Emily Carter, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, CEREVITY
Sixty-two percent of the bankers in Wall Street Oasis’s 2024 Investment Banking Working Conditions Survey said their work hours have negatively affected relationships with family or friends.
Thirty-three percent said they have considered seeking counseling or therapy because of stress at work.
Same 531 people, same questionnaire, fielded between October 8, 2024 and January 14, 2025. Nearly two thirds report that the job is costing them their closest relationships. One third have gotten as far as considering help. That gap is the most interesting thing in the survey, and none of the usual explanations for it survive contact with the people it describes, which is most of what I do in private-pay work with finance professionals.
Worth noting the survey’s own caveat before going further: respondents were self-selected and the deck states plainly that the professional status of each respondent was not verified. Roughly 70 percent identified as analysts. Read it as a large, consistent, self-reported picture rather than as a census. It rarely surprises anyone who treats this population.
The conditions are not in dispute
Average weeks in that sample run 74.00 hours for first-year analysts, 72.72 for second-years and 74.47 for associates. Sleep averages 5.95, 6.28 and 6.27 hours respectively. Average bedtime for a first-year is 12:51 a.m.
Asked to rate their own mental health before starting the job and now, respondents moved from roughly 8 to roughly 6. Physical health moved about the same distance.
None of this surprises anybody in banking, and that is exactly the problem. A condition everyone shares stops registering as a problem and starts registering as the weather. You do not seek treatment for the weather, and what that normalization costs shows up a decade later rather than in any acute event.
What the two thirds are actually thinking
The bankers who have not considered therapy are not, in my experience, in denial about the hours. They have usually done a calculation and reached a conclusion that sounds airtight.
The conclusion is that the job is the cause, so the job is the only cure. If the hours are producing the exhaustion, then talking to someone changes nothing, and the only real options are quit or endure. It is a coherent argument. It is also the single most expensive mistake I see people in finance make, because it treats every consequence of the hours as equally untouchable, and they are not.
Underneath that argument, and rarely said out loud, sits a second question that decides more than the first one does: what becomes discoverable. Between recognizing the problem and doing anything about it, senior professionals wait an average of 21 months, and the delay is rarely about willingness.
What treatment reaches, and what it does not
Let me be direct about the limit first. Therapy does not reduce your hours. It will not get you off a bad deal team, it will not make a difficult MD reasonable, and anyone suggesting otherwise is selling something.
What it does reach is narrower than people hope and more consequential than they expect.
The first is sleep, and specifically the quality of it rather than the quantity. This is the complaint that clinicians who already see people in banking hear before any other. Six hours in a nervous system that has been running anticipatory arousal since Sunday evening is not the same six hours as ordinary tired. Bankers describe lying down at two in the morning, completely exhausted and completely awake, mentally re-running a page that has already gone out. Anticipatory arousal of that kind is one of the more treatable things in clinical practice, and improving it inside an unchanged schedule is realistic in a way that most promises made to junior bankers are not.
The second is what happens to ordinary feedback on the way in. A round of markups that means “this needs work” gets processed as information about whether you belong in the industry at all. Most analysts do some version of this and most of them experience it as simply being clear-eyed. It is the largest unforced cost of the job, and loosening it does not make anyone complacent. It shortens the recovery time after a rough round of comments, which is time that currently comes out of the work. Left alone for a decade it stops being an analyst problem and becomes executive burnout, which is considerably harder to shift.
The third only becomes visible later. People who spend their twenties treating exhaustion as a neutral input generally do not stop when the title changes, and the pattern I see most often in senior finance clients is not a crisis. It is a flatness that arrived so gradually that nobody can date it.
If you are in the 33 percent
Three questions determine whether this survives contact with a live deal.
Ask about rescheduling before anything else. This is the practical barrier almost nobody names. An analyst can want treatment and still be unable to hold Tuesday at six, because Tuesday at six does not reliably exist. A first session gets booked two weeks out, a comment run lands at 5:50, it moves, it moves again, and by the third reschedule the idea quietly dies. The person concludes they are too busy for therapy. What actually happened is that a fixed-slot model met a job with no fixed slots. Anyone who works with this population routinely expects the calendar to move, and it is a fair question to ask on a first call.
Ask what leaves the room. For most people in finance the operative question is whether a claim is filed anywhere. Private-pay answers that structurally rather than with a reassurance.
Separate the two questions you are actually asking. Whether to stay in banking is a real question and deserves a real answer. It is not the same question as whether you are sleeping. Trying to settle the first while the second is unaddressed reliably produces bad answers to both.
Sixty-two percent already know what it is costing them. That was never the missing piece.
Emily Carter, PhD is a clinical psychologist licensed in California, New York and Massachusetts, seeing clients by telehealth through CEREVITY, a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians. Her work focuses on burnout, perfectionism and imposter syndrome in high-achieving professionals. This article is general information and not a substitute for individual clinical care.