Can overworking be a form of self-harm?

By Jessica. Jessica discusses how her overworking felt like a form of self-harm.

I was 25 the first time someone told me they thought I would have a nervous breakdown. “25 year-olds don’t have nervous breakdowns,” I told my GP with confidence in reply when she expressed worries about the toll my career was taking on me. At the time I was working a senior role in a content agency and moonlighting as a freelancer, balancing three clients of my own alongside my job.

Sure, I had to get up at 5am to freelance before work, but I paid off my master’s loan early, so maybe I was just girlbossing life? I was so focused on work that I rented a small office a few doors down from our flat so I had a place away from home to work more. I neglected other parts of my life like my relationship and chores.

Looking back, the comments by my GP probably should have been a sign I should have taken a few steps back, but that’s not what I did. In fact, it didn’t occur to me that she was right until years later when I was hospitalised with psychosis and wrote an article for work from my hospital bed. Perhaps I had an unhealthy relationship to work after all?

By the time I was approaching 30 I still had a destructive relationship with work. Instead of worrying about me, everyone I knew was impressed; I was plucky and ambitious and even winning a few awards along the way. No one ever expressed any worries about my relationship with work despite its detrimental impact on my life.

I never found good habits to relieve stress or spent time doing hobbies to help me relax. My life was a testament to unhealthy coping mechanisms. There wasn’t a lot that I was sure of, but by then I knew work was something I could excel at if I ploughed enough time and energy into it. It was never enough for me to just do my job, I was always chasing the next project or the next prize. The next thing to make me feel like a more worthy person. Spoiler alert: when I achieved the next thing I always felt nothing. Not even a brief moment of joy. It was always about the buzz of what I could do next, never about what I had achieved. I think ultimately my obsession with work was down to feelings of inadequacy.

I had settled into a destructive but comfortable cycle of clumsily balancing my two great loves: work and alcohol when I was offered a new role 100 miles away in London. It was a job writing the social media for big brands and it was my big break. It was the gold dust job that meant I was “going places” (literally and figuratively) and I wasn’t going to let it slip through my fingers. At the time I felt was the start of something big, but I was wrong, it was actually the beginning of the end of my career.

I had bought a house in the South West of England so I had to commute into London. This didn’t faze me because it just meant I had extra time to work on the train. I started the job and for a few months I felt like I had it all, except that I didn’t have much of anything in reality because I was working evenings and weekends. I didn’t see my friends much. The company in question saw that I was working hard and used it as an excuse to give me even more work. I started to buckle under the pressure.

My mental health, which had always been very fractured, became worse and worse. I was having fantasies of self-harm and suicide and went into A&E and cried for the whole six hours or so I was there and was signed off work with anxiety and depression. The company I worked for got wind of this and let me go. Luckily for them, in my zest to do a good job and excessive hours I’d done six months of draft content in advance, unluckily for me that meant they didn’t need me anymore.

I picked myself up after this experience and decided that it was time to go freelance. So, I set myself up as self-employed. For a year I was alternating between suicide attempts and excessive work. My friends and family knew something wasn’t right, but to be honest, they acted like I was being dramatic. I was not, I was often crying, drinking way too much, thought I was imagining things and had the underlying sense that people were out to get me. Eventually these odd sensations that I was being stalked or people were against me that I was managing became something I couldn’t manage anymore and I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, ultimately spending nearly two months in hospital. By then I thought I was on a TV show or that there was a conspiracy against me.

When it was over, I tried to go back to work. I wasn’t going to let a “blip” affect my career so I got another job in an advertising agency. After a week I resigned. It was making me paranoid and I didn’t seem to be able to think clearly enough to do the tasks. I got another job. This time at a library. After two shifts I resigned again but it was too late, and I was sectioned again, and had another psychotic break. This time I was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder.

My friend once asked me if my motto was “success at all costs”. It was only later that this seemed poignant, I was worried that not working would bankrupt me because I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage: it had never occurred to me that work could take something more important from me: my mental health.

For me overworking became a form of self-harm. Not just self-harm, but a form of self-harm sanctioned and praised by those around me.

There are complex reasons why I overworked. Desperation to have a life that looked good on paper, fear of going bankrupt if I didn’t pay my mortgage, the feeling I was never good enough, finally finding something, anything I was good at and understood. I’ve never been able to do things at half measures and instead it’s always full throttle. I’m autistic and on the waiting list for an ADHD assessment. When I’ve researched trying to find out why I might have such a destructive relationship with work, I’ve noticed that there’s a strong overlap between work addiction and ADHD.

I’ve not really heard anyone talk about work as a form of self-harm before, but I can’t help but think that’s what it is to me. It’s something that I do which harms me. In fact, I blame overwork for my psychotic illness, my relationship with work has triggered a mental health disability which might affect me for the rest of my life.

We don’t talk a lot about work addiction when we talk about mental health issues. And I don’t think my mental health team even believe me when I mention my work addiction “how could someone out of work have a work addiction?” Because I worked myself into disability.

I felt a lot of pressure to keep overzealously working even though it was harming my mental health. I still look through the jobs every day even though I am too unwell to work and sometimes I volunteer until it makes me psychotic.

Overwork is held up as aspirational in our society which means that many people condone overwork, although the negative effects of this are rarely talked about. People also need to work to live, and some people overwork just to make ends meet, but that’s not what I was doing. I was taking on way too much because I got some kind of buzz from it. Alongside binge drinking, it helped me manage distressing feelings and made me feel for brief moments like I wasn’t a failure. I didn’t realise that there would be any consequences for overwork. When I started to realise it was affecting me, I couldn’t stop myself doing it. It felt like part of me.

Looking back, my friends sometimes ask if I’ve learnt anything and would do things differently. I’d like to say I have learnt something and that I would do things differently. But in reality, it feels like overwork is the way I am wired. It’s something that has been impressed upon me for so long I can’t extract it from myself. I know this is not encouraging, but I think it’s important to be honest. I may always be prone to overworking until it harms me and it’s something I might have to manage for the rest of my life.

I hope one day to be in a place where I am well enough to work again. I’d like to think I would take things slower, pace myself. Learn to be the tortoise instead of the hare. But I’m not sure I can shake off this desire to plough myself into a task so completely that it starts to harm me, the mountains of paperwork giving me paper cuts I can’t see that start to form into scars.

If you need support with your mental health, please reach out to your GP or mental health team.

Published 1st April 2026.