I Talked to Silicon Valley Therapists. Tech Workers Are Not OK.NEWS | 13 August 2026Silicon Valley is having an existential freakout.
Tech workers have long complained to their therapists about soul-crushing hours, cutthroat competition, and the absence of that woolly concept known as work-life balance. Lately, with the collision of mass layoffs, artificial intelligence, and gazillion-dollar IPOs, the woes cut deeper.
"Three years ago, people would walk in saying, 'I'm exhausted, burned out beyond belief,'" says Annie Wright, a Bay Area psychotherapist and executive coach whose practice is dominated by tech workers. "Now they walk in saying, 'I'm exhausted. I'm burned out beyond belief. I don't know who I am if my work gets automated. I don't know if I'm next, right? And what is this even going to look like for the next 20 years of my career?'"
Globally, more than 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026, the tracker Layoffs.fyi reports, with Silicon Valley giants like Meta, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and Amazon laying off hundreds or thousands at a time. The tech-focused Substack Lenny's Newsletter surveyed 8,200 workers and found the industry's state of mind deteriorated in one year. Reports of burnout shot up from 44.4% to 55.7% of those surveyed between 2025 and 2026, and career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%.
While the AI juggernaut has fueled upheaval and anxiety across many sectors, in tech, it's rattling the lives of the people who engineered it — a phenomenon Wright calls "complicity grief."
"The engineer who trained the model that's now displacing her peers — she built the machine," she says. "The PM who shipped the AI feature that just made three of her colleagues redundant — she shipped it, right? The founder who raised a round to build the agent that's about to commoditize an entire profession — she raised it, and then she has to go home and sit with what she did."
For those who don't survive, a different calculus awaits. Nick Sanchez, who founded Silicon Valley Therapy and specializes in high-performing professionals, says that of the 25 clients on his roster, six have been laid off in the last two years, and most have been unemployed for six months or longer. While some are getting by with contract work, others are pivoting — to smaller companies, to jobs inside non-tech companies, or to completely new careers.
"I have one client that's trying to pursue the FBI," he says.
Figuring out what comes after isn't reserved for those on the chopping block. Josh Altman, who counsels many tech professionals in the New York City area, says that some of his clients are excited about the powers AI has given them.
"They're creating at another level," Altman says. "One of my clients, who's a senior engineer, said to me, 'I no longer feel like an engineer. I feel like a sorcerer.'"
At the same time, he says, every senior-level engineer on his client list — people with 10-plus years of experience working at a top company — believes they won't be an engineer a decade from now. The ones who are financially set may be having what's called a "third-life crisis," and for some, the next stage is getting out. "For the first time in my career, I have a lot more male clients who are speaking actively about becoming stay-at-home dads one day," Altman says.
Tech workers who have been grinding for years have seen the industry become more hardcore, with longtime employees branded as low performers and told to embrace return-to-office mandates and other policy changes or get lost.
Bay Area psychotherapist Annie Wright says that after an IPO, her tech worker clients "expect to feel triumphant. Instead, they feel numb or flat or even depressed." Courtesy of Annie Wright
"Something about the AI conversation has shifted, has made it abundantly clear that many of these organizations feel more transactional, less sentimental," Altman says. "As a result, it's causing the employees, some of whom have been very loyal, to ask, 'Oh, what else is out there for me?'" Some of his clients are moving abroad and "will be hiking for the rest of their lives," he says. Some "could have exited with great wealth but found the job so taxing or the environment so toxic that they quit."
He mentions one tech professional who quit to become the president of the board of their local library. Another client, who worked at one of the biggest companies and "made millions," is now self-employed and "working on finding ways to create safety boundaries for AI."
Ross Nelson, a clinical psychologist who works in Palo Alto and San Mateo, has seen a similar trend.
"If you've been working for a large tech company," he says, "and you feel like you're not really doing anything that's all that impactful, people are making pivots toward trying to find a company that they have an appreciation for the mission of" — fields like cancer treatment or environmental protection.
Tech-focused therapists say that whether their clients have lost their jobs, or downshifted, or hit the IPO jackpot, adjusting to a less frenetic existence torments them because so much of their self-image is tied to work.
"Whether that's their job title, their compensation, the name of the company that they work for, or their promotion cycle and how fast they're moving in their promotion cycle, they're linking their worth as a human being to that," Nelson says. "I ask clients at my intakes, 'What do you do for your hobbies?' And people look at me like I'm crazy."
Silicon Valley denizens who stand to make bank from IPOs confront two kinds of tension, says Wright. Before they can cash out, they face what she calls "liquidity anxiety," or "the very specific distress of being technically rich on paper and functionally stuck in real life."
"The wealth exists. They can see it, but they cannot touch it," she says. "That liminal space between the achievement and the reward can be so psychologically destabilizing for the execs I've sat with."
After liquidity anxiety comes what Wright calls "the arrival paradox."
"The IPO is sold to these people for years as the finish line," she says. "And what they actually experience very often is an anti-climax." The victory lands in their bank account, not in the body, she explains. "They expect to feel triumphant. Instead, they feel numb or flat or even depressed, right? And then they feel guilty about that."
Work is the most socially acceptable addiction. Nobody stages an intervention for a woman who is killing it at work. Annie Wright, a Bay Area psychotherapist
Wright, whose client base is women, says the absence of grinding post-IPO can lead to self-destructive behavior. To protect confidentiality, she offers a composite of a half-dozen clients: a woman in her mid-40s who is vice president at a tech company that went public eight months ago. The lockup period for insider shares has expired, and she is now very rich.
"She was expecting relief and probably a lot of joy, but what she got was insomnia, a flat emotional feeling her partner was criticizing her about, and kind of a disorientation," Wright says. The cause? "A realization that the version of herself that thrived in the pre-IPO years — the scrappy, do-everything, mission-driven, heroic hours version — no longer had that job to do at the public company."
That might sound like nirvana to the average worker, but Wright says this woman has been in fight-or-flight mode for so long that her nervous system is traumatized; she's numbed anxiety and depression with her work habits. "Work is the most socially acceptable addiction," Wright says. "Nobody stages an intervention for a woman who is killing it at work."
And once the addictive substance — the work — is gone, big feelings bubble to the surface, and she starts looking for something else to tamp them down. Within six to 12 months post-IPO, Wright sees her clients replacing work overdrive with less productive activities like "overexercising to the point of injury, a new and slightly frantic relationship with alcohol, cannabis." There's a lot of doomscrolling, compulsive shopping, and serial angel investing. People have affairs. And, she adds, "this is so common in Silicon Valley, ayahuasca tourism."
The tech industry, says Wright, "bears substantial structural responsibility" for the anxieties it's caused. Her clients, she adds, are "working inside a system whose incentive structures reliably produce the symptoms we're then asked to help them manage: always-on Slack culture, RSU cliff vesting that makes leaving feel financially catastrophic, an operating premise of infinite scale applied to nervous systems that don't scale."
Josh Altman literally encourages his clients to touch grass. Courtesy of Josh Altman
How therapists help techies better cope with those incentive structures depends on their modality.
Ross, who focuses on cognitive behavior therapy, uses worksheets — created with the help of AI — to reduce catastrophizing and negative self-talk. He'll talk clients through sending a text to a work friend to arrange a social date or encourage them to put a hike on their calendar. Altman, whom I interviewed on the phone while he was taking a break from gardening, similarly guides his clients toward building an identity and self-esteem outside of work. He says he literally encourages them to touch grass.
Wright, whose toolkit includes EMDR, the eye-movement therapy used to process trauma, offers a success story, again using a composite client: a senior engineer in her late 30s whose company went public 18 months ago. For six months, she's felt emotionally flat, sleepless, "embarrassed that the windfall wasn't making her more happy."
The first step was to help her name what was happening. "She had to understand and be able to say, "Oh, I have moral injury about the work I'm shipping, and I think I'm grieving a version of myself that doesn't exist anymore,'" Wright says. The second stage was somatic behavior work, including EMDR. The woman started running again, taking pottery classes, and reading romantasy novels — building an identity separate from work, without quitting her job. Now she was ready for the third stage: values realignment.
"The fantasy is always that somebody has a breakdown and runs off to start a goat farm in Vermont. But the reality for most of these women — it's much quieter and it's much more useful," she adds. "They become the senior person on the team that can name the thing that no one else is naming. They become a source of sanity in a system that needs it."
The need can be seen in the demand for mental health services, which is surging with no sign of letting up.
"I am completely full with a six- to 12-month waiting list," says Wright, who charges $950 an hour, "and my fees are very, very, very high."
Tracy Connor is the Standards Editor at Business Insider.Author: More Stories. Tracy Connor. Every Time. Look Out For An Alert In Your Inbox The Next Time. Source
