Why Overworking Hurts Your Mental Health and Relationships and How Therapy in Los Angeles Can Help
We live in a world that glorifies the grind. The phrase “I’m so busy” has become a strange kind of status symbol; it is a way to signal success, competence, and drive. In our culture, slowing down can feel almost shameful, as if rest means you’re falling behind. But when your sense of worth is tied to your productivity, it’s only a matter of time before the very thing that helps you “succeed” starts to harm your mental health, relationships, and sense of self.
As a therapist in Hermosa Beach, I see this all the time: smart, motivated, high-functioning people who are completely burnt out. They’ve built careers, raised families, managed responsibilities, and somewhere along the way, lost themselves. They tell me things like, “I can’t stop working,” or “I feel guilty when I rest.” They know it’s unsustainable, but the idea of slowing down brings up anxiety or fear. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone and this pattern is something therapy can help you unwind.
Whether you come to therapy in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, or seek online therapy in California, this work is about more than just learning time management. It’s about healing the deeper emotional wiring that keeps you running on empty.
Why We Stay Busy: The Emotional Roots of Overworking
Overworking often masquerades as ambition, but beneath it is usually something more tender: fear, shame or a lifelong belief that you have to earn your worth. When you grew up equating love or approval with achievement, your nervous system learned that safety comes from doing, not being.
So, you stay busy because stillness feels unsafe.
You say “yes” to everything because saying “no” feels selfish.
You overextend yourself because the thought of disappointing someone is unbearable.
In therapy when we work though our attachment wounds , we often explore how early relational patterns shape these behaviors. For example, if you were praised for being the “responsible one” or the “helper,” you likely internalized that your value came from what you could do for others. As an adult, this can manifest as overworking, over-giving, or feeling guilty for having needs.
Therapy helps you name these patterns and not to judge them, but to understand how they were once adaptive. That awareness is the first step in loosening their grip.
The Cultural Trap of “Success”
Our culture doesn’t make it easy to slow down. We glorify the hustle and subtly shame rest. Productivity is praised, exhaustion is normalized, and the people who quietly say “I need a break” are often seen as unmotivated.
But the truth is, constant striving is not the same as thriving. It disconnects you from the parts of life that actually matter such as connection, joy, curiosity, love. It also takes a toll on your body: when you’re always “on,” your nervous system never gets the signal that it’s safe to relax. You might find yourself feeling anxious even during downtime or irritable when someone interrupts your workflow because rest feels like a threat.
In therapy for high achievers in Hermosa Beach or through online therapy in California, we work to understand how your body and mind have learned to live in a constant state of alertness, and how to gradually reintroduce calm without losing your sense of purpose.
The Physical and Emotional Cost of Overworking
Workaholism doesn’t just steal your time; it chips away at your health and relationships. Chronic overworking can cause:
- Anxiety and Depression: When you never pause to process your emotions, they build up, showing up as irritability, sadness, or numbness.
- Sleep Issues: The mind that never stops planning or replaying the day makes it nearly impossible to rest deeply.
- Chronic Stress and Illness: Living in a near-constant fight-or-flight state affects hormones, blood pressure, and immunity.
- Relationship Strain: When your mind is always at work, even your presence can feel absent. Loved ones start to feel secondary to your schedule.
These symptoms are your body’s way of saying, something needs to change. Therapy can help you listen before burnout becomes a full collapse.
What Therapy for High Achievers Can Help You Understand About Overworking
Therapy isn’t about fixing you; it’s about understanding you. It’s about getting curious about the why beneath the what. Here’s what that often looks like in practice:
1. Discovering What Drives You to Overwork
We’ll explore the emotional undercurrents that fuel your need to stay busy. Maybe it’s anxiety about falling behind, maybe it’s the discomfort of stillness, or maybe it’s old survival wiring that says, “If I stop, everything falls apart.” Naming that pattern allows you to work with it consciously rather than being run by it.
2. Healing the Link Between Worth and Productivity
So many of us were raised to believe that being valuable means being useful. Therapy helps you separate your worth from your output to see that rest, creativity, and even imperfection have value. Through individual therapy Manhattan Beach or online therapy in California, we can explore what self-worth looks like when it’s not tied to performance.
3. Processing the Emotions You’ve Been Avoiding
When you stop overworking, all the emotions that work helped you outrun: grief, loneliness, anger, disappointment start to surface. It can feel destabilizing, but this is where real healing happens. In therapy, we learn how to feel and release those emotions safely rather than stuffing them down or distracting ourselves.
4. Reconnecting with Your Body and Nervous System
Your body often tells the truth before your mind does. Therapy helps you recognize the cues: the tight shoulders, racing heart, or shallow breath that signal stress. Over time, you learn how to regulate your nervous system so you can live with more ease and balance, not just endurance.
Learning to Self-Parent: The Emotional Repair Work
A big part of healing workaholism is learning to re-parent yourself to become the nurturing, compassionate presence you needed when you were younger. That might look like:
- Letting yourself rest without guilt.
- Speaking to yourself with kindness when you make a mistake.
- Noticing when you’re running on empty and choosing to stop.
- Learning to meet your needs before they become crises.
Self-parenting isn’t indulgent; it’s the foundation for sustainable growth. When you learn to care for your inner world, your drive becomes rooted in self-respect rather than self-punishment.
This process can be deeply transformative, especially for people who’ve spent years being the caretaker, the achiever, or the one holding everything together. In counseling in Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach we focus on helping you integrate insight with self-compassion so the changes last not just for your work life, but your relationships too.
Building a Life That Feels Balanced and Not Just Busy with Therapy in Los Angeles
The goal isn’t to abandon ambition; it’s to align it with your wellbeing. You can still have drive, but it doesn’t have to be fueled by anxiety. You can still care deeply about your work, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of your relationships or your health.
Through online therapy in California, you can begin practicing what balance actually feels like not as another item on your to-do list, but as a way of existing in your body and life. It’s the difference between working to prove yourself and working from a place of enoughness.
You deserve a life that’s not just impressive on paper but also peaceful, connected, and fulfilling.
A Final Thought
If you’ve been feeling stuck in a loop of exhaustion, therapy offers a gentle off-ramp. It’s a space to slow down, process what’s been driving you, and build a new rhythm: one grounded in awareness rather than autopilot.
Therapy in person in Hermosa Beach, or online therapy across California, can help you reconnect with what truly matters: your health, your relationships, your peace of mind. Healing doesn’t mean quitting your job or giving up your goals. It means learning how to do it all differently with more space, presence, and intention.
Because your worth isn’t in how much you produce.
It’s in how deeply you live.
