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Busy or Hiding: What the Research Says About Using Work to Avoid Feelings.
Updated: Sep 28
It is twenty to ten on a Tuesday night and the inbox is at zero. You know it is at zero because you have refreshed it four times since eight o'clock. Earlier today there was a conversation that stung, a throwaway remark in a one-to-one that you have not let yourself think about, and in the hours since you have rebuilt the board pack template, colour-coded next quarter's travel, answered every message that could possibly be answered and started on a few that could have waited until Thursday. It has been, by any visible measure, an excellent afternoon. Then you close the laptop, the house goes quiet, and the remark is sitting there waiting for you, exactly where you left it.
I know this one from the inside. I used to wear my busyness like a crown. If there was data to analyse, I volunteered; if my inbox was empty, I refreshed it every few seconds in case something new had come in. Whenever I felt anxious or uneasy I buried myself in work, and the bigger the feeling, the longer the to-do list became. I truly believed I was being thorough, until the day it dawned on me that I was not only busy, I was hiding. I wrote about productivity as a polished escape hatch in 2025, and the research turns out to have a great deal to say about why the hatch is so tempting, what it costs, when stepping away from a feeling is exactly the right thing to do, and how to tell the difference.
What you will get out of this
The experiments in which people chose a mild electric shock over fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts, and the follow-up in eleven countries that explains why
Why a demanding task really does lift a low mood, and why that is precisely what makes it such an effective place to hide
What avoiding a feeling costs over months, from studies of nurses, police officers, teachers and customer service staff
The line between a healthy break and a hiding place, which the research draws more generously than you might expect
Why busyness became a status symbol, and why a role built on being endlessly useful is especially exposed to it
The difference between working hard because the work pulls you and working hard because stopping feels worse, and what each does to your health and your performance
What naming a feeling, and letting it be there, does that pushing it away does not
Why being kind to yourself about all this makes you more likely to change it
The busy check: a tool that looks at what you are doing right now and tells you whether the work needs you or you need the work
The Stillness Pages: three pages for noticing the pattern and stepping out of it gently
Why doing something feels better than sitting still
In 2014 a group of psychologists asked people to do something that sounds like a treat. Put your phone and your things away, sit in a plain room for somewhere between six and fifteen minutes, and entertain yourself with your own thoughts. Across eleven studies, most people did not enjoy it. They enjoyed ordinary external activities, such as reading, much more. And in the study that made the headlines, many of them, particularly the men, chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than sit alone with nothing to do but think.
It would be easy to dismiss that as an oddity of American undergraduates, so it matters that the question was put to 2,557 people at twelve sites in eleven countries. The result was the same in every country: people randomly assigned to do something enjoyed themselves more than people assigned to think for pleasure. The countries differed in how much people liked thinking, and those differences were explained by a handful of personal traits. People who enjoyed thinking more tended to be curious, open to experience, experienced at meditating and in a good mood to start with. The one trait that went the other way was how much people used their phones.
Two more findings sit underneath this. In a pair of experiments from 2010, people given a choice between staying idle and keeping busy chose idleness when there was no reason to do anything else. Give them a reason, even a flimsy one, and they chose to be busy. And the busy people were happier than the idle ones, even when they had been made to be busy. The authors' conclusion was that people dread idleness and need a justification to be busy, and that many of the goals we pursue may partly be justifications for keeping ourselves occupied.
The second finding is kinder. In six experiments with 259 people, participants predicted how much they would enjoy sitting quietly and waiting, then did it. They consistently enjoyed it more than they expected. Their low forecasts were enough to make them choose checking the news instead, even though their experience of the two turned out to be much the same.
We do not avoid stillness because it is unbearable. We avoid it because we expect it to be, and that expectation turns out to be wrong more often than it is right.
There is an honest counterweight to the shock study. A commentary in 2014 went back through the published data and argued that it offered less support for the claim that thinking is aversive than the headlines suggested, and that a long line of research had found daydreaming to be pleasant a good deal of the time. The research on why it can go either way is helpful. Deliberately thinking pleasant thoughts turned out to be mentally demanding, and people enjoyed it much more when they were given a simple aid: a short list, made beforehand, of things they would like to think about. Boredom research points the same way. Boredom appears when there is a mismatch between the demands of a moment and the attention you have available, or between what you are doing and anything you value. And a large smartphone study found that people's minds wandered to something other than what they were doing almost as often as not, and that this typically made them less happy.
Put together, the research suggests your inner life is a perfectly good place to be, and that an empty moment with no plan for your thoughts is harder work than it looks, while the nearest task is always there, offering to take the effort away.
Try this. Before the next gap in your day, whether it is a train, a walk to a meeting or the ten minutes before the executive arrives, write down two things you would like to think about. They can be large or small: where you want to be in two years, the garden, a conversation you enjoyed. When the gap arrives, leave your phone where it is and think about one of them. Give it five minutes and notice whether it was as bad as you predicted.
The research behind this section
Wilson and colleagues (2014) found across eleven studies that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed mundane external activities much more, and that many, particularly men, preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than be left alone with their thoughts. Buttrick and colleagues (2019) replicated the comparison with 2,557 participants at twelve sites in eleven countries and found that in every country those assigned to do something reported significantly greater enjoyment than those assigned to think for pleasure; country differences in enjoyment of thinking were accounted for by need for cognition, openness to experience, meditation experience and initial positive affect, which were positively related, and reported phone usage, which was negatively related. Hsee, Yang and Wang (2010) showed in two experiments that without a justification people chose to be idle, that even a specious justification motivated them to be busy, and that busy people were happier than idle people even when forced to be busy. Hatano and colleagues (2022) asked 259 university students across six experiments to sit and wait in a quiet room and found that predicted enjoyment and engagement were consistently lower than what participants actually experienced, and that this underestimate led them to choose checking internet news instead, although their experiences of the two did not differ statistically. Fox and colleagues (2014) argued in a commentary that the data in the 2014 studies offered little support for the claim that thinking is predominantly aversive, and that it contradicted a substantial body of research on the affective qualities of daydreaming. Westgate, Wilson and Gilbert (2017) found in an experience sampling study and four experiments that thinking for pleasure is cognitively demanding, and that a simple thinking aid made it easier and more enjoyable. Westgate and Wilson (2018) set out the Meaning and Attentional Components model, in which boredom results from mismatches between cognitive demands and available mental resources, and from mismatches between activities and valued goals. Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) used a smartphone method to sample people's thoughts and feelings and found that people think about what is not happening almost as often as about what is, and that doing so typically makes them unhappy. Havermans and colleagues (2015) found in two experiments with 30 participants each that induced boredom led people to eat more sweets and to self-administer more electric shocks, concluding that the drive was to escape monotony. Nederkoorn and colleagues (2016) found with 69 participants that a monotonous film led to more and stronger self-administered shocks than a sad or neutral one, and that sadness had no such effect.
When the to-do list is doing the feeling for you
Here is the uncomfortable reason busywork is so effective as a hiding place: it works. A set of three experiments published in 2007 showed people neutral, mildly upsetting or strongly upsetting pictures and then gave them a task. When the task made heavy demands on their working memory, they reported less negative moods afterwards. The demanding task made no difference after neutral pictures. And when the task was demanding enough, the strongly upsetting pictures left people no worse off than the mildly upsetting ones. The explanation is almost mechanical. Working memory is limited, and a task that fills it leaves less room for the thoughts that keep a mood going.
So when you feel something difficult and reach for a spreadsheet, your mind has found a reliable way to feel better within minutes, which is rather clever of it.
The trouble lies in what that reach is doing to your other priorities. A series of experiments published in 2001 asked why people's self-control gives way when they are upset. Upset people ate more snacks, chose immediate rewards over better later ones and put off practising for a test in favour of something more fun. But when they were led to believe their bad mood could not be changed, all three effects disappeared. The researchers concluded that when people are upset, feeling better right now takes priority over their other goals. The indulgence is a repair job.
This is the heart of the modern research on procrastination, which describes it as short-term mood repair paid for by your future self. A large meta-analysis, built on 691 correlations, found that one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of putting something off was how unpleasant the task felt. What makes this relevant to anyone good at their job is that avoiding one task rarely looks like doing nothing. It looks like doing a great many other tasks, efficiently, with the difficult one sitting untouched at the bottom of the list. The difficult email, the honest conversation with the executive, the decision about whether this role is still right for you: these are exactly the kinds of work that a very organised person can avoid for months while looking extraordinarily productive.
Two studies show the same pattern in smaller habits. People who habitually juggled several screens and feeds at once found it harder to accept their own emotional responses, and the researchers concluded that for some of them the multitasking was a way of steering attention away from anything upsetting. And the reassuring part: a set of studies from 2016 found that the ability to tolerate and change unpleasant feelings was linked to less procrastination, and in a randomised trial, training people in those two skills reduced it. The avoidance is a response to a feeling, which means building your capacity to sit with the feeling changes the behaviour.
The most productive avoidance in the building rarely looks like avoidance. It looks like someone who has done everything except the one thing that matters.
Try this. The next time you notice yourself deep in work that did not need doing today, ask the question I used to ask myself: am I working because this is needed, or am I avoiding something? Then go one step further and write down, in a few words, the task or conversation you are not doing. You do not have to do it yet. Naming what the busyness is standing in front of is usually enough to loosen its grip.
The research behind this section
Van Dillen and Koole (2007) found in three experiments that after viewing negative pictures, participants reported less negative moods under high compared with low working memory demand, that working memory demand did not affect mood after neutral pictures, and that under high demand strongly negative pictures no longer produced more negative moods than weakly negative ones, suggesting that loading working memory prevents mood-congruent processing. Tice, Bratslavsky and Baumeister (2001) found in three experiments that believing one's bad mood was frozen and unchangeable eliminated the tendency to eat fattening snacks, to seek immediate gratification and to engage in frivolous procrastination, concluding that upset people give short-term affect regulation priority over other self-regulatory goals. Tice and Bratslavsky (2000) set out the place of emotion regulation within general self-control, arguing that people give in to feel good. Sirois and Pychyl (2013) reviewed the research on procrastination as short-term mood repair and emotion regulation, and argued that its consequences are typically borne by the future self. Steel (2007) meta-analysed 691 correlations and found that task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy and impulsiveness, along with conscientiousness and its facets, were strong and consistent predictors of procrastination. Shin and Kemps (2020) found in 140 participants that media multitasking was associated with difficulties in accepting emotional responses, and concluded that it can serve as an avoidance coping strategy that directs attention away from negative stimuli. Eckert and colleagues (2016) found in cross-sectional and cross-lagged studies that emotion regulation skills were linked to procrastination through the ability to tolerate aversive emotions, and in a randomised controlled trial that training the skills of tolerating and modifying aversive emotions reduced procrastination.
What avoiding a feeling costs
Psychologists have a name for the habit of steering away from uncomfortable inner experiences: experiential avoidance. It was set out in 1996 as the unwillingness to stay in contact with painful thoughts, feelings, memories and sensations, together with the effort to change or escape them, even when the effort causes harm. The idea has been influential enough to be measured, and the most widely used measure was tested on 2,816 people in six samples. Scores on it predicted a range of outcomes over time, from mental health to how often people were absent from work.
It is worth being careful here, because the research is careful. A review of the field found that experiential avoidance may well be involved in many kinds of difficulty, and also that the concept needs sharper definition than it has been given. So the fairest way to put it is that the evidence points consistently in one direction, and nobody should read a questionnaire score as a verdict on a person.
The direction is clear enough in working life. In a study of 187 police officers, avoidance was linked to burnout, lower wellbeing and lost productivity, through fewer positive feelings and more negative ones. In 80 critical care nurses in Spain, it was clearly correlated with emotional exhaustion and with the detached, going-through-the-motions feeling that researchers call depersonalisation. In medical students, avoidance and disengagement were linked to burnout and depression. And in 415 secondary school teachers in Hong Kong, the ones who coped by escaping and avoiding were more prone to every aspect of burnout. These are correlations rather than experiments, but they come from very different jobs and point the same way.
The mechanism the laboratory offers is the rebound. Trying not to think about something needs a mental process that keeps checking whether you are thinking about it, and when you are tired or stretched, the checking can end up bringing the thought back more often. A meta-analysis of controlled studies found a small to moderate rebound of this kind. One experiment with 60 people who were living with anxiety or low mood compared two instructions before an upsetting film: hold the feelings down, or let them be there. Both groups felt about as distressed during the film. Afterwards, the group that had accepted their feelings recovered with less negative feeling, and the group that had suppressed them showed a rising heart rate while the accepting group's fell.
Another set of experiments with more than 1,300 people compared hiding what you feel with reframing it. Reframing reduced how strongly people felt. Hiding the feeling did not reduce it at all compared with doing nothing. And in daily life, the picture is similar: a meta-analysis of diary and experience sampling studies found suppression and dwelling on things closely tied to negative feelings through the day.
The largest map of all, pulling together 331 samples and 670 effect sizes, found that the common ways of handling emotion fall into three loose families: pulling away from a feeling, getting stuck going round it, and engaging with it. The ability to tolerate distress sat closest to low avoidance and high acceptance.
Try this. Think of the last week and ask which feeling you worked hardest to avoid. Leave aside what happened and look for the feeling itself: embarrassment, dread, disappointment, being taken for granted. You are not required to do anything about it. Knowing its name tells you what the extra hours were for, and that knowledge is where choosing differently begins.
The research behind this section
Hayes and colleagues (1996) set out experiential avoidance as a functional dimension of psychological difficulty, meaning the unwillingness to remain in contact with private experiences and the attempt to alter their form or frequency. Kashdan and colleagues (2006) examined experiential avoidance as a generalised psychological vulnerability, compared with coping and emotion regulation strategies. Chawla and Ostafin (2007) reviewed the empirical studies and concluded that although experiential avoidance may be implicated in various forms of psychopathology, the research was limited by a lack of theoretical integration and refinement in how the construct is defined and measured. Bond and colleagues (2011) developed the second Acceptance and Action Questionnaire across 2,816 participants in six samples and found that it concurrently, longitudinally and incrementally predicted outcomes from mental health to work absence rates. Kashdan and Rottenberg (2010) reviewed the evidence for psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Mojallal and colleagues (2022) studied 187 police officers and found that experiential avoidance was indirectly associated with burnout, wellbeing and productivity loss through lower positive affect and higher negative affect. Losa Iglesias, Vallejo and Fuentes (2010) surveyed 80 critical care nurses and found experiential avoidance positively correlated with emotional exhaustion (r = 0.51) and depersonalisation (r = 0.53). Kroska and colleagues (2017) examined burnout and depression in medical students and their relations with avoidance and disengagement. Chan and Hui (1995) surveyed 415 secondary school teachers in Hong Kong and found avoidant coping strategies consistently related to all three aspects of burnout. Wegner (1994) proposed the theory of ironic processes of mental control, in which a monitoring process searching for unwanted mental contents can come to dominate when capacity is reduced. Abramowitz, Tolin and Street (2001) meta-analysed controlled studies of thought suppression and found a small to moderate rebound effect. Campbell-Sills and colleagues (2006) randomly assigned 60 people with anxiety and mood disorders to suppress or accept emotions during an emotional film and found similar distress during the film, less negative affect during recovery in the acceptance group, and rising heart rate with suppression against falling heart rate with acceptance. Kalokerinos, Greenaway and Denson (2015) found in two experiments with more than 1,300 participants that reappraisal reduced the experience of negative and positive emotion while suppression did not reduce either relative to a control condition. Gross (1998) set out the distinction between regulating emotion early, by changing how a situation is appraised, and late, by suppressing its expression. Boemo and colleagues (2022) meta-analysed experience sampling and daily diary studies and found large contemporaneous relations between negative affect and rumination, suppression and worry. Naragon-Gainey, McMahon and Chacko (2017) meta-analysed 331 samples and 670 effect sizes and found three underlying factors of emotion regulation strategies, labelled disengagement, aversive cognitive perseveration and adaptive engagement, with distress tolerance most closely associated with low experiential avoidance and high acceptance and mindfulness.
A break, or a hiding place
If all of this is making you feel guilty about every time you have lost yourself in a task to get through a bad afternoon, please stop, because the research is much kinder to distraction than the story so far suggests.
The most useful work here comes from studies of how people choose between ways of handling a feeling. In three experiments, people faced situations of different emotional intensity and could choose between thinking the situation through differently or turning their attention elsewhere. When the situation was mildly upsetting, they tended to choose the thinking. When it was intensely upsetting, they tended to choose distraction, which stops a feeling gathering force before it takes hold. The researchers saw this as healthy adaptation. In the moment, when something is too big to think about well, stepping away from it is a sensible choice.
The distinction that matters is between stepping away and staying away. Researchers studying chronic stress separated distraction, which means taking a break from the stressor and doing something else for a while, from avoidance, which means trying not to have the thoughts and feelings at all. In four samples, positive distraction, doing something that lifts you, was linked with higher wellbeing, more positive emotion and fewer depressive symptoms once avoidance was taken into account. A study that followed 305 people through three weeks of a long-running stressful period found that both distraction and avoidance helped people feel better that week, but that the people who habitually avoided were worse off overall, while the habitual distracters were better off.
The quality of the break matters too. Among law graduates waiting for their exam results, those who found activities that absorbed them completely reported less worry and fewer negative feelings, though many of them were poor at predicting which activities would do that for them. In an experiment, an absorbing game lifted people's mood while they waited for news, even though it did not stop them worrying.
So there is a real disagreement in this literature, and you deserve both sides of it. For decades, pulling away from a stressor was classed as a poor way of coping, and the evidence on habitual avoidance still supports that. The newer work argues that some disengagement is adaptive, and that treating any single strategy as always good or always bad is a mistake, which one influential review named the fallacy of uniform efficacy. What the two sides agree on is flexibility: noticing the situation, having more than one way of responding, and checking whether the way you chose is working.
That flexibility cuts the other way too. A study of 170 people found that being good at reframing things went with less depression when their stress came from things they could not change, and with more depression when it came from things they could. A daily diary study found that reframing did nothing for the bad days of about half its participants. The point for someone who is busy for a living is simple and slightly surprising. Sometimes the healthy response to a feeling is neither to work through it nor to hide from it, but to act on what it is telling you. Frustration about a workload that could be changed is information, and reframing it into acceptance can be one more way of not dealing with it.
Stepping away from a feeling is often wise. What matters is whether you ever came back to it.
Try this. When you step away from something difficult, give the break an ending. Decide when you will come back to it, and what coming back means: ten minutes with a notebook on Thursday morning, a conversation booked for Friday, a walk tonight. A break with a return time is distraction, and the research supports it. A break with no return time is how a hiding place is built.
The research behind this section
Sheppes and colleagues (2011) found in three experiments using emotional pictures and unpredictable electric stimulation that people showed a relative preference for reappraisal in low-intensity negative situations and for distraction in high-intensity ones, interpreting this as an adaptive pattern in which disengagement blocks emotional processing early. Sheppes and colleagues (2014) set out a conceptual framework for emotion regulation choice, supported by six studies of its emotional, cognitive and motivational determinants. Waugh, Shing and Furr (2020) developed a measure of positive and neutral distraction across three samples and correlated it with outcomes in a fourth, and found that, unlike avoidance, positive distraction was related to higher wellbeing, more positive emotion and fewer depressive symptoms, especially when controlling for avoidance. Waugh, Leslie-Miller and Cole (2023) followed 305 participants across three waves one week apart during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that habitual distraction was associated with better emotional wellbeing overall and that both distraction and avoidance improved wellbeing that week, while habitual avoidance was associated with worse wellbeing overall. Rankin, Walsh and Sweeny (2019) found that law graduates awaiting bar exam results (125) and doctoral students on the academic job market (141) who experienced more flow reported less worry and fewer negative emotions, that participants were often unable to identify their own flow-inducing activities, and that an adaptive game in an experiment with 309 participants improved emotions but did not reduce worry. Bonanno and Burton (2013) named the fallacy of uniform efficacy, the assumption that particular regulatory strategies are consistently beneficial or harmful, and proposed regulatory flexibility, comprising sensitivity to context, a diverse repertoire of strategies and responsiveness to feedback. Aldao, Sheppes and Gross (2015) set out emotion regulation flexibility as the ability to use different strategies effectively across situations. Troy, Shallcross and Mauss (2013) measured reappraisal ability, stressor severity and controllability in 170 participants and found that higher reappraisal ability was associated with lower depression under uncontrollable stress and with higher depression under controllable stress. Brockman and colleagues (2017) used a daily diary with 187 participants and found daily mindfulness associated with lower negative and higher positive affect, the converse for suppression, and reappraisal related to positive but not negative affect, with reappraisal conferring no benefit for negative affect in approximately half the sample. Tamir (2016) set out a taxonomy of motives for emotion regulation, distinguishing hedonic motives from instrumental ones such as behavioural, epistemic, social and eudaimonic motives.
Busy as a badge, and a job that rewards it
Part of why busyness makes such a comfortable hiding place is that nobody questions it. It looks like virtue.
A set of studies published in 2017 found that a busy, overworked lifestyle had become a status symbol, at least in North America. People inferred that someone who was always busy was competent, ambitious and in demand, a scarce resource. The effect depended on culture: it was tied to the belief that hard work leads to getting on, and it was weaker in the European samples. A sociologist had made a similar argument a decade earlier, describing busyness as the badge of honour of a new professional class. And the badge works on the wearer, too. Seven studies found that simply feeling busy raised people's sense of their own importance, and that this in turn improved their self-control. Another set found that being busy could raise motivation and speed up completing a task.
So busyness rewards you twice: it makes you look good and it makes you feel important. Neither of those is a reason to be suspicious of hard work. They are reasons to notice how little resistance you will meet if you use it to avoid something.
The same orientation follows people into their time off. Research on what the authors called a productivity orientation found that people chose unusual, even less pleasant leisure experiences so they could tick them off and feel they had achieved something with their holiday. Six experiments found that measuring an activity, such as counting your steps, made people do more of it and enjoy it less, because it made pleasure feel like work. People who saw leisure as wasteful enjoyed their leisure less. And a 2026 study that followed people through their daily lives found them feeling guilty about leisure on about one leisure occasion in seven, more often when the leisure was solitary, and the people most prone to it got less benefit from their time off.
Then there is the job itself. The Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff roles are built on being useful, anticipating the need before it is voiced, and being the person who can always find a way. The research on going beyond the job description, which organisational psychologists call citizenship behaviour, has long been mostly positive, and it has a shadow. In 98 couples, people whose partners rated them high on taking extra initiative at work had more role overload, more job stress and more conflict between work and family, and the link with family conflict was stronger for women. A study of 273 employees found that going the extra mile could leave people worn out and on edge, particularly when they felt the organisation did not support them, and that this fatigue made them less likely to go the extra mile later. And an experience sampling study of 91 employees across ten working days found that helping others at work was depleting, and that on days after a lot of helping, people helped less.
A software engineering team studied for nine months in the late 1990s showed how the pattern becomes a culture. Constant interruptions, a crisis mentality and a reward system built on individual heroics kept everyone in a permanent time famine. When the team changed how it used its time, its collective productivity went up. The heroics had felt like the work. They were often in the way of it.
Try this. For one week, notice when you mention how busy you are, in an email, a meeting or a corridor. You do not need to stop saying it. Notice what it was doing in each case: explaining a delay, asking for help, or defending your worth. The third kind is the one worth gently letting go of, because your worth is not measured in how full your calendar is.
The research behind this section
Bellezza, Paharia and Keinan (2017) found across a series of studies that a busy and overworked lifestyle has become an aspirational status symbol, driven by perceptions that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics such as competence and ambition and is scarce and in demand, and moderated by perceived social mobility and by culture, comparing North America with Europe. Gershuny (2005) described busyness as the badge of honour of a new superordinate working class. Kim, Wadhwa and Chattopadhyay (2019) found across seven studies, including a field study, that a busy mindset bolstered people's sense of self-importance, which in turn increased self-control. Wilcox and colleagues (2016) examined how being busy can increase motivation and reduce task completion time. Keinan and Kivetz (2011) found in laboratory and field studies that a productivity orientation drives people to choose collectable, unusual experiences so that they feel productive even during leisure. Etkin (2016) found in six experiments that measurement increased how much people did an activity while reducing how much they enjoyed it, by drawing attention to output and making the activity feel more like work. Tonietto and colleagues (2021) found that viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment of it. Koo and colleagues (2026) developed a measure of leisure guilt and, in an experience sampling study, found that people experienced it during 14% of leisure occasions, more among women, people of lower socioeconomic status and younger adults, and more during solitary than social leisure, with those high in leisure guilt proneness reporting reduced benefits from leisure. Hochwarter and colleagues (2007) found in two studies that work-induced guilt was most harmful to job and life satisfaction when people could not manage their work resources. Bolino and Turnley (2005) studied 98 couples and found that higher individual initiative, rated by the spouse or partner, was associated with more role overload, job stress and work-family conflict, with the work-family link stronger among women. Bolino and colleagues (2015) studied 273 employees and their peers over time and found that the link between citizenship behaviour and citizenship fatigue depended on perceived organisational support, team relationships and pressure to perform citizenship, and that citizenship fatigue was negatively related to later citizenship behaviour. Gabriel and colleagues (2018) followed 91 full-time employees across ten workdays and found that helping others was depleting and was followed by less helping and more self-serving behaviour. Bergeron (2007) set out the potential paradox of citizenship behaviour, that good citizens may pay a price in their own task performance and careers. Perlow (1999) spent nine months with a software engineering team and found that interruptions, a crisis mentality and a reward system based on individual heroics perpetuated a time famine, and that altering how the engineers used their time enhanced collective productivity. Giurge, Whillans and West (2020) argued that time poverty is linked to lower wellbeing, physical health and productivity and is widely under-appreciated. Whillans and colleagues (2017) found in samples totalling 6,271 people across four countries that spending money on time-saving services was associated with greater life satisfaction, and in a field experiment that a time-saving purchase increased happiness more than a material one.
Working hard, and not being able to stop
There is a word for the far end of this, and I use it with care because it is so often used lightly. Researchers have studied workaholism for fifty years, and the most useful thing they have established is that it is not the same as working long hours or loving your job.
The distinction goes back to a 1992 study of social workers, which separated people who were highly involved in their work and enjoyed it from people who were highly involved, felt driven and did not enjoy it much. The second group reported more perfectionism, more reluctance to delegate, more job stress and more health complaints. Later work refined this into two different ways of working hard. Work engagement is energy, dedication and absorption: you work hard because the work pulls you. Workaholism is working excessively and compulsively: you work hard because something pushes you, and stopping feels worse than carrying on. In 587 telecom managers, workaholism, engagement and burnout turned out to be three distinct things with different patterns of causes and consequences.
The motivation behind them differs in exactly the way you would expect. In 1,246 Dutch employees, workaholics were driven by pressure, the sense that they ought to or must, while engaged employees were driven by interest and enjoyment. In Chinese nurses and doctors, workaholism went with the kind of motivation that comes from guilt and self-worth, and engagement with the kind that comes from finding the work interesting.
The consequences diverge too. A two-year study of 1,196 employees in Japan found that workaholism predicted rising ill-health and falling life satisfaction, while engagement predicted the opposite, along with better job performance. In 340 working adults, workaholism led to conflict between work and home through anxiety, anger and disappointment, while engagement enriched home life through feelings of cheerfulness and self-assurance. A meta-analysis found workaholism related to perfectionism and to burnout, job stress, conflict between work and life, and poorer physical and mental health. And the part most relevant to this post: the theory known as work craving describes workaholism as including the expectation that working will relieve bad feelings. In 469 teachers, difficulty calming yourself down was linked to poorer health partly through that craving, and in a longitudinal study of 170 employees, difficulties regulating emotion came before the craving to work, while distress did not.
The daily studies are the most vivid. In 311 workers, workaholism went with more negative feeling at work, as reported by both the workers and the people who knew them, and with higher blood pressure. In 114 workers followed across ten working days with 2,534 measurements, days with more workaholic tendencies than usual brought higher blood pressure, more emotional exhaustion and more disturbed sleep, and switching off in the evening softened the effect on sleep.
And now the counterweight, because it matters. Does all that drive at least make people better at their jobs? The evidence says no. A review of fifty years of research concluded that workaholics do not perform better than others and may perform worse, and a study of 519 employees found that supervisors' ratings of performance rose with engagement and were unaffected by workaholism. On the other side, the line between the two is not always clean. A meta-analysis of 35 studies found real overlap, particularly between working excessively and the absorbed, time-flies side of engagement. And a group the researchers called engaged workaholics, who were both driven and enthusiastic, worked the longest hours of anyone without having the highest burnout, which suggests that real enjoyment offers some protection. I would read that as good news rather than as permission: loving your work helps, and it does not make the compulsion harmless.
One more finding belongs here, because it is about where the drive comes from. Several studies found that job demands and an overwork culture predicted workaholism more strongly than personality did, and in one two-year study, high demands came before rising workaholism rather than the other way round. Far from being a character flaw, it is very often a response to a place.
A large survey of 16,426 workers found that workaholism was more common alongside symptoms of anxiety, depression and attention difficulties. That is a correlation in a web survey, and it is not a diagnosis of anybody. But if you recognise yourself in this section and you have been feeling low, anxious or unable to switch off for a while, please treat that as a reason to talk to someone: your GP, an employee assistance programme if you have one, or a counsellor. Reaching for support is one of the most capable things a capable person can do.
Try this. Ask yourself the question that separates the two ways of working hard: when you stop, what do you feel? If the answer is contentment, or pleasant tiredness, you are probably working because the work pulls you. If the answer is unease, guilt or a need to check one more thing, notice it without judging it, and try one evening this week with a firm stop time and something physical to do instead. In a study of evenings, work after hours was worse for people high in workaholism, and exercise did them more good.
The research behind this section
Spence and Robbins (1992) defined workaholism as high work involvement and drivenness with low enjoyment, contrasted it with work enthusiasm, and found among 291 academic social workers that workaholics were higher on perfectionism, nondelegation of responsibility, job stress and health complaints. Ng, Sorensen and Feldman (2007) offered a conceptual integration of the dimensions, antecedents and consequences of workaholism. Schaufeli, Taris and Van Rhenen (2008) found in 587 telecom managers that workaholism, burnout and work engagement were three distinct yet correlated constructs with unique patterns of relationships with working hours, job characteristics, outcomes, social relationships and health. Van Beek, Taris and Schaufeli (2011) found in 1,246 Dutch employees that workaholism and engagement were largely independent, that workaholic employees were driven by controlled motivation and engaged employees by autonomous motivation, and that engaged workaholics worked the most hours without the highest burnout. Van Beek and colleagues (2012) found in 544 nurses and 216 physicians in China that workaholism was associated with introjected and identified regulation and engagement mainly with intrinsic regulation. Shimazu and colleagues (2015) followed 1,196 employees of a Japanese company over two years and found workaholism related to increasing ill-health and decreasing life satisfaction, and engagement related to increasing life satisfaction and job performance and decreasing ill-health. Clark and colleagues (2014) found in a two-wave study of 340 working adults that anxiety, anger and disappointment mediated the link between workaholism and work-home conflict, and joviality and self-assurance mediated the link between engagement and work-home enrichment. Clark and colleagues (2016) meta-analysed the correlates of workaholism and found it related to perfectionism and Type A personality, mixed in its relations with affect, and related to burnout, job stress, work-life conflict and poorer physical and mental health. Clark, Smith and Haynes (2020) developed the Multidimensional Workaholism Scale across five samples totalling 1,252 people, covering motivational, cognitive, emotional and behavioural dimensions. Wojdylo and colleagues (2014) found in 469 German teachers that the negative relationship of self-relaxation deficits with health was partially mediated by work craving, defined to include the anticipated reduction of negative emotions through working. Wojdylo, Karlsson and Baumann (2016) found in 170 German employees that self-regulation deficits predicted later work craving, which partially mediated their link with psychological distress, while distress did not predict later work craving. Balducci, Avanzi and Fraccaroli (2018) found in 311 workers that workaholism was related to observer-reported and self-reported job-related negative affect, more strongly among women, and to systolic blood pressure, and in a two-wave panel of 235 health-sector employees that job demands predicted later workaholism and workaholism predicted mental distress a year later. Balducci and colleagues (2021) found in 102 workers over ten days that daily workload mediated the link between workaholic tendencies and daily emotional exhaustion, and in 519 employees that workaholism did not affect supervisor-rated performance while engagement did so positively. Menghini, Spagnoli and Balducci (2023) found in 139 back-office workers that higher workaholic tendencies went with lower hedonic tone at work. Menghini and Balducci (2024) followed 114 workers over ten workdays with 2,534 measurement occasions and found higher blood pressure, emotional exhaustion and sleep disturbances on days with higher-than-usual workaholism, with evening psychological detachment buffering the link with sleep. Di Stefano and Gaudiino (2019) meta-analysed 35 studies and found associations between working excessively and absorption (g = .34), working compulsively and absorption (g = .28), and working excessively and dedication (g = .14). Taris and de Jonge (2024) reviewed fifty years of research and concluded that work-related factors such as an overwork culture and high job demands matter more than demographic and personality factors, and that workaholics do not perform better and may perform worse. Mazzetti, Schaufeli and Guglielmi (2014) examined whether workaholism is driven by person characteristics or an overwork climate. Gillet and colleagues (2017) found in two studies that emotional dissonance predicted membership of higher workaholism profiles and that higher profiles went with more need thwarting and poorer outcomes. Aziz, Bellows and Wuensch (2021) found in 400 working adults that workaholism was related to negative affect and that mindfulness weakened this link. Andreassen and colleagues (2016) surveyed 16,426 workers online and found workaholism positively associated with symptoms of ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression, with most effect sizes relatively small. Bakker and colleagues (2013) used a day reconstruction method with 85 people and found that work-related activities in the evening were more harmful, and physical activities more beneficial, to evening wellbeing for those high in workaholism. Sonnentag, Binnewies and Mojza (2010) followed 309 human service employees over twelve months and found that psychological detachment during off-job time predicted emotional exhaustion and buffered the effects of high job demands on psychosomatic complaints and work engagement. Sonnentag and Wiegelmann (2024) followed 243 employees over two working weeks and found that of the job-related thoughts that follow a lack of detachment, only backward-oriented negative rumination predicted next-day negative affect. Weigelt, Gierer and Syrek (2019) distinguished detachment, affective rumination, problem-solving pondering and positive and negative work reflection in 474 employees and found affective rumination particularly linked to burnout and detachment to life satisfaction and flourishing. Hahn and colleagues (2011) evaluated a two-session recovery training with 95 people and found improvements in recovery experiences, recovery self-efficacy and sleep, and reductions in perceived stress and negative affect three weeks later, but no effect on emotional exhaustion.
Naming it, and letting it stay a while
When I first heard that naming your emotions could help you manage them, my first reaction was: really, that is it? Then I tried it. When I said to myself "this is anxiety" or "this is disappointment", the feeling became less overwhelming, as if naming it gave me enough distance to deal with it rather than drown in it.
The research is kinder to that experience than I expected. In a study of people afraid of spiders, one group described their feelings in words while they were exposed to a live spider, others tried to reframe the situation or distract themselves, and a fourth group simply went through the exposure. A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the group that had put their feelings into words showed less physiological arousal than the others, and the more fear and anxiety words people had used, the more their fear responses fell. Interestingly, they did not report feeling less afraid. The words seemed to work on the body before they worked on the mind.
Precision helps. People who distinguish finely between their emotions, telling irritation from resentment and worry from dread, are less likely under intense distress to reach for unhelpful ways of coping such as drinking heavily, and are less prone to severe anxiety and low mood. An earlier study found that people who could tell their negative feelings apart more precisely also did more to manage them.
Then comes the harder step, which is letting the named feeling stay. A set of three studies with more than 1,300 people in total found that people who habitually accepted their thoughts and feelings, without judging them, had better psychological health, and that this worked because they felt less negative emotion in response to everyday stress. One distinction in that work is worth underlining twice. The benefit came from accepting inner experiences. Accepting difficult situations did not show it. You can let a feeling of frustration be there and still decide the situation causing it needs to change. A second study found that acceptance protected people from low mood specifically when life was most stressful.
Accepting a feeling is not the same as accepting the situation that caused it. You can let the feeling stay and still change the situation.
This is also where the workplace evidence is strongest. A year-long study of 412 customer service staff in the United Kingdom found that people higher in acceptance had better mental health and better objectively measured performance a year later, and that they made more of the control they had over their work. Workplace training based on acceptance and commitment therapy, delivered in three half-day sessions to 311 local government employees, reduced distress, and among those who had been struggling at the start, most improved to a meaningful degree. A comparison found that approach and a more traditional stress programme equally effective, with the acceptance approach working through greater psychological flexibility. And mindfulness, the practice of noticing what is happening without judging it, reduced emotional exhaustion in a field experiment, partly because people stopped faking emotions they did not feel.
The honest caveats belong here as well. A meta-analysis of 30 experiments found that acceptance helped people tolerate pain for longer, but did not reduce negative feeling more than other strategies did. A systematic review of acceptance-based programmes for burnout found promising effects and small samples. And the meta-analysis of workplace mindfulness training could not reach any conclusion about burnout, depression or job performance. Acceptance and mindfulness are useful tools, and they do not replace a workload that is too big.
Try this. Set one or two gentle reminders tomorrow that simply ask what is going on inside. When one appears, take fifteen seconds to name what you feel as precisely as you can, and then say to yourself that it is allowed to be there. Then ask one practical question: is there anything about the situation that this feeling is asking me to change?
The research behind this section
Kircanski, Lieberman and Craske (2012) compared affect labelling, reappraisal, distraction and exposure alone during brief exposure therapy for spider fear and found that at a one-week test with a different spider in another context the affect-labelling group showed reduced skin conductance response relative to the other groups, with no difference in self-reported fear, and that greater use of anxiety and fear words during exposure was associated with greater reductions in fear responding. Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015) reviewed research showing that people who experience emotions with more granularity are, under intense distress, less likely to resort to binge drinking, aggression and self-injurious behaviour and experience less severe anxiety and depressive disorders. Barrett and colleagues (2001) mapped the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation, finding that people who differentiated their negative emotions more also reported more regulation of them. Ford and colleagues (2018) found in three studies (1,003, 156 and 222 participants) that habitual acceptance of mental experiences predicted psychological health, lower negative emotional responses to a laboratory stressor, and lower negative emotion during daily stressors that accounted for its link with psychological health six months later, and that the link was unique to accepting mental experiences rather than situations. Shallcross and colleagues (2010) found that acceptance was correlated with decreased negative affect during a negative emotion induction and, prospectively, predicted fewer depressive symptoms after higher but not lower life stress. Bond and Bunce (2003) followed 412 customer service centre workers in the United Kingdom over a year and found that acceptance predicted mental health and an objective measure of performance over and above job control, negative affectivity and locus of control, and enhanced the benefits of job control. Bond and Flaxman (2006) examined the ability of psychological flexibility and job control to predict learning, job performance and mental health. Flaxman and Bond (2010) randomly assigned 311 local government employees to acceptance and commitment therapy based stress management training or a waitlist and found reduced distress, moderated by baseline distress, with 69% of initially distressed participants improving to a clinically significant degree. Flaxman and Bond (2010) also compared acceptance and commitment therapy with stress inoculation training in 107 distressed workers and found them equally effective, with the benefits of the former mediated by increased psychological flexibility. Hayes and colleagues (2006) reviewed the model, processes and outcomes of acceptance and commitment therapy and concluded the data were promising but not enough to say it is generally more effective than other active treatments. Towey-Swift, Lauvrud and Whittington (2023) systematically reviewed 14 controlled trials of acceptance and commitment therapy for professional staff burnout and found statistically significant effects in favour of the interventions in most, with small samples. Hülsheger and colleagues (2013) found in a diary study of 219 employees and a field experiment with 64 that mindfulness reduced emotional exhaustion and improved job satisfaction, mediated by less surface acting. Bartlett and colleagues (2019) meta-analysed 23 randomised controlled trials of workplace mindfulness training and found benefits for mindfulness (g = 0.45), stress (g = 0.56), anxiety (g = 0.62), psychological distress (g = 0.69), wellbeing (g = 0.46) and sleep (g = 0.26), with no conclusions possible for burnout, depression or work performance. Good and colleagues (2016) reviewed the research on mindfulness at work and proposed that it acts through attention on cognition, emotion, behaviour and physiology. Kohl, Rief and Glombiewski (2012) meta-analysed 30 experimental studies and found acceptance superior to other emotion regulation strategies for pain tolerance (g = 0.43) but not for pain intensity or negative affect.
Being kind to the person who kept busy
If you have recognised yourself in any of this, the natural next move for a conscientious person is to add it to the list. Stop avoiding feelings, starting Monday. Please do not, because the research on how people change suggests that being hard on yourself about a habit is one of the more reliable ways to keep it.
In four experiments, people who were encouraged to treat a mistake or a weakness with self-compassion, rather than with a boost to their self-esteem or no intervention, were more motivated to improve. After failing a difficult test, they spent more time studying for the next one. Five further studies found that self-compassionate people could acknowledge their own part in difficult events without being overwhelmed by negative feeling, which is exactly the capacity needed to look at a habit without flinching. Across 79 samples and 16,416 people, self-compassion was clearly linked with wellbeing, and across 20 samples it was strongly linked with lower psychological distress.
Procrastination research found the same thing in the most practical way. Students who forgave themselves for putting off revision before one exam procrastinated less before the next. The self-criticism that feels like responsibility turns out to be one more unpleasant feeling to avoid, and the easiest way to avoid it is to stay busy.
So if busyness has been doing some of your feeling for you, it was doing a job. It got you through hard afternoons, it earned you a reputation for being brilliant under pressure, and in a role that prizes being endlessly useful, it was rewarded at every turn. You do not have to be ashamed of it. You may simply be ready for it to share the load with something else.
Try this. Write down one sentence you would say to a colleague you care about who told you they had been hiding in their inbox. Then read it back to yourself. It will almost certainly be kinder, more specific and more useful than what you had been telling yourself, and it is the version the research says works.
The research behind this section
Breines and Chen (2012) found in four experiments that participants in a self-compassion condition, compared with a self-esteem control and either no intervention or a positive distraction control, expressed greater incremental beliefs about a personal weakness, greater motivation to make amends for a moral transgression, spent more time studying for a difficult test after an initial failure, and reported greater motivation to change a weakness. Leary and colleagues (2007) found across five studies that self-compassion predicted emotional and cognitive reactions to negative events and led people to acknowledge their role in negative events without feeling overwhelmed by negative emotions. Zessin, Dickhäuser and Garbade (2015) meta-analysed 79 samples with 16,416 people and found a relationship between self-compassion and wellbeing of r = .47. MacBeth and Gumley (2012) meta-analysed 20 samples and found a large relationship between self-compassion and psychopathology of r = -0.54. Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett (2010) found that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before a first examination procrastinated less before the next. Sirois (2014) examined the role of self-compassion in the relationship between procrastination and stress.
The busy check
Everything in this post comes down to a single moment: you are doing something, you are doing it well, and a small voice asks whether you are doing it because it needs doing. So here is a tool for that moment.
Put in what you are working on right now, and answer a few questions about whether it is needed today, what you felt in the moment before you started, and what happens when you stop. It will tell you whether this looks like work, a healthy break or a hiding place, what to do next, what to check, and it gives you a short note to keep. Nothing you enter leaves the page.
Where to start
If you take one thing from all of this, make it the return time. Stepping away from a difficult feeling is human and often wise, and the research supports it, especially when the feeling is intense and the moment is wrong. What costs you is the break that never ends: the feeling that is quietly parked behind a tidy inbox for weeks. Give every retreat a time and a way back, and busyness goes back to being what it should be, which is a way of getting good work done.
After that, there are three moves worth making.
When you notice you are busy, ask whether the work needs you or you need the work, and name the task you are not doing. When a feeling arrives, name it as precisely as you can and let it be there, while asking whether it is pointing at something you can change. And when you stop in the evening, notice what you feel. Contentment means the work is pulling you; unease means something may be pushing, and that is worth a kind and curious look.
I have put three pages into a download that make this easier to do on an ordinary day: a page for catching the busyness in the moment, a page for naming the feeling and deciding what it is asking of you, and a page for building a proper end to the working day.
Your drive, your ambition and your ability to get things done are brilliant, and nothing in this research asks you to give them up. It asks only that they stop being your armour. You are not a productivity machine. You are a whole person doing a demanding job very well, and you deserve to feel your own life as well as run everyone else's.
The part of this that shows up in how you work sits inside what the Connected Leader Assessment calls Sustainable Performance: how you manage your energy and your emotional load, how you recover from hard days, and whether the way you work now is one you could keep doing well for years. It is the dimension that decides whether being endlessly useful makes your career or quietly costs you.
The assessment is free, takes about twelve minutes and gives you a read across all five dimensions. If you want to go further on this one, the Skill Sprints are short, focused programmes on a single dimension, and the Irreplaceable Audit is the place to separate the work that truly needs you from the work you have been holding onto, which is often where the hiding places are.
Stay savvy.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The busy check, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Stillness Pages, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Sustainable Performance, the dimension this post sits in
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on Busyness and Avoidance?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on why staying busy can be a way of not feeling, and what helps instead, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess.
📃 Wilson and colleagues (2014) Eleven studies. Six to fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts, and many chose a mild shock instead. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250830
📃 Buttrick and colleagues (2019) 2,557 people in eleven countries. Doing beat thinking for pleasure in every one. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000198
📃 Hsee, Yang and Wang (2010) People dread idleness and need a reason to be busy; busy people were happier, even when made to be. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610374738
📃 Westgate and Wilson (2018) Boredom as a mismatch of attention and of meaning. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000097
📃 Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) Minds wandered almost as often as not, and wandering minds were less happy. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
📃 Havermans and colleagues (2015) Bored people ate more sweets and gave themselves more shocks, to escape the monotony. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2014.11.007
📃 Nederkoorn and colleagues (2016) Boredom, not sadness, led people to give themselves more and stronger shocks. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2016.01.063
📃 Hatano and colleagues (2022) Six experiments. People enjoyed sitting and waiting more than they predicted, and still chose the news. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001255
📃 Westgate, Wilson and Gilbert (2017) Thinking for pleasure is hard work; a simple list of topics made it easier and more enjoyable. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000278
📃 Fox and colleagues (2014) A commentary arguing the shock studies offered little support for thinking being unpleasant. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01427
📃 Hayes and colleagues (1996) Experiential avoidance set out: the unwillingness to stay in contact with painful inner experience. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006x.64.6.1152
📃 Kashdan and colleagues (2006) Experiential avoidance as a general psychological vulnerability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.10.003
📃 Chawla and Ostafin (2007) Review. Avoidance may be involved in many difficulties, and the concept needs sharper definition. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20400
📃 Kashdan and Rottenberg (2010) Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.001
📃 Bond and colleagues (2011) 2,816 people. The avoidance measure predicted outcomes from mental health to work absence. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2011.03.007
📃 Mojallal and colleagues (2022) 187 police officers. Avoidance was linked to burnout, lower wellbeing and lost productivity. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.23371
📃 Losa Iglesias, Vallejo and Fuentes (2010) 80 critical care nurses. Avoidance correlated with emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2009.06.014
📃 Kroska and colleagues (2017) Burnout and depression in medical students, and their links with avoidance. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2017.08.003
📃 Bond and Bunce (2003) 412 UK customer service staff. Acceptance predicted mental health and performance a year on. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.6.1057
📃 Bond and Flaxman (2006) Psychological flexibility and job control as predictors of learning, performance and health. https://doi.org/10.1300/j075v26n01_05
📃 Flaxman and Bond (2010) 311 employees. Acceptance-based training cut distress, most for those struggling at the start. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020522
📃 Flaxman and Bond (2010) 107 distressed workers. Acceptance training worked as well as stress inoculation, through flexibility. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2010.05.004
📃 Kohl, Rief and Glombiewski (2012) Meta-analysis of 30 experiments. Acceptance helped tolerate pain but not negative feeling more than other strategies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2012.03.004
📃 Ford and colleagues (2018) Three studies. Accepting feelings, not situations, predicted better psychological health. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157
📃 Campbell-Sills and colleagues (2006) 60 people. Accepting feelings during a film led to better recovery than suppressing them. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.10.001
📃 Sheppes and colleagues (2011) Three experiments. People chose distraction for intense feelings and rethinking for mild ones. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611418350
📃 Sheppes and colleagues (2014) A framework for how people choose between ways of handling a feeling. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030831
📃 Bonanno and Burton (2013) Regulatory flexibility, and the fallacy that any one strategy always works. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691613504116
📃 Aldao, Sheppes and Gross (2015) Emotion regulation flexibility: using different strategies well across situations. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-014-9662-4
📃 Gross (1998) Regulating a feeling early by rethinking it, or late by holding it in. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.1.224
📃 Wegner (1994) Why trying not to think of something can bring it back. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.101.1.34
📃 Abramowitz, Tolin and Street (2001) Meta-analysis. Suppressing a thought produced a small to moderate rebound. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0272-7358(00)00057-x
📃 Kircanski, Lieberman and Craske (2012) Putting fear into words during exposure reduced arousal a week later. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830
📃 Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015) Naming emotions precisely went with healthier coping under distress. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708
📃 Barrett and colleagues (2001) People who told their feelings apart more precisely did more to manage them. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930143000239
📃 Hülsheger and colleagues (2013) Mindfulness reduced emotional exhaustion, partly by reducing faked emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031313
📃 Good and colleagues (2016) Review of mindfulness at work and how it acts through attention. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315617003
📃 Bartlett and colleagues (2019) 23 trials. Workplace mindfulness reduced stress, anxiety and distress; burnout was inconclusive. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000146
📃 Schaufeli, Taris and Van Rhenen (2008) 587 managers. Workaholism, burnout and engagement were three different things. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2007.00285.x
📃 Clark and colleagues (2016) Meta-analysis. Workaholism went with perfectionism, burnout, stress and poorer health. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206314522301
📃 Shimazu and colleagues (2015) 1,196 employees over two years. Workaholism harmed health; engagement helped health and performance. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-014-9410-x
📃 Van Beek and colleagues (2012) Nurses and doctors. Workaholism went with guilt-driven motivation, engagement with interest. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2011.00454.x
📃 Van Beek, Taris and Schaufeli (2011) 1,246 employees. Workaholics were driven by pressure, the engaged by interest. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024392
📃 Clark, Smith and Haynes (2020) The Multidimensional Workaholism Scale, across five samples and 1,252 people. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000484
📃 Ng, Sorensen and Feldman (2007) A conceptual integration of what workaholism is, where it comes from and what it does. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.424
📃 Bakker and colleagues (2013) 85 people. Evening work hurt workaholics more; exercise helped them more. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1796
📃 Di Stefano and Gaudiino (2019) Meta-analysis of 35 studies. Where workaholism and engagement overlap. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2019.1590337
📃 Andreassen and colleagues (2016) 16,426 workers. Workaholism went with symptoms of anxiety, depression and ADHD, mostly small effects. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152978
📃 Balducci, Avanzi and Fraccaroli (2018) Workaholism went with more negative feeling at work and higher blood pressure. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316658348
📃 Balducci and colleagues (2021) Workaholism raised daily workload and exhaustion; it did nothing for performance ratings. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2020.1735569
📃 Bellezza, Paharia and Keinan (2017) Busyness and lack of leisure became a status symbol, signalling competence and demand. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw076
📃 Gershuny (2005) Busyness as the badge of honour of a new professional class. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2005.0026
📃 Kim, Wadhwa and Chattopadhyay (2019) Seven studies. Feeling busy raised self-importance and, with it, self-control. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy069
📃 Perlow (1999) Nine months with a software team. Heroics and interruptions kept everyone in a time famine. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667031
📃 Whillans and colleagues (2017) 6,271 people. Spending money to buy time was linked to greater life satisfaction. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706541114
📃 Keinan and Kivetz (2011) A productivity orientation led people to collect experiences, even on holiday. https://doi.org/10.1086/657163
📃 Tonietto and colleagues (2021) Seeing leisure as wasteful undermined enjoyment of it. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104198
📃 Etkin (2016) Six experiments. Measuring an activity made people do more of it and enjoy it less. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv095
📃 Wilcox and colleagues (2016) Being busy can raise motivation and shorten the time a task takes. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000045
📃 Giurge, Whillans and West (2020) Why time poverty matters for people, organisations and nations. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0920-z
📃 Tice and Bratslavsky (2000) Giving in to feel good: emotion regulation within general self-control. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1103_03
📃 Tice, Bratslavsky and Baumeister (2001) Upset people indulged to feel better now, unless they believed the mood could not change. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.1.53
📃 Sirois and Pychyl (2013) Procrastination as short-term mood repair, paid for by the future self. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011
📃 Steel (2007) Meta-analysis of 691 correlations. How unpleasant a task felt strongly predicted putting it off. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
📃 Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett (2010) Forgiving yourself for procrastinating reduced procrastination next time. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029
📃 Eckert and colleagues (2016) Training people to tolerate and change unpleasant feelings reduced procrastination. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.10.001
📃 Sirois (2014) Self-compassion in the link between procrastination and stress. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2013.763404
📃 Breines and Chen (2012) Four experiments. Self-compassion after a mistake raised the motivation to improve. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212445599
📃 Zessin, Dickhäuser and Garbade (2015) 79 samples, 16,416 people. Self-compassion and wellbeing, r = .47. https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12051
📃 MacBeth and Gumley (2012) 20 samples. Self-compassion strongly linked with lower distress. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2012.06.003
📃 Bolino and Turnley (2005) 98 couples. More initiative at work went with overload, stress and work-family conflict. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.4.740
📃 Bolino and colleagues (2015) 273 employees. Going the extra mile could lead to citizenship fatigue, and less of it later. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037583
📃 Gabriel and colleagues (2018) 91 employees over ten days. Helping others was depleting. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12229
📃 Bergeron (2007) The potential paradox of good organisational citizens, and what it costs them. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2007.26585791
📃 Sonnentag, Binnewies and Mojza (2010) 309 employees over a year. Switching off buffered the effects of high demands. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020032
📃 Hahn and colleagues (2011) A two-session recovery training improved recovery, sleep and stress. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022169
📃 Troy, Shallcross and Mauss (2013) 170 people. Reframing helped with stress you could not change and hurt with stress you could. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613496434
📃 Shallcross and colleagues (2010) Acceptance protected against low mood when life was most stressful. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2010.05.025
📃 Brockman and colleagues (2017) 187 people, daily diary. Mindfulness helped, suppression hurt, reframing was mixed. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2016.1218926
📃 Kalokerinos, Greenaway and Denson (2015) More than 1,300 people. Reframing reduced feelings; hiding them did not. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000025
📃 Tamir (2016) Why people regulate their emotions: feeling better now, or other goals. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868315586325
📃 Hayes and colleagues (2006) The model, processes and outcomes of acceptance and commitment therapy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006
📃 Towey-Swift, Lauvrud and Whittington (2023) Review of 14 trials. Acceptance-based programmes showed promise for burnout, in small samples. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2021.2022628
📃 Weigelt, Gierer and Syrek (2019) 474 employees. Five ways of thinking about work after hours, each with its own effects. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16162987
📃 Mazzetti, Schaufeli and Guglielmi (2014) Whether workaholics are born or made, by person and by overwork climate. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035700
📃 Spence and Robbins (1992) Workaholism defined: high involvement and drive, low enjoyment, set against enthusiasm. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5801_15
📃 Chan and Hui (1995) 415 teachers. Escape and avoidance coping went with every aspect of burnout. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1995.tb01128.x
📃 Leary and colleagues (2007) Five studies. Self-compassion let people own their part without being overwhelmed. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.887
📃 Wojdylo, Karlsson and Baumann (2016) 170 employees. Difficulty regulating emotion came before the craving to work. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.5.2016.005
📃 Wojdylo and colleagues (2014) 469 teachers. Trouble calming down fed work craving, and work craving poorer health. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0106379
📃 Menghini and Balducci (2024) 114 workers, 2,534 measurements. High-workaholism days raised blood pressure and broke sleep. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000383
📃 Menghini, Spagnoli and Balducci (2023) 139 office workers. Higher workaholic tendencies, lower mood at work. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000365
📃 Clark and colleagues (2014) 340 adults. Anxiety, anger and disappointment carried workaholism into home life. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2511
📃 Aziz, Bellows and Wuensch (2021) 400 adults. Mindfulness weakened the link between workaholism and negative feeling. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-020-00249-5
📃 Taris and de Jonge (2024) Fifty years of research. Workaholics do not perform better, and culture matters more than personality. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-111821-035514
📃 Waugh, Shing and Furr (2020) Four samples. Positive distraction went with better wellbeing; avoidance did not. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2020.1755820
📃 Waugh, Leslie-Miller and Cole (2023) 305 people over three weeks. Habitual distraction helped; habitual avoidance hurt. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2022.2081841
📃 Rankin, Walsh and Sweeny (2019) Absorbing activities eased waiting for news, though people struggled to pick them. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000479
📃 Van Dillen and Koole (2007) A task that filled working memory lifted a low mood after upsetting pictures. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.715
📃 Naragon-Gainey, McMahon and Chacko (2017) 331 samples. Coping strategies fell into pulling away, going round in circles and engaging. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000093
📃 Boemo and colleagues (2022) Meta-analysis of daily-life studies. Suppression and rumination tracked negative feeling. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104747
📃 Koo and colleagues (2026) Leisure guilt appeared on 14% of leisure occasions and reduced its benefits. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672261462977
📃 Sonnentag and Wiegelmann (2024) 243 employees. Only dwelling backwards on bad events predicted next-day low mood. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2792
📃 Shin and Kemps (2020) 140 people. Media multitasking went with difficulty accepting feelings, as a way of looking away. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2020.1745194
📃 Hochwarter and colleagues (2007) Guilt about work hurt satisfaction most when people could not manage their resources. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.2.125
📃 Gillet and colleagues (2017) Emotional dissonance predicted higher workaholism profiles. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12185
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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