Turns Out My 'Work Ethic' Was Just Unresolved Trauma

The Truth About Why I Worked So Hard for So Long

For most of my adult life, I thought I was ambitious.

I told myself I had a strong work ethic. That I was disciplined. That I just liked being busy. That I was driven. I even wore it like a badge of honour - the kind of person who might not be the most talented in the room, but would absolutely outwork everyone else.

And for a long time, that story worked. It sounded respectable. It sounded productive. It sounded like something you'd say in an interview or casually drop into conversation without anyone questioning it.

But it wasn't the truth.

The truth is, I didn't work hard because I loved working hard. I worked hard because stopping didn't feel safe.

The illness that quietly set the rules

When I was thirteen, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome - ME, as it's known. At the time, it was barely recognised by the medical community. There were no neat explanations. No reassuring frameworks. One doctor even called me a hypochondriac, which is a bold accusation to throw at a child whose body has completely shut down. But I knew it was real.

My immune system collapsed. My energy disappeared. There were days when I was only awake for two or three hours. The rest of the time, my body simply powered down. Not tired. Not sleepy. Shut down. It wasn't subtle, and it wasn't something you could just push through with a bit of discipline and a strong cup of tea - as much as the British side of me wanted to try.

The cruelest part? I could push through when I absolutely had to. If someone was visiting, if there was something important, I could summon just enough energy to show up and look somewhat functional for a few hours. But it wasn't free. My body would punish me for it - completely collapsing for a week or more afterwards. Every attempt to be normal came with a price tag my system made sure I paid in full.

It didn't just affect me, either. It pulled everyone around me into its orbit. It was just me and my dad at the time, and I could feel how helpless it made him. There was nothing he could do. No fixing it. No pushing through. No advice that worked. Just watching his kid disappear into exhaustion with no clear way out.

Eventually, through a chain of small miracles and conversations - my dad was a teacher, spoke to a school nurse, who happened to know someone - he got me in a car and drove me an hour away to see a doctor who recognised it immediately.

This doctor asked me a question that, at the time, felt almost ridiculous: What did you like to do physically before you got sick?

I told him I liked riding my bike. I was only 13 after all.

He asked how much I thought I could manage without completely exhausting myself. I said one minute. Honestly, at that point, even that felt ambitious.

So that became the plan. One minute a day. Ride to the end of the garden. Come back. Stop. After a week, two minutes. Then three. Then four. And here's the crucial bit - he made it very clear: if you miss a day, you don't double up the next day. That's not how this works. You'll just screw yourself for a week. He understood what my body had been teaching me the hard way - that pushing to make up for lost time doesn't work when your system is running on fumes.

It took nearly a year before I could ride my bike for thirty minutes. But by that point, something important had changed. I was awake most of the day again. My system was slowly coming back online.

The whole thing lasted two years. Two full years of my life where my body had essentially checked out. I missed the schools years nine and ten entirely. And then, six months after I'd hit that thirty-minute milestone, I went back to school for year eleven - my final year before GCSEs. I had to compress two years of exams into one. Catch up. Keep up. Prove I could still function.

And without realising it, my nervous system learned a very specific rule: If I stop, I disappear.

When survival strategies grow legs

That belief didn't stay in my teenage body. It followed me quietly into adulthood, like a particularly persistent shadow you can't quite shake off.

Do something every day or you fall behind. Do something every day or your body gives up. Do something every day or everything collapses. At some point, that turned into identity. I became the person who always worked. Always pushed. Always said yes. Always kept moving. I joked about being a workaholic. I used to say - when I was choreographing and dancing - that I might not be the best or the most talented, but I'd outwork anybody. And I meant it. I was proud of it, even.

Externally, it looked great. Internally? It was fear wearing a productivity costume.

This is the part that's uncomfortable to admit. My work ethic wasn't just ambition. It was a trauma response. It was my nervous system saying, don't stop, don't rest, don't trust stillness - stillness is dangerous. That belief made sense once. It kept me alive. It got me through something genuinely frightening. But decades later, it was still running the show, long after it had stopped being accurate. My body was still braced for collapse, still convinced that if I stopped moving, I'd disappear again.

Why this is more common than people realise

Here's what I know now, with everything I understand about the nervous system and trauma: this isn't just about illness. A lot of people are driven by nervous system rules they learned very early on. If I slow down, I'll be left behind. If I rest, I'll lose everything. If I stop producing, I won't be valued. If I'm not busy, something bad will happen.

We call this ambition. Hustle. Discipline. Motivation. Sometimes it is those things. Sometimes it's just fear with good branding - and let's be honest, fear markets itself extremely well in the modern world. It's got excellent PR.

The nervous system doesn't care how impressive your coping strategy looks from the outside. It only cares whether it feels safe. For years, constant movement felt safer to me than rest ever did. And this is where the science matters, because understanding what was happening in my body helped me stop blaming myself for something I didn't consciously choose.

When you experience something like chronic illness as a child - or any prolonged threat to your system - your brain doesn't just store it as a memory. It stores it as a pattern. A rule about survival. My nervous system learned: stillness equals shutdown, movement equals staying alive. So even when I was physically recovered, even when the illness had dampened, that rule kept firing. My body was still operating on old information, still running a program designed to keep me safe in circumstances that no longer existed.

It’s not a character flaw. That's a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do - protect you based on past information. The problem? It doesn't update automatically. It keeps running the old program until you actively teach it something new.

The moment the old strategy stops working

Here's where things get interesting. When you start regulating your nervous system - when you actually do the work to update those old rules - that drive can start to wobble. You don't suddenly become lazy. You don't lose your edge. But the urgency underneath the work softens. And that can feel deeply unsettling, because if you're not driven by fear anymore, you're left with a very honest question: What am I actually choosing to do?

That's where a lot of people get stuck. Not because they feel worse, but because the familiar pressure disappears. The background noise drops. The adrenaline fades. And suddenly, you're face to face with space. For someone whose nervous system learned that stopping equals danger, space can feel terrifying. So the instinct is to fill it - more work, more projects, more movement, more noise.

I did that too. I overworked. Took on too much. Packed my schedule. Travelled constantly. Stayed just busy enough not to notice what the quiet was asking of me. But eventually, the truth caught up. I wasn't afraid of failing. I was afraid of stopping and discovering that I no longer needed to run.

Learning that safety doesn't require exhaustion

The real work wasn't slowing down. It was teaching my nervous system that rest doesn't equal collapse. That missing a day doesn't mean disappearing. That my body is no longer thirteen years old and under threat. That doing nothing for a moment isn't a medical emergency - though I'll admit, it took a while to convince my system of that. British stoicism meets nervous system dysregulation is quite the combination.

That took time. Patience. Repetition. A lot of uncomfortable stillness. And once that safety started to land, something shifted. I didn't lose my drive. I lost the panic underneath it. Work became something I chose, not something I clung to. Effort became sustainable, not compulsive. For the first time, rest stopped feeling like a risk and started feeling like part of the system working properly.

What this changes when it finally lands

This is the part people don't talk about enough. When the nervous system stops running on survival rules, life reorganises itself. You still work. You still create. You still build things. But you no longer need to prove your worth through exhaustion. You can pause without spiralling. You can say no without fear. You can stop without your body bracing for impact. And perhaps most importantly, you can finally separate who you are from how much you produce.

That's not laziness. That's regulation.

A different kind of strength

I used to believe strength was pushing through no matter what. Now I understand strength differently. Strength is knowing when effort is coming from choice and when it's coming from fear. Strength is being able to stop without panicking. Strength is letting old survival rules retire when they're no longer needed.

I'm still driven. I just no longer need to outrun my own nervous system to prove it. And that's changed everything.