Picture a senior manager who has already met every deadline, earned the praise of her boss, and been told outright that she does not need to work this hard. And yet, on a Saturday afternoon, she feels a nagging pull toward her laptop. Stopping feels uncomfortable. Resting feels like failure. She knows the pattern is harming her health, but she cannot seem to break it.
This is the puzzle two researchers set out to understand. Most explanations for overwork point outward, toward demanding bosses, always-on technology, or workplace cultures that reward total devotion. But if the problem were purely external, why would people resist policies designed to make them work less? A study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers evidence that the roots of excessive work may reach back into childhood, and that the very habits people built to protect themselves as children can quietly generate the distress they suffer as adults.
A question about distress that won’t go away
Preeti Varma and Jennifer Louise Petriglieri of INSEAD wanted to know what role, if any, people’s own psychological defenses play in producing and sustaining distress at work. Their interest in the topic was personal as well as academic. One author describes her own ongoing struggle with excessive work, and the other has spent years teaching professionals who openly described the emotional toll of their working habits.
The researchers approached the question through a psychodynamic lens. This is a way of understanding behavior that rests on two ideas: first, that much of what drives us operates below conscious awareness, and second, that our inner lives are shaped by relationships, including those formed in early childhood. From this perspective, the authors argue, distress that appears to be triggered by a job may actually be perpetuated, and even amplified, by the defenses a person carries inside.
The study centers on a concept psychologists call an “identity defense.” This refers to an identity a person constructs to shield themselves from emotional pain. Management researchers have usually treated such identities as helpful coping tools. Varma and Petriglieri set out to examine whether they might also carry hidden costs.
Listening to 43 self-described excessive workers
The researchers conducted an inductive qualitative study, meaning they built their theory from the ground up by listening closely to people’s stories rather than testing a fixed hypothesis. Over 29 months, they recruited 43 knowledge workers from the alumni network of a global business school. All of them self-identified as people who choose to put more energy into their work than their jobs require. The group was diverse in gender, industry, years of experience, and geographic region.
Each person took part in a semi-structured interview lasting between one and two hours. The researchers encouraged participants to treat the conversation as a storytelling space, opening with a simple prompt: describe what excessive working looks like for you. They listened without interruption, then followed up. Afterward, they coded the transcripts line by line, often using participants’ own phrases such as “always doing” and “tick box doing.” They later returned to 21 participants to check whether their emerging interpretations rang true.
Across the interviews, a consistent picture took shape. Participants described their working lives in terms of long hours and constant mental preoccupation. One said, “I’m constantly on emails, evenings, weekends, and holidays.” Another described lying awake replaying tasks, “almost like I’m clearing the cache.” Many used the language of being trapped. One likened himself to a frog in a slowly heating pot, aware of the danger yet unable to jump out.
The people interviewed acknowledged some payoff from all this effort, including praise and promotions. But they consistently said their level of doing far exceeded what those rewards required. As one put it, “there are extra things I do that I really don’t need to do… but that’s not really the reason I do them.” Something other than career strategy seemed to be at work.
The “doer” and the false self
That something, the researchers found, was a sense of self the participants described as being a “doer.” This is a personal identity defined not by what someone does or where they do it, but simply by the act of doing itself. As one person explained, “if I stop doing, then it’s an emotional thing, I will start feeling less about myself.” Another questioned whether she would even exist as a person if she stopped: “are you here in the world… if you stop doing things?”
When the researchers traced where this identity came from, participants pointed back to childhood and to caregivers whose demands felt excessive. The authors interpret the doer identity through a concept from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the “false self.” Winnicott proposed that when caregivers place heavy demands on a child, the child suppresses their natural way of being and adapts to meet those demands. Over time, this adaptation hardens into a self-structure that feels like one’s own.
The researchers are careful to note that “false” does not mean fake or deceptive. The false self is an unconscious adaptation that helps a person function and keep relationships intact. In childhood, the authors argue, the doer identity worked. It helped children win approval or avoid the worst consequences of their caregivers’ demands. The trouble comes later. Carried into adult working life, where rewards depend on doing, the same defense gets activated and drives people to work excessively, generating distress rather than relieving it.
Three childhood stories, three forms of overwork
The analysis identified three distinct narratives, each tied to a different kind of childhood demand and a different emotional experience at work.
The first group, which the authors call the conforming false self, grew up with caregivers who treated hard work as an unspoken moral ideal. The demand was implicit, but children internalized it as pressure, and it bred a deep distress about self-worth. As adults, these workers were driven by guilt. One described feeling he was “wasting” his life if he did not have a productive day. The researchers observed that these workers tended to place unspoken pressure on junior colleagues to match them, often without intending to. One recalled younger colleagues telling her, “we can’t live up to this standard that you’re setting.”
The second group, the dissociative false self, described emotionally oppressive or unsafe childhood homes. For them, constant doing became a way to escape from relationships that felt threatening. As adults, the researchers found, these workers approached work mechanically and kept emotional distance. One described herself as “a company composed only of myself,” treating work as “100% a transaction.” The authors note that these workers tended to withdraw from colleagues while occasionally erupting into conflict, reproducing the tense environments they grew up in.
The third group, the reflexive false self, faced explicit demands to perform, often measured in grades or achievements, and carried a distress about being recognized. As adults, they chased recognition that never satisfied them. One described finally earning praise and “flush[ing] it down the toilet right away” before searching for the next one. What set this group apart, according to the researchers, is that they were aware of their pattern as it happened and consciously tried to shield their own teams from the pressure, scheduling late-night emails to send the next morning so staff would not feel they had to keep up.
The authors describe a difference in what they call the “thickness” of these defenses. The reflexive false self was thin enough for people to see and resist passing on. The conforming and dissociative versions were thicker and largely operated outside awareness, which the researchers suggest is why those workers more often recreated their own painful conditions for others. They liken the thickest defenses to “protection rackets,” patterns that grow more entrenched as they draw colleagues into sustaining them.
What it might mean for workplaces
The researchers suggest that standard fixes for overwork, such as email curfews or flexible schedules, may fall short for some people because they do not touch the inner forces at play. They propose that managers watch for employees whose excessive working stays constant regardless of workload, and that approaches aimed at the individual, such as coaching or reflective work, may help surface these patterns.
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind. The study draws on a relatively small group of business-school alumni who already saw themselves as excessive workers, so the findings are not meant to be statistically representative. The stories were also gathered retrospectively, reflecting how people made sense of their pasts in the moment of the interview. And the authors are clear that they are not claiming distress is entirely self-generated. They frame it as something co-created by the demands of a workplace and the sensitivities a worker brings into it. The doer identity itself, they add, is not inherently negative. Held without the weight of a childhood defense, they suggest, it might just as easily be a source of pride and satisfaction.
