Lost Myself in My Job: How Modern Men Get Back the Person They Used to Be

If you can no longer describe who you are without referencing your job, you didn’t lose yourself in one move — work amputated the rest of you piece by piece, year by year, while you were busy succeeding at it. Drawing on clinical psychologist Guy Winch’s book Mind Over Grind, this guide explains the slow mechanism that turns multidimensional men into two-dimensional versions of themselves, the diagnostic moment (Winch calls it “the wince”) that tells you whether those buried parts of you are still alive, and the specific exercise he gives clients to start bringing the old you back without quitting your job. By the end, you’ll know what you’ve actually lost, what’s worth reclaiming, and how to start tomorrow.

Liam was on track to make partner at his Manhattan law firm. He was in his late thirties, sharp, well-dressed, married to a woman he met at university. He came to clinical psychologist Guy Winch’s office because he’d hit a wall — exhausted, low-grade depressed, going through the motions of a life he had built and didn’t quite recognise as his.

Twenty minutes in, Winch asked him a simple question. “Who were you before you became a lawyer?”

In Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life (2026), Winch describes what happened next: “Liam winced — a slight grimace I’d seen many times on other faces. Sensing he might be at a loss for words, his wife, Veronica, jumped in. ‘He was an improv comedian who used to make me laugh on dates and at parties. He used to write hilarious poems and toasts for our friends’ birthdays and weddings. He was the funny guy! It’s why I fell for him!'”

Liam hadn’t done improv in years. He hadn’t written a poem since law school. The man Veronica fell for at the back of an improv club at twenty-two had quietly disappeared by the time he was thirty-five. Liam hadn’t noticed it happen. He’d been busy.

This is the most under-recognised form of damage work does to modern men. It isn’t burnout. It isn’t even unhappiness, exactly. It’s slow identity amputation — work taking pieces of you it never asked permission for, year after year, until what’s left bears almost no resemblance to who you used to be.

This article explains why it happens, the diagnostic moment that tells you something is still alive in there, the specific exercise Winch gives clients to start the reclamation, and why “more rest” is the wrong prescription for a problem that doesn’t come from exhaustion.

Lost myself in my job — the short version

If you’ve got two minutes:

• You didn’t lose yourself in one move. Work amputated parts of you one at a time, over years. Each individual lapse seemed reasonable.
• The classic burnout fixes (rest, vacation, mindfulness) don’t address this. Identity loss isn’t exhaustion — you can’t rest your way back to a person who used to play guitar.
• The diagnostic move is the wince. When asked who you used to be, your face does a small involuntary grimace. That wince tells you those parts of yourself are still meaningful — and still recoverable.
• The reclamation is small and active. List what used to bring you alive. Pick one small piece to bring back. Schedule it. Note how it feels.
• You probably don’t need to quit your job to do this. You need to renegotiate how much of you it gets.

How work quietly eats your identity

Identity doesn’t disappear in one act. It evaporates by attrition.

A typical pattern, drawn straight from Winch’s clinical observations of men in their thirties and forties: in your twenties, you have a relatively rich life. A job — possibly several jobs in a few years — but also a sport, a creative hobby, a friend group, a band or a writing project or a kayaking trip every summer. Your identity is multidimensional. People who know you would describe you with at least three different attributes before they got to your profession.

Then your career enters its serious phase. Promotions arrive. The hours grow. The expectations grow. The financial commitments grow (mortgage, kids, lifestyle). And every year, almost imperceptibly, you let one thing go.

Year one of the demanding job, you stop playing in the band — it’s just hard to make rehearsals. You’ll get back to it later.

Year two, the weekly tennis with your university friends becomes monthly. Then quarterly. Then you stop scheduling it.

Year three, the writing project stalls. You always meant to finish that novel/screenplay/songbook. You haven’t touched it since spring.

Year four, the kayaking trip doesn’t happen — you can’t get the time off. You’ll go next year.

Year five, the kayak is in the garage and you can’t remember the last time you put it on the roof of the car.

Year seven, somebody at a dinner asks what you do for fun. You realise the honest answer is I watch shows with my wife and run errands on the weekend. You feel something move in your chest and change the subject.

By year ten, the gym is occasional. The friends are mostly colleagues. The creative work is dead. The parts of your personality that used to feel like the most you — the funny one, the curious one, the adventurous one, the artistic one, the contemplative one — have been crowded out by the parts of your personality your job rewards. “We go from being a multidimensional person with a full life,” Winch writes, “to a two-dimensional version of ourself whose existence revolves almost entirely around work.”

The maddening thing about this process is that every individual amputation seemed reasonable in the moment. You weren’t quitting the band — you were just skipping rehearsal that week. You weren’t ending the friendship — you just hadn’t been able to make the last few dinners. You weren’t dropping the creative project — you were going to get back to it after the launch.

Each decision was rational. The aggregate was catastrophic.

The wince: the diagnostic moment

Winch has noticed something in his clinical practice that’s worth paying attention to. When you ask a man who has lost himself in his job who he used to be — what he used to do, what kind of person he used to be at twenty-four or twenty-eight — there’s almost always a wince before the answer arrives.

“Liam winced — a slight grimace I’d seen many times on other faces,” he writes. “The wince was important. It meant those parts of himself were still meaningful to him, even if they were in deep hibernation.”

The wince tells you something specific: those parts of you haven’t actually died. They’ve been buried, not killed. The fact that they hurt when poked is good news. Truly dead parts of yourself don’t generate winces. The wince is the body’s confirmation that what’s been amputated is still alive enough to be reattached.

If you’ve felt a version of this — a small involuntary flinch when an old friend mentions the thing you used to be obsessed with, or a tightness in your chest when you walk past the place you used to play music — that’s the wince. That’s diagnostic. It’s also the doorway.

What men typically lose first

A rough but useful taxonomy of what gets amputated, in the order men usually lose it:

Time-intensive hobbies first. Anything that requires several uninterrupted hours and ideally a free weekend. Bands, sport leagues, fishing trips, building projects, ongoing creative work. These die first because they need scheduled blocks of time that demanding jobs make impossible.

Then social life outside the work tribe. Friends from school, college, sports teams. They become birthday-card friends, then occasional-text friends, then people you mean to message and never do.

Then the casual creative side. The cooking-for-pleasure that used to take Sunday afternoons becomes weeknight reheating. The guitar in the corner that used to come down nightly stays in the corner. The reading that used to be three novels a month becomes “I really should read more.”

Then the parts of your personality those activities used to express. The funny guy goes quiet because there are no friends around to be funny with. The curious guy stops being curious because nothing in his schedule rewards curiosity. The adventurous guy stops planning adventures because his bandwidth is fully committed.

Then the physical maintenance. Workouts slip. Eating habits slip. Sleep slips. The body that used to be a vehicle for your interests becomes a thing you push through the workday with.

The end state: a man whose identity is now dominated by his job, his immediate family role, and whatever low-effort consumption fills the residual hours. The “him” of fifteen years ago would not recognise him if they met.

The reclamation exercise

Winch’s exercise for this is small, specific, and surprisingly effective. It does not require quitting your job or making any dramatic move. It works with the bandwidth you actually have.

Step 1: Make the list.

Write down — actually write, on paper or a document, not just think — every activity, person, place, or side of yourself that used to make you feel alive. Don’t filter. Don’t be reasonable. Don’t think about feasibility yet.

Things that might go on the list: a sport you used to play, an instrument you used to practice, a creative project you used to work on, a friend you used to see weekly, a kind of book you used to read voraciously, a kind of music you used to make time for, a trip you used to take annually, a place that used to centre you, a side of your personality that used to come out around certain people, a routine that used to anchor your week.

Aim for ten items. Most men get six or seven and stop because the list becomes uncomfortable. Push past it. Get to ten.

Step 2: Identify the one that pulls hardest.

Read the list back. Notice which item generates the strongest internal pull — the strongest version of the wince. That’s your starting point. Not the most logical item. Not the easiest. The one that pulls.

Step 3: Bring back a small piece.

Not the whole thing. A small, time-bounded version. If the item is playing in a band, the small piece is playing guitar for twenty minutes Thursday night. If the item is the friendship with Marco, the small piece is one beer with Marco this month. If the item is writing fiction, the small piece is one short paragraph in a notebook on Sunday morning.

The piece has to be small enough that you can actually do it without renegotiating your job. The point is not the volume. The point is reconnection.

Step 4: Schedule it. Treat it as non-negotiable.

Put it in the calendar. Block the time. Treat it the way you’d treat a doctor’s appointment or a client meeting — show up. Most men’s reclamation projects die because they remain intentions rather than appointments.

Step 5: Note what happens.

After three or four sessions, observe what shifts. Most men report something they didn’t expect: it’s not the activity that changes how they feel as much as the fact that they’re doing it. The activity is the vehicle. What’s actually happening is the wince’s underlying mechanism finally getting some movement. Those buried parts of you, addressed for the first time in years, start to come back.

After one item is steady — usually a few weeks — add a second.

Why “more rest” is the wrong prescription

A common failure mode: men recognise that work has eaten them, decide they need more rest, and use their reclaimed time to lie on the couch with screens. They do this for a month, feel no better, and conclude that the problem isn’t fixable.

The issue is that identity loss isn’t exhaustion. It’s a content problem, not an energy problem. You can rest for a week, a month, a sabbatical, a sabbatical year, and not get back the parts of yourself that have been amputated, because rest doesn’t reconstruct identity. Active engagement with the buried parts does.

This is the resting vs recharging distinction Mind Over Grind lays out clearly. Resting reduces your energy expenditure. Recharging is doing something that gives life back to you. The reclamation exercise is a recharging move, not a resting move. It will sometimes feel harder than rest does. That’s because it’s actually doing the work rest can’t do.

Why men, specifically, are exposed to this

A particular reason men are at higher risk for this kind of identity collapse: in most cultures, career remains the primary public marker of male identity. “What do you do?” is the second question asked at a dinner party for a reason. For most men, what they do and who they are have been collapsed into the same answer for so long that they no longer notice the conflation.

This makes career-based identity feel rational in the short term and disastrous in the medium term. When the career hits a setback, ends, or simply changes — you lose your job, you get demoted, you retire, you get sick — the man whose entire identity is in his job loses far more than his job. He loses himself.

The fix isn’t to care less about your career. It’s to make sure your identity has redundancy. Multiple sources of meaning, multiple roles, multiple competences. Several of the pieces on your reclamation list can be the start of that redundancy.

The bigger picture

You did not become two-dimensional in one move, and you won’t reclaim yourself in one move either. The amputation took years; the reattachment takes months. But it works, and the men who do it consistently report something specific: not just feeling better, but feeling more like themselves than they have in a decade.

The wince is good news. It tells you that what’s been buried is still alive. The list tells you what to dig for. The schedule turns intention into actual reattachment. Start small. Pick the one that pulls hardest. Block twenty minutes Thursday night.

“The wince was important,” Winch wrote about Liam. “It meant those parts of himself were still meaningful to him, even if they were in deep hibernation.”

The men who have read this far almost certainly have their own version of Liam’s improv comedy in deep hibernation somewhere. The work that pays for your life isn’t going anywhere. The version of you that existed before your career absorbed everything else doesn’t have to stay buried.

Bring some of him back. Twenty minutes at a time.

Source: Guy Winch, Mind Over Grind: How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life (Simon & Schuster, 2026). All quoted passages from Winch are drawn from the book.