By: Gavin Cross, LMFT
It is Sunday night, and you already know how tomorrow is going to feel before it starts. Your body knows first, actually, usually somewhere between dinner and whatever you are half-watching on the couch. Your stomach tightens. You open your laptop “just to check one thing” and forty-five minutes disappear. You go to bed early because you are tired, but you do not sleep well, because your brain is already rehearsing the 9am meeting, the email you still have not answered, the project that is behind schedule through no fault of your own.
If that sounds familiar, you are not imagining the scale of it. In its most recent Work in America survey, the American Psychological Association found that 77% of U.S. workers reported experiencing work-related stress in the past month, and 57% said they were dealing with symptoms of burnout. The physical and emotional exhaustion that shows up after stress has been running too hot for too long without a real off switch. Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace data puts it a different way: nearly half of workers in the U.S. and Canada report feeling stress “a lot of the previous day,” and that number has held stubbornly high for years, not months.
I bring this up not to pile on more bad news, but because I want you to start from an accurate place: if work has been getting to you lately, that is not a personal failing or a sign that you cannot hack it. It is closer to the norm than the exception. What matters is what you do with it, because the version of “pushing through” that a lot of us were taught growing up to put your head down, stop complaining, everyone is dealing with something is exactly the strategy that tends to turn ordinary job stress into something more entrenched: chronic anxiety, a short fuse at home, trouble sleeping, and eventually a kind of flatness where nothing at work or outside of it feels like it means much anymore.
I work with a lot of men in Los Angeles who are high-functioning by any outside measure; good job, steady paycheck, people who rely on them and privately running on fumes. This is written for you.
Stress is manageable when you can point to its source. It is much harder to manage when it feels like a general hum underneath everything, because you cannot problem-solve a feeling you cannot locate.
So the first real move is diagnostic, not motivational. Before you reach for a coping strategy, get specific. Is the stress about a particular project with an unreasonable deadline? A manager whose feedback style leaves you rattled for the rest of the day? A colleague who is difficult to work with, or a role that has quietly outgrown what you signed up for? Sometimes the honest answer is that the job itself is fine, but it has swallowed a disproportionate share of your identity, so any setback there lands harder than it should.
Naming the actual source matters because the fix is different depending on the answer. A deadline problem might be solved with a direct conversation about scope. A manager problem might call for boundaries around how and when you take feedback. A role-outgrown problem is a much bigger conversation, possibly one worth having in therapy before you make any big decisions from a place of exhaustion. Men in particular tend to skip this step and go straight to “just deal with it,” which is part of why irritability becomes the main symptom, if you want to understand that pattern more, I wrote about it directly in what a man’s irritability is really trying to tell you.
Boundaries get talked about so often that the phrase has started to feel like a platitude, but the research behind it is not soft. Mental Health America has found that roughly three in four employees say work stress interferes with their sleep, and about six in ten say it spills over into their personal relationships. That is the part people underestimate: the cost of unmanaged work stress rarely stays contained to work hours. It shows up as a short temper with your partner, less patience with your kids, less interest in things you used to enjoy.
A few boundaries that actually hold up under pressure:
A defined end to the workday, even if it is imperfect. Not “I will stop when I feel done,” which never arrives, but a specific time you close the laptop, informed by what your actual job requires rather than what your anxiety demands.
Notifications off outside of agreed hours, unless your role genuinely requires otherwise. Most jobs do not, even when it feels like they do.
A transition ritual between work and home. This sounds small, but changing clothes, taking a short walk, or even sitting in the car for five minutes before you walk in the door gives your nervous system a chance to downshift instead of carrying the meeting you just left straight into dinner.
If you share a home with a partner, this is also where couples get quietly worn down — one person brings the office home every night and the other absorbs it. If that dynamic sounds familiar, therapy for couples can help you both name what is happening before resentment sets in.
Stress is not only a mental experience. When you are under sustained pressure, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline as part of a genuinely useful short-term survival response. The problem is duration. That response is built for a sprint to get through the threat, then recover, not for a low simmer that runs eight, ten, twelve hours a day, five days a week, for years.
Over time, a nervous system that never gets the “all clear” signal starts producing symptoms that do not look like stress on the surface: tension headaches, a tight jaw, digestive issues, a weakened immune system, trouble falling or staying asleep. If you have been chalking these up to getting older or just having a demanding job, it is worth considering that your body might be telling you something more specific. I go into this in more depth in what trauma does to your body, because chronic, unprocessed stress and unprocessed trauma often show up through the same physical channels, even when the original source feels completely unrelated to work.
Self-care gets a bad reputation among a certain kind of guy, partly because it is often marketed in a way that feels disconnected from an actual demanding life. But the research on it is real: regular movement, adequate sleep, and even short daily practices like breathing exercises measurably lower cortisol and improve mood regulation. A walk at lunch, twenty minutes of exercise before work, five minutes of deliberate breathing before a hard meeting. These are not indulgences, they are maintenance, the same way you would not skip an oil change indefinitely and expect the engine to be fine.
Here is where I want to be honest with you, though: self-care has a ceiling. If you are doing all the “right” things moving your body, sleeping reasonably, trying to set boundaries, and you are still waking up with a knot in your stomach most days, that is not evidence that you are failing at self-care. It is evidence that the stress has outgrown what individual coping strategies alone can handle. That is a different problem, and it calls for a different response.
This is usually the part men are most resistant to, and I understand why. Therapy can sound like an admission that something is wrong with you, when really it is closer to bringing in a second set of eyes on a system that has been running too hot for too long without anyone checking the pressure gauge.
In practice, therapy for work stress does a few specific things that self-help alone cannot. It gives you an outside perspective on patterns you cannot see from inside them — the way you might be recreating the same conflict with every manager, or bracing for criticism that has not actually happened yet. It builds concrete coping skills tailored to your actual triggers rather than generic advice. And for stress that has roots in something older than the current job — a demanding parent, a history of having to perform to be valued, a nervous system that learned early to stay on alert — approaches like EMDR therapy can help process the original material so your body stops reacting to today’s inbox like it is yesterday’s emergency. I have written more about how that process actually works in what EMDR actually does, if you are curious about the mechanics before deciding whether it is right for you.
If your stress is also showing up as anxiety that follows you into rooms full of people, not just your inbox, I have written a companion piece on managing social anxiety with four simple questions that might be a useful next read.
Most of the men I work with on job stress are not looking to overhaul their entire lives. They want to understand why a fairly normal amount of professional pressure is landing like a five-alarm fire, get some of their evenings and weekends back, and stop feeling like their job is quietly running their nervous system. We usually start by mapping the actual sources of stress rather than treating it as one undifferentiated blob, then work on both the practical (boundaries, communication at work, decision-making about the role itself) and the physiological (what is happening in your body, and why it may be reacting to a Tuesday standup the way it would react to something genuinely dangerous). This is slow, deliberate work, not a quick fix, but it is work that tends to produce change that actually holds up under the next stressful week, rather than a temporary sense of relief that evaporates the moment a new deadline appears.
Is it normal to dread work every single day, or is that a sign something is actually wrong? Some dread before a hard week is common. Daily dread, especially paired with poor sleep, physical symptoms, or irritability that spills into your home life, usually means the stress has moved past “part of the job” into something worth addressing directly, either through changes at work or through therapy, ideally both.
Can therapy help if the real problem is my job, not me? Yes. Therapy is not about convincing you the job is fine when it is not. Often the most useful work is figuring out, clearly and without panic, whether the situation is changeable, and helping you make a grounded decision. Set a boundary, have a hard conversation, or start looking elsewhere, instead of a reactive one made from exhaustion.
How is work stress different from anxiety or burnout? They overlap but are not identical. Stress is usually tied to an identifiable, often temporary source and tends to ease once that source resolves. Burnout is what happens when stress goes unaddressed long enough that exhaustion, cynicism, and a drop in effectiveness set in even when the original trigger is removed. Anxiety can exist independent of work altogether and simply gets amplified by it. Sorting out which one you are actually dealing with changes the treatment.
How long does it typically take to feel a difference? Many people notice a shift in how manageable things feel within the first several sessions, simply from having a clearer picture of what is driving the stress and a plan for it. Deeper, longer-standing patterns, the kind rooted in how you learned to handle pressure long before your current job usually take longer, but tend to produce change that holds.
I offer therapy for men built around exactly this kind of pressure: high-functioning guys who look fine from the outside and are quietly stretched thin. For stress with roots in something older than your current job, EMDR therapy is often part of the work. When work stress is affecting your relationship, not just you, couples therapy gives both of you a space to reset. You can see the full range of services I offer, in person in West Hollywood or by telehealth anywhere in California.
There’s a big, beautiful world out there. You deserve to experience all it has to offer without a knot in your stomach every Sunday night. If work stress has started running your life instead of the other way around, schedule a free 15-minute consultation and let’s talk about what is actually going on and what to do about it.
If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room. This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized professional mental health care.
There’s a big, beautiful world out there. You deserve to experience all it has to offer.
Let’s rediscover your strength.
