Do I Hate My Job... or Am I Depressed?
Dreading work is so common that the feeling of watching the weekend disappear has its own name: the “Sunday Scaries.” However, there is more than one way to dread Monday and there are important differences between an ordinary dread of the work week, genuinely hating your job, and an entanglment between depression and work. When people reach out to us because they're looking for a depression therapist in NYC and the explanation for how they are feeling involves the word "work" pepperred throughout, it is important to figure out whether it is playing a causal role in the way they are feeling, or if it is a part of larger story.
Some people feel bad about going back to work because it means that the part of the week that feels like it belongs to them is over. This person might like their job well enough but, if the choice is between going to work on the one hand and sleeping late and playing pickleball all day on the other, they would rather do the latter. For this person, Sunday really signals the end of their own preferences dictating the course of their lives and so naturally triggers some negative feelings.
However, other people really do hate their jobs: they dislike their boss (or bosses), the type of work they do, the commute, their coworkers, everything. This person isn't just losing the opportunity to feel self-directed as the first person is when they return to work on Monday, they are going to a place they actively dislike to do work they dislike with people they dislike. If you offered them a better salary with a better boss, or perhaps an entirely different career doing something more interesting, that anxious depression feeling on Sundays would disappear (or start to look like the person above).
But there is a third kind of person who dreads returning to work. They don't simply long for more free time, and they don't hate their job per se - this person resents having to work entirely. They may spend enormous amounts of time wishing they didn't have to do their job but when they are pressed on what they would rather be doing, they find it hard to say. They don't want another job, but they also don't particularly want to do anything.
Although the second person's feelings are valid and constitute a very understandable reason to ask whether they are burned out and to seek a therapy for depression, the job depression (or, equivalently, work depression) that the third person feels provides a very different clinical picture. Although all three people dread going to work, only the second person really dislikes their job; the third, by contrast, seems as though their dissatisfaction with work is only a single point in a much larger constellation of depression.
In the high-performance, high-functioning, work culture that is New York, this is one of the most common reasons people begin depression therapy in Manhattan. And, although it is easy to get sucked into the work part of the equation and think about quitting, it is worth considering: if you didn't have to work tomorrow, what would you actually want to do instead?
Job Depression? How Work Dissatisfaction Can Masquerade as Depression
The two major advantages of using work to explain why you're unhappy is (1) that it is a common trope that it is normal to hate your job, and (2) that there is so much of it. For many professionals in New York, work occupies eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours of the day, and that doesn't even begin to cover all the work there is to do - the commute, the emails you answer during dinner, the Slack messages you check even though you know you shouldn't, the calls you take on the weekends. And because time is zero-sum, all that work means you have to squeeze, the laundry, the parent-teacher conferences, the dating that feels like an obligation, the recitals, and cleaning the apartment all fit into the smallest time-frame possible. If you feel bad most of the time, and you spend most of your time working, the causal inference is almost irresistible and, obviously, sometimes it is correct.
And, obviously, that inference is sometimes correct. People can choose (or fall into) careers when they are 22 because they seem impressive or prestigious and because they are good at it, only to discover years later - after their mortgage and kid's school tuition is riding on it - that they hate what they do. That is far more common than people appreciate and many people toil away thinking that they are the only one who feels that way. Sometimes a job that felt exciting gradually becomes boring or administrative once you've climbed the ranks. Sometimes work just feels like a means to an end, but over time the end no longer makes the means feel worth it.
But just like anxiety and work, depression and work have an inconvenient relationship. Depression often first becomes obvious in precisely the places where life already requires effort. This means that work becomes intolerable before lying on the couch, scrolling through reels does. But this only conceals the problem by making a more substantive issue look like a professional one.
The "Vacation Test" for Depression
One way to “test” whether you are experiencing temporary burnout or a more significant depression is to imagine how you feel about taking a vacation.
For some people, the answer comes easily. They picture themselves utterly relaxed on a beach, skiing somewhere for a week, or drinking wine in some picturesque European city. The important part of the fantasy is not simply that they aren't working; there are things they actually want to be doing instead. But some people have a harder time filling in the picture. They desperately want a vacation, but what they really want is not to work. Asked where they want to go or what they want to do when they get there, nothing sounds particularly exciting.
And sometimes they take the vacation and discover exactly that. They sleep late the first day and maybe the second, but by the fourth day they aren't really enjoying themselves. The dinners are fine, the view from their hotel is beautiful... but nothing feels like much of anything. Worse yet, they often feel a pressure to be enjoying themselves and the daylight between how they are supposed to be feeling and what they're actually feeling makes the whole thing worse.
This is one place where burnout and depression can look different. It isn't a diagnostic test, of course: People who are burned out do not magically recover after 72 hours in Portugal, and people who are depressed can certainly enjoy a vacation. The important question is not simply whether getting away from work provides relief, but whether removing work allows your interest in the rest of your life to return. If it doesn't, the problem may be larger than the job you left back in New York.
Depression and Work in New York
New York makes all of this harder to sort out because being somewhat miserable at work is practically a professional subculture. It starts with our youth, who work incredibly hard in some of the most impossible to get into high-schools in the country, and often feel miserable along the way; it is found in our college students, who battle imposter syndrome as they compare themselves to other incredibly hard-working students; and, of course, in our much admired work-culture.
New Yorkers tend to have a pretty unhealthy relationship with work. People brag about how many hours they work a week and how little time they have for fun. A part of that is that for some people, the busier they are, the more important they feel. For others, working all the time can help direct their anxiety and so make things feel less uncertain. Working a lot can also provide a remarkably effective supplementary structure for when depression takes it all away. When you feel like you can't get out of bed, you can force yourself to because you have a meeting; you can't get yourself to go to the gym or cook for yourself, but you finish the deck because other people need it.
This is one reason people looking for a depression therapist in NYC rarely start with "I think I'm depressed" and far more often say something like "I don't feel motivated anymore." That shift can sometimes tell you everything: they have made work the center of who they are and now that work feels harder, it is not that they are depressed, but that they cannot get themselves to work as hard... that is the real problem.
When A Therapist for Depression Can Help
In previous posts, we have discussed that although depression is often associated with sadness - and this obviously makes sense - it has a number of features that make depression mean more than extreme sadness. One of the most important of these features is known as anhedonia - the reduction or loss of interest and pleasure.
As is becoming more well known, depression doesn't always look like overt sadness, and anhedonia doesn't look like a person staring emptily into the middle distance. You might still go to dinner, but you just don't particularly care where; you spend an hour scrolling through Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc. to find something to watch but then don't pay attention to it; even sex can feel like an effort.
When everything starts to feel this way, that is an important clue for someone wondering whether they are depressed: if work is the problem, there is usually some contrast between work and the rest of life - depression can flatten that contrast.
You Feel Depressed... So, Should You Quit?
The uncomfortable answer is: Maybe. Therapy should not become an elaborate argument for remaining in a job that makes you miserable, but nor should it be an excuse to quit your job when it isn't really the problem. If you built a career around goals that no longer matter to you, taking that realization seriously may mean finding something else to do, but discussing how your priorities have shifted does not always mean that ending a job you've worked hard for will automatically make your life fall into line with your new values.
Therapy for Depression in NYC with Lexington Park Psychotherapy
At Lexington Park Psychotherapy we have experience working with high-functioning (and over-functioning) people struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, and major life transitions and understand that the solution is not always to scale back on work or change careers. Work can be a significant source of meaning in people's lives, and the goal cannot be to ham-fistedly take that away. We work to understand your history and values so that if work is getting in the way of you living your life, we can figure out a way to set you on a new path.
If you're interested in depression therapy in Manhattan, reach out today for a free consultation. When you are ready to take that step, Lexington Park Psychotherapy offers individualized, clinical care designed to go deeper than surface-level thought patterns and address what introspection alone cannot. Get started in three simple steps:
Schedule a Free Consultation to discuss how work and depression are affecting your life and determine whether therapy is the right support.
Meet with an experienced depression therapist to understand the patterns sustaining your depressive beliefs and feelings.
