Clinical Whitepaper · Series No. 47

The Investment Banking Wellbeing Report

What the data says about hours, sleep, anxiety, and attrition among bankers, and what an effective clinical response looks like.

21 min read · 4,706 words · 4 figures · 20 references

Executive summary

Investment banking mental health is shaped by three measurable pressures: the hours, the sleep they leave behind, and a culture in which asking for help still feels like a risk. First-year analysts in the 2024 Wall Street Oasis survey averaged 74 hours a week and 5.95 hours of sleep a night, and respondents rated their own mental health 8.0 out of 10 before the job and 6.2 now.¹ This report sets out what the evidence shows, why caps and wellness perks have not closed the gap, and what confidential, effective care looks like for bankers.

In early 2021, a self-selected group of 13 first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs surveyed themselves and took the results to management. They reported working more than 95 hours a week on average and sleeping about five hours a night, and every respondent said the hours had hurt their relationships with friends and family.⁵ Their slides put the average week at 98 hours, the typical bedtime at 3am, and satisfaction with personal life at one out of ten.⁶ The sample was tiny, but the industry recognized itself in it, and the analysts' central request, a cap of 80 hours a week, became the story.⁷

The question returned in 2024 with a death. Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier working as a junior investment banker at Bank of America, died in May of an acute coronary artery thrombus. The medical examiner did not establish a connection between his death and his workload, but it prompted calls from junior bankers, posted online, for hour caps and a guaranteed weekend off each month.⁸ The industry had begun adopting protected weekends in 2013, after a Bank of America intern in London died following a reported stint of sleepless nights.⁹ The usual framing treats all of this as a question of hours. The clinical picture is wider: chronic sleep loss, anxiety, caffeine to get through the day and alcohol to come down, and a culture in which admitting strain feels like a career risk.

This is beyond the level of hard-working. This is inhumane. First-year analyst, Goldman Sachs analyst survey, 2021

The most consistent recurring measure of junior banker working conditions is the Wall Street Oasis survey, which has run each year since 2021 with largely the same questions. Its 2024 edition drew 531 banking professionals, 70.2 percent of them analysts.¹ Respondents are self-selected and their status is unverified, so the figures are indicative rather than census data, but the direction holds across four years and matches independent reporting. Read together, they describe the working conditions behind investment banking burnout.

The pattern is improvement that leaves the job far outside healthy limits. Across all respondents, average hours fell from 82 a week in 2021 to 72 in 2024, and average sleep rose from 5.85 to 6.22 hours a night.¹ Even 72 hours is well above the 55 hours at which the WHO and ILO estimate a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with a 35 to 40 hour week.² In 2023, 30 percent of respondents averaged five hours of sleep or less and 72 percent said their hours had damaged relationships with family or friends.¹¹ The concern is not confined to Wall Street: a survey of 1,456 investment banking practitioners in China, using structured diagnostic interviews and the Hamilton anxiety and depression scales, concluded that the likelihood of anxiety disorders in the profession is high.¹² Because sleep loss amplifies every other symptom, therapy for professionals who cannot sleep because of work stress belongs at the center of any response.

Bankers rarely describe a single breaking point. They describe a slope. A named model helps a banker, a partner or a manager see where someone sits on that slope while there is still room to act, and it gives clinicians and firms a shared vocabulary. The Deal-Cycle Strain Model is CEREVITY's synthesis of the evidence in section 02 and of longitudinal research on bankers. In a nine-year ethnography of two investment banks, bankers experienced their overwork as self-chosen, the banks benefited in the first three years, and from year four body breakdowns set in and performance declined despite bankers' efforts to push through.¹⁵

The value of the model is timing. By the time strain is visible to a staffer or a managing director, the banker has usually spent months in sleep debt and masking. Those middle phases are where treatment is fastest and least disruptive, which is why anxiety and broken sleep that follow a banker off the desk call for high-functioning anxiety and depression therapy now, not after the deal closes.

The same industry produces different strain at different seats. Junior bankers absorb the volume, senior bankers carry the client, the team and the culture, and markets professionals live with real-time risk. The clinical presentation, the confidentiality concern and the right format of care differ for each, so the three groups are treated separately below.

The cost of leaving this untreated shows up in three ledgers: the banker's health, the quality of the work, and the firm's investment in its people. Across the U.S. workforce, one model attributes about 120,000 deaths a year and 5 to 8 percent of annual healthcare costs to how companies manage their workforces, including long hours and high job demands.¹⁸

Effective care for bankers starts with sleep, because judgment, mood and health all depend on it. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, a structured and drug-free treatment, shortened the time taken to fall asleep by about 19 minutes and cut time awake after sleep onset by 26 minutes across 20 randomized trials, with gains that appeared to last.¹⁹ Anxiety and low mood respond to the same evidence-based family of treatments, and secure video does not dilute them: a 2023 meta-analysis of 31 randomized trials found therapist-supported internet-delivered CBT produced effects similar to face-to-face therapy.²⁰ Good care for this population also needs a clinician who understands deal cycles, confidentiality that does not depend on the employer, and scheduling that bends around a live transaction instead of breaking on it.

CEREVITY is built along those lines: a nationwide network of independent licensed clinicians who work with high-pressure professionals, matched to the person, delivered by secure video, and private-pay, which keeps the work outside employer and insurance systems. How CEREVITY approaches this work starts with that match. For most bankers, steady 50-minute therapy sessions are the base for work on sleep and anxiety.

Longer formats fit the pressure points of the job. Extended 90-minute sessions give room to work through an acute stretch or a hard family conversation without the clock cutting it short, and 3-hour therapy intensives concentrate several weeks of work into one block after a close, before a move, or at a career decision point.

The steps below are written for a banker deciding what to do next, and for the managers and HR leaders who want to make that decision easier.

1. 01

   Name the pattern early

   Use the four phases in section 03 as a check. Nights under six hours that persist between deals, anxiety that follows you off the desk, or drinking to come down are signals to act, not to wait for a quieter month.

2. 02

   Protect sleep first

   Start with sleep, because it carries judgment, mood and health. Structured insomnia treatment is brief, effective and compatible with a demanding schedule.¹⁹

3. 03

   Choose care outside the firm

   Pick a private-pay clinician with no reporting line to the employer or the insurer. Disclosure concerns are the most commonly reported stigma barrier to seeking help, so removing them removes a reason to delay.⁴

4. 04

   Build sessions around the deal calendar

   Book a regular session time, then use longer formats at pressure points: an extended session in the middle of a live deal, an intensive after a close. Firms can help by protecting the time and funding care without asking for records.