Personal Finance

I’m a high earner at the peak of my career and feel I have golden handcuffs. How can I deal with my depression and anxiety without affecting my performance?

Maurie Backman

Published: January 13, 2025 2:10 pm

Key Points from 24/7 Wall St.

• Earning a high salary can come at the cost of your mental health.
• Striking a balance could help you preserve your health while continuing to work toward your financial goals.
• You may want to talk to a financial advisor and therapist to get to a better place.
• Retiring early is possible, and may be easier than you think. Click here now to see if you’re ahead, or behind. ^(Sponsor)

My first job out of college was extremely stressful. But since I was making more money than most of my friends and I knew I had the energy in my 20s to keep up with it, I pushed through for a while despite being miserable. I also banked a good portion of my income so I could shift into a less stressful career having that cushion.

Because of my experience, I can truly relate to this Reddit poster who earns a high salary but is struggling with depression and anxiety from their job. Now a key difference between younger me and this Reddit user is that they’re earning about $700,000 a year, whereas my salary in my 20s was high, but not nearly that high. Also, this poster has a net worth of $5.2 million, whereas my net worth at the time I was struggling at my job was, well, let’s just say a lot lower.

Still, I can imagine that the longer this person stays at their job, the more their health might decline. So I’d love to see them make some positive changes that help them better manage their situation.

It’s hard to leave a high-paying role

The poster above has a goal of amassing a $7 million net worth. At $5.2 million, they’re close, and they feel that another four years at their job should be enough to get them to $7 million.

On the one hand, I could see why the poster would try to push themself to work four more years. On the other hand, four years is a long time to be stressed and depressed.

The poster says their anxiety not only persists during the workweek, but impacts weekends and generally takes over their life. Honestly, that’s no way to live — not for another four years. So I’d recommend that the poster make some sort of change, whether it means getting a different job and seeing if that helps or adjusting their savings goal and looking at retiring.

Because they don’t say how old they are, it’s hard to know how much risk retiring with $5.2 million entails. But they’re also in a very high-cost-of-living area right now. Retiring could mean moving somewhere considerably cheaper and stretching their money further.

Professional help is a must in this situation

It’s possible that with the right help, this person could stay at their job another four years, meet their financial goal, and then move on. Or, it may be that they need to cut ties with this particular job and find one that’s less stressful for the sake of their health. To help make that decision, I suggest that they talk to two professionals — a financial advisor and a counselor or therapist.

A financial advisor can walk them through the numbers end and help them decide whether they’re okay to adjust their $7 million target downward based on their goals and plans. A financial advisor can also help them run the numbers to see how long it might take to get to $7 million at a lower-paying but less stressful job.

A therapist or counselor, meanwhile, may be able to work with the poster to manage their anxiety and get to a better place mentally. If they succeed, they may be able to stick out their job a few more years and continue on their path to $7 million uninterrupted.

But either way, something has to give here. It sounds like the poster, despite being wealthy, really has no quality of life. And no amount of money is worth constant misery.