cut back, and use of the behaviour to regulate emotional states. Whether it meets formal diagnostic criteria for addiction is less important than whether it's causing problems in your life that you can't easily resolve yourself.

Should I take time off before starting therapy?

Not necessarily. Therapy doesn't require you to have already reduced your work hours. In fact, beginning therapy while still in the pattern is often more useful—you can observe and examine the pull towards work in real time. Taking time off before therapy is fine if circumstances allow, but it's not a prerequisite.

What if my job genuinely requires this level of work?

It's worth examining this assumption carefully. Some jobs do involve intense periods. But sustained, chronic overwork is rarely literally required—it is often a product of culture, identity, and the absence of limits more than genuine necessity. Even if your job does demand a lot, therapy can help you understand your relationship with those demands and develop sustainable ways of managing them.

Can workaholism affect my relationship permanently?

It can do significant damage. Partners of workaholics often describe feelings of loneliness, neglect, and coming second—and these experiences have real cumulative effects. Whether the relationship can recover depends on many factors, including the degree of harm and the willingness of both partners to engage with what needs to change. Individual therapy for the workaholic, and couples therapy if both partners are willing, can both be valuable.

What if I enjoy my work—does that mean I'm not a workaholic?

Genuine enjoyment of work is not the same as workaholism, and many people love their work without being addicted to it. The key question is whether you have a genuine choice about how much you work, or whether the work is driven by anxiety, compulsion, or identity need in a way that overrides your own preferences and judgement. You can love your work and still be a workaholic—the love is real, but so is the compulsion.

Finding a Different Relationship with Work at Kicks Therapy

If work has become something you can't put down—if the busyness is filling something it was never quite designed to fill—therapy can help you understand what's happening and begin to find a different way.

At Kicks Therapy, Annabel works with a humanistic, integrative approach that's well-suited to the work underneath workaholism: the anxiety, the identity questions, the patterns absorbed long before you took your first job. Her training in person-centred therapy, Gestalt, and Transactional Analysis gives her a rich set of frameworks for this kind of exploration.

Sessions are available in person in Fulham (SW6) or via Zoom, Monday to Friday, 9am–8pm. Initial consultations are free, and there's no obligation to proceed. To get in touch, visit the contact page or call 07887 376 839.

About the Author: This article was written by the Kicks Therapy Content Team in collaboration with Annabel, BACP-registered integrative therapist and founder of Kicks Therapy. Annabel holds a BSc (Hons) in Humanistic Counselling from the Metanoia Institute and works with adults in Fulham and online.

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Related Topics:

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