Why You Can’t “Switch Off” After Work — and How Anxiety Therapy Can Help

In a famous bit of dialogue from Richard Linklater’s surrealist movie Waking Life, the protagonist speaks to a man about the importance of maintaining a life that is really yours. As with much else in the movie, the dialogue is overwrought and exaggerated almost comically (for instance: “The worst mistake you can make is to think you’re alive when, really, you’re asleep in life’s waiting room.”). Toward the end of their interaction, he describes working a difficult job, getting home and falling asleep, only to immediately wake up and realize that the whole day at work was a dream, and says: “It’s bad enough that you sell your life for minimum wage, but they get your dreams for free.”

Whether or not you’ve had this dream, most people have had this experience. You’re done with work, you pack up, and go home, but the workday stays with you. Not in any dramatic way – but your attention cycles back to work: a conversation replayed on the way home, an email you mentally revise without meaning to, preparing what tomorrow is going to look like. You might be having dinner with your partner or relaxing at home, but you’re not fully there. They may pay you for your days, but now they’re getting your nights for free. 

This pattern is extremely common, especially among parents and people with careers that demand a high level of performance, and especially in places like New York, where work culture predominates. Most people simply chalk it up to the way things are – “it is what it is” – but, as with so many other times people use that phrase, it doesn’t have to be that way. Part of the problem is that this particular type of stress is self-sustaining, and the solution to it isn’t a vacation or another beer after work; it is addressing the underlying anxiety that keeps your attention tethered to work, long after the day has ended, with anxiety therapy. 

Why Does Your Mind Stay Attached to Work After Hours?

There are several related reasons why you can’t break away from work. One reason is that work doesn’t simply occupy the time that you’re there but provides a kind of momentum that can be difficult to wind down from. Think about how hard it can be at times to gear into the workday – the same thing can happen at the end of the day. So, once that momentum is up, it is hard to bring it back down. People tend not to have great strategies for unwinding, and so, although they take that long weekend now and then and have a show that they can turn their brain off to, they are effectively in “work mode” all the time.

The inability to wind down means that the ride home becomes an opportunity to scan through mistakes of the day, spending time with friends or family, having a constant feeling of ambient anxiety about what tomorrow or the rest of the week will be like, and getting ready for bed can just be a time when anxious thoughts cycle through your mind. Troublingly, the scanning can feel productive, but it rarely leads to a resolution and never eliminates every problem: there is always more to do.  

Part of what makes this difficult to interrupt is that it often feels justified. Mike Tyson once said that his favorite time to train was at midnight because he knew that’s when his opponents were sleeping, and so he knew he was training a bit harder than they were. Many people feel the same way: what makes them perform at a high level is that they are willing to stay mentally engaged when others aren’t. And, in some ways, that is true. The trouble is that there are trade-offs that can be pretty severe and that are often concealed while you’re engaged in overworking. 

The Subtle Toll of Anxiety in High-Performing Professionals

In high-performing environments – whether at work, university, or high school – anxiety does not always appear as panic or avoidance. More often, it shows up as a grinding feeling that there is always something to do, always something being forgotten, and some priority that makes that thing that you want to do have to happen tomorrow.  

The trouble is that people who feel this kind of anxious attachment to work come to identify with their work ethic and not the constant beleaguering stress that causes it. They appear responsible, conscientious, and ambitious. Have the ability to anticipate, refine, and stay ahead of potential problems, but their life is quietly slipping away from themselves. The pattern becomes self-reinforcing: the more you rely on constant mental engagement to feel prepared, the harder it becomes to step away from it. Time away from work can even create a low-level sense of unease, as though something important is being missed.

What Are the Signs That You Cannot Switch Off After Work?

This pattern often develops a familiar shape. It is not constant or overwhelming, but it is persistent enough to be noticeable. Over time, it doesn’t just stay contained to your thoughts about work. It begins to show up in other areas of your life—often in ways that are easy to miss at first, but harder to ignore as they accumulate.

You might notice:

• Difficulty falling/staying asleep. Even when you’re physically tired, if your mind continues working through the day or preparing for tomorrow, sleep can become harder and harder to get. And, once you’re asleep, the stress can wake you up again and again throughout the night. (Just as they said in Waking Life … they get your nights for free.)

• Strained relationships. One of the worst effects of being overworked in this way is that it can place a devastating strain on important relationships. People tend not to notice the effect it is having and almost always think they are better at hiding it when their attention is elsewhere, but when you feel less present with the people around you, it can cause them to drift away. 

• Inability to focus. Paradoxically, being so committed to work that it occupies most of your life can make you worse at your job. Hyperfocus, for extended periods, especially when it is accompanied by a lack of sleep, can make extended periods of focused attention very difficult. 

• Excessive drinking. This does not always mean developing a substance-use disorder – more often it involves getting too used to having one more drink than is usual, or spending just a little bit less time with family and a little bit more at the bar. While that isn’t always a bad thing, it is a stepping stone to even more troubling problems. 

• Irritability or reduced patience. Most often, this is noticed first by loved ones and colleagues, but occasionally by overworked people themselves. 

• A sense that rest isn’t actually restoring you. No matter how much time you take away from work, it just feels like work is right around the corner. 

So, What is Going On? Why “Just Relaxing” Won’t Work

Many strategies for stress management focus on relaxation: taking breaks, massages, and vacations. These can be helpful, but they often do not address the underlying mechanism that keeps the mind active. So what is going on? 

At Lexington Park Psychotherapy, we emphasize our integrative training and multi-disciplinary approach to psychotherapy. Below we offer just a few potential reasons that keep your anxiety running. 

Behavioral.

For many, there aren’t clear divisions, both physical and mental, between work and non-work hours. Work-from-home has been a terrible contribution to this because everything that makes working from home more convenient contributes to it interceding in the rest of life. Just think: when you first smell coffee in the morning, it starts to wake you up a little bit, even before you drink any. That is because, as neuroscientists say: what fires together, wires together. In other words, short neural pathways between smell coffee > drink coffee > wake up get developed and become so entrenched that the wake up mechanism gets signaled with just the smell of coffee input. 

The same thing happens when you get dressed for work in something you wouldn’t wear to bed, travel to work, and/or have a designated sleeping area and working area. If you wear a suit to work, your brain will start to associate work with getting suited up, and the parts of your brain that get activated at work will be triggered by that input. But that cuts in both directions. If you are sending emails in bed or rolling out of bed and going directly into meetings, the chance that getting into bed is going to trigger the go-to-sleep program is unlikely. 

Cognitive.

The same thing is true for “relaxing,” depending on what “relaxation” looks like for you. For many people, relaxing is just taking a day off work, going on a vacation, or watching a show. The problem is that taking a day off work or going on a vacation isn’t a structural changes so they’re not likely to have a structural effect. If your partner notices that you’re not really “there” in your conversations, or you’re noticing that you’re snapping at friends more often, you’ll go right back to those behaviors when you get back from Montauk or Mikonos.

And although watching a show you like is daily, for most people, it doesn’t actually relax them; it just moves time along. When was the last time you actually felt relaxed – as in, destressed, not anxious – after watching an episode of Heated Rivalry or Sopranos? More likely, you felt engaged in the show while it was on, and “back to work” once it ended. Often, people try to maintain that feeling of not being at work by watching “just one more” episode, but that just eats into sleep and makes tomorrow feel worse. 

Psychodynamic/IFS.

It is difficult to appreciate, but for many people, work connects them to a part of themselves that they like or distracts them from a part of themselves that they hate. If your work is creative, for example, it might feel like the only time you get to express that part of you is when you’re at work. At work, people might value your intellect, inventiveness, talent, etc., whereas when you’re with friends or family, you’re just… you. Maybe a parent you admire was incredibly talented, and when you’re working, you can feel like you have some of that too. Of course, this also cuts in both directions. When people feel shame about themselves or something they’ve done, focusing intently on work can keep those thoughts at bay. The anxiety of having to confront oneself can be delayed for just one more day if work can take priority for the day.  

What Anxiety Therapy Addresses That Self-Discipline Cannot

Because this pattern often appears as over-engagement rather than avoidance, it is easy to assume that the solution is better discipline: stricter schedules, firmer boundaries, or more effective time management. While these can help, they do not change the underlying dynamics that keep your attention locked onto work.

Anxiety therapy in Manhattan, NY focuses on understanding and interrupting the dynamics that maintain this kind of overwork. Crucially, that doesn’t mean working less or simply encouraging disengagement; it helps clarify what makes disengagement difficult in the first place – how attention becomes tied to evaluation, how responsibility becomes internalized, and how certain patterns of thinking sustain a sense of ongoing urgency.

Over time, this allows for a different relationship to work. The goal is not to reduce commitment or performance, but to make it possible to step away from work without feeling that something essential is being lost in the process.

When It May Be Time to Seek Support With a Therapist For Anxiety

If you find that your attention returns to work despite your efforts to disengage, or that rest consistently feels incomplete, it may be worth looking more closely at what is maintaining that pattern. In these cases, a skilled therapist for anxiety can offer a more targeted approach than strategies focused on rest alone.

Being deeply engaged in your work is not a problem in itself. But when that engagement continues without pause, it can become difficult to access the parts of life that exist outside of it. Understanding why that happens is often the first step toward changing it.

When the Workday Never Really Ends There Is Support Through Anxiety Therapy in Manhattan, NY

When the inability to disengage from work begins to affect your sleep, relationships, and capacity for genuine rest, it is rarely a problem that stricter boundaries or better time management can resolve on their own.

If a persistent sense of mental overextension is quietly narrowing the parts of your life that exist outside of work, anxiety therapy in Manhattan, NY can help you understand the underlying dynamics sustaining it and develop a more flexible relationship to performance and disengagement. When you are ready to take that step, Lexington Park Psychotherapy offers individualized, clinically rigorous care tailored to the specific ways professional anxiety manifests in demanding New York City environments. Get started in three simple steps:

1. Schedule a Free Consultation to discuss your experience with work-related anxiety and determine whether therapy is the right support.

2. Meet with an experienced therapist for anxiety to understand the patterns keeping your attention tethered to work after hours.

3. Begin therapy designed to interrupt mental overextension and restore genuine rest and presence outside of work.

Schedule a Free Consultation

Additional Services Offered at Lexington Park Psychotherapy

The inability to disengage from work rarely affects professional life alone, and the clinical support needed is often just as broad. Lexington Park Psychotherapy offers a range of mental health services, including depression therapy, trauma-focused treatment, couples counseling, adolescent and teen therapy, and perinatal mental health support, to address the full scope of what you may be experiencing.

Our therapists draw on evidence-based frameworks including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic interventions, tailoring each treatment plan to your specific psychological needs and history. Explore our blog for additional clinical perspectives on mental health and therapeutic approaches.

We work with clients throughout NYC, including Midtown, Tribeca, Gramercy Park, Brooklyn Heights, West Village, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Financial District, Columbus Circle, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Chelsea, NoMad, and Bryant Park.