When Work Becomes Your Coping Mechanism: What Happens When You Can’t Work Anymore?

“I realised years ago that if I worked constantly, my mental health didn’t have as much opportunity to get on top of me. So I worked 70 hours a week. It worked — until eventually I couldn’t do it anymore. And now I’m discovering just how much of my identity and coping mechanism was tied up in work.”

I’ve been used to working 70+ hours per week for such a long time.

Nobody forced me to do it. It’s not like some evil faceless corporation sat there with a whip and made me into a machine.

No, there was something else at play.

Something I never really considered until recently: work was helping me cope with my mental health.

I Thought I Just Had a Strong Work Ethic

I’ve always loved computers and pretty much the entire IT field.

There were so many different areas to explore that I never got bored. There was always something new to learn, something that needed fixing or another problem that needed solving.

I assembled and configured servers, worked with networks and internet infrastructure, wrote software, managed systems — you name it, there’s a pretty good chance I had my hand in it at some point.

And I loved solving problems.

Work gave my brain somewhere to go.

Later, I had both work and family life consuming my time. There simply wasn’t much time left to sit around feeling down or getting stuck inside my own head.

In fact, from what I remember, I was pretty happy with everything.

For some people, working those sorts of hours is simply necessary. You need the income to keep your life afloat, pay the bills and look after your family.

Of course, the income was important to me too.

But looking back, money wasn’t the only reason I worked so hard.

Work provided me with purpose, distraction and identity.

Work Was Doing More for Me Than I Realised

This is something I’ve only really started understanding recently.

Work wasn’t simply keeping me busy.

It was giving me several things at once.

There was structure to my day. There were problems that needed solving. People relied on me. I could measure my progress. I was good at what I did, and that gave me confidence.

Perhaps most importantly, when my brain was occupied with all of that, there wasn’t as much room for the darker stuff.

If there was a technical problem at work, I concentrated on fixing it.

If a server went down, that became the priority.

If software needed writing, I wrote it.

There was always something that required my attention.

I thought I was simply a bloke with an incredibly strong work ethic.

Now I’m beginning to realise that work had also become one of my coping mechanisms.

And the problem with building so much of your life around work is that you don’t necessarily realise how much it’s holding together until the work disappears.

What Happened When the Work Stopped

I finished up with my previous company in September 2017, and I feel like I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster during the nine years since.

I won’t go into everything that’s happened during that period. A lot of it involves my family, and they deserve their privacy.

But it’s been a lot, let me tell you.

The last four years in particular have been difficult because family obligations and commitments meant I could simply no longer work the way I once did.

For a bloke who had spent decades working insane hours, that required an enormous adjustment.

For so long, my identity, self-worth and confidence came from working hard, solving problems and putting in seriously long hours.

I was consumed by it.

Once that was taken away, I experienced something of an existential crisis.

If I’m not working, then who exactly am I?

My mental health deteriorated, and I became increasingly down as the years progressed.

The strange thing was that I could still do things when other people depended on me.

If one of my kids had an appointment with one of their providers, I’d manage to get out of bed and take them.

There were things that simply had to be done, and somehow I did them.

But if something was just for me?

That was completely different.

Sometimes I could barely make myself get out of bed.

Heck, there were days when I didn’t even turn on my PC.

For a guy who has loved computers for most of his life, you know something is seriously wrong when that happens.

When Your Self-Worth Becomes Tied to Productivity

I think this is something I’m still trying to untangle.

For decades, being productive meant I was doing well.

A busy day was a good day.

If I’d solved ten problems, written some software, helped someone, fixed something and ticked another dozen things off my list, I’d accomplished something.

And accomplishment felt good.

The trouble comes when productivity stops being something you do and starts becoming part of how you determine what you’re worth.

When I stopped being able to work the way I once had, I didn’t simply lose the work.

I lost some of the things the work had been providing me:

Structure.

Confidence.

Purpose.

A sense of accomplishment.

A feeling that I was useful.

And, to some extent, my identity.

That’s a hell of a lot to replace.

Trying to Find the “Next Big Thing”

If I’m being perfectly honest, this is something I still struggle with today.

I still see my psychologist once a month. Sometimes it feels like I’m simply going through the motions and I’m not always sure how much difference it’s making at the moment.

But I keep showing up.

I’ve also spent a great deal of time trying to work out what my next big thing should be.

I’ve written down countless business ideas.

I’ve built little software prototypes.

I’ve looked at affiliate marketing, writing, online businesses and other projects.

I’ve even used AI agents to help me brainstorm ideas and build things.

The problem is that nothing is really sticking.

I’ll have an idea, become interested in it for a little while and then realise:

I don’t actually care enough about this to keep doing it.

That’s been frustrating.

Particularly because the old version of me would probably have thrown himself into one of those projects and worked on it until three o’clock in the morning.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether constantly searching for another enormous project is really the answer.

Maybe replacing one all-consuming obsession with another isn’t what I need.

Learning Who I Am When I’m Not Working

This is where things become surprisingly difficult.

If I’m not the IT guy, the software developer, the business owner or the bloke who works ridiculous hours…

Who am I?

I’m still working that one out.

I like reading books.

I enjoy computer games.

I’m slightly obsessed with marine aquarium fish, although I haven’t actually done anything with aquariums for quite a while.

I genuinely like doing the housework and keeping everything nice, particularly the kitchen.

And I also happen to talk both to and for our cats.

I’m sure that if they could understand me, they’d think I was a complete nutcase.

In a loving way, of course.

These aren’t impressive achievements.

They’re not things I’d put on a CV.

But perhaps that’s part of what I’m having to learn.

Not everything I do needs to produce something.

Not every hour needs to generate money.

Not every interest needs to become a business.

And not every day needs to finish with a list of accomplishments before I’m allowed to consider it worthwhile.

That’s surprisingly difficult for me to accept.

Losing Work Can Mean Losing Part of Your Identity

My experience has made me think more about people who go through major transitions in their working lives.

I’ve found myself thinking about military veterans transitioning out of service.

I’m certainly not comparing my career to military service, and I wouldn’t pretend to understand what an individual veteran experiences.

But there’s one part of that transition I can relate to: what happens when something that has provided structure, identity, community and purpose is suddenly no longer part of everyday life?

I’ve thought about retirement in much the same way.

Imagine someone who has spent 40 or 50 years getting up every morning and going to work.

They’ve built a career. Raised their children. Provided for their family.

Then they retire.

Their children have grown up and moved out.

Suddenly, the two things that occupied most of their adult life — work and raising a family — have changed enormously.

What comes next?

I think that’s a much bigger psychological question than simply finding some hobbies to fill the time.

Because when your identity becomes intertwined with what you do, losing that role can feel like losing a piece of yourself.

So What Am I Doing About It?

I wish I had a particularly impressive answer.

I don’t.

Right now, I’m trying something different.

Instead of immediately finding another enormous project and throwing myself into it for 70 hours a week, I’m trying to work out what actually interests me.

That’s surprisingly difficult.

I’m experimenting with things.

I’m reading.

I’m writing.

I’m spending time with my boys.

I’m trying ideas and giving myself permission to decide that I don’t actually like them.

I’m also trying to recognise that the things I already do matter, even if nobody is paying me to do them.

Most importantly, I’m beginning to question something I’ve believed for most of my adult life:

Is a productive day automatically a good day — and is an unproductive day automatically a wasted one?

I haven’t completely convinced myself otherwise yet.

But I’m working on it.

I’m Still Figuring It Out

I’m learning to separate who I am as a person from what I produce.

I’d love to tell you it’s been easy.

It hasn’t.

I built so much of my life around working that my identity became intimately intertwined with it. I don’t think something like that gets untangled overnight.

And perhaps that’s okay.

Maybe I don’t need to discover the next big thing this week.

Maybe I don’t need to replace 70-hour working weeks with another project that consumes every waking hour.

Maybe part of what I’m learning is how to build a life where work can still be important to me without being the thing that determines my entire sense of self-worth.

I wish I could finish this article by giving you a five-step formula that fixed everything.

I can’t.

I’m still trying to figure this all out.

And if you’re going through something similar, perhaps knowing that someone else is still figuring it out too is worth something.