Are You a Workaholic?

Find Out If You Have a Work Addiction

The topic of addictions is on the rise. In recent years, numerous studies have been carried out and the fifth edition of the DSM (a manual of mental disorders widely used by psychologists and psychiatrists) includes for the first time in the addictions section non-substance-related disorders. This would amount to acknowledging that we can be addicts without consuming anything, and therefore it opens the door to disorders such as pathological gambling. We have opened this door, and now we can only hope that they begin to recognize the other addictions, those that do not require the consumption of a substance, such as work addiction.

Spain is a country prone to this addiction, as revealed by a study carried out by the Universitat Politècnica de València, the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, and the Universidad del País Vasco. News reported by Universia. According to it, we will reach a rate of 11.8% of people addicted to work by 2015. Our marathon schedules, with that Mediterranean tendency to put in more hours than a clock, the poor balance between work and family life, and pushing personal fulfillment or leisure into the background, make Spaniards think that we owe our lives to work, a concept fairly deeply rooted in our society. What better country than ours to study work addiction! A particularity of work addiction that distinguishes it from other addictions is that people are praised and rewarded for working excessively; this almost never happens with other addictions (Fassel, 2000).

The ILO (Source from the International Labour Organization) states that 8% of the Spanish working population dedicates more than 12 hours a day to their profession, and many of them end up suffering from cardiovascular diseases.

Most common characteristics of a person addicted to work:

1. You dedicate 10 hours or more a day to working

Your work schedule takes up almost your entire day and although it doesn't really bother you, you neglect other areas of your personal life (your children, family, friends, leisure,..). Even though your work schedule is 8 hours, you dedicate more to it, regardless of whether or not it is paid. You are unable to leave an unfinished job at the end of the day. When you look at the clock, time has flown by and you never see the moment to stop. You are almost always the last one to leave your company.

2. You forget important things unrelated to work

Sometimes you forget to have breakfast or even lunch because you are absorbed in work. You also find it hard to remember other things like someone's birthday or picking up your clothes from the dry cleaner's. Your mind is occupied with work-related things, leaving little room for everything else.

3. You are unable to delegate

You find it extremely hard to delegate work to others, to let go of control and let someone else do it is very complicated because you know they won't do it like you, and you end up loading yourself with more work than you should. And whenever you do manage to delegate, you always supervise and follow up to make sure it has been done well.

4. Your personal life has shrunk

You no longer dedicate time to leisure, nor to your family, but you really don't care because you have lost interest in those things. You are unable to enjoy your free time because work inactivity does not satisfy you. Usually it is the family who tends to complain about your excess of work because you are fine the way you are, but they have developed a separate life and miss you.

5. You never disconnect

When you finally decide to call it a day at work, you keep thinking about work, about pending matters, about future projects… And you get the feeling that you are wasting time when you rest. Your vacations have become tiny and your weekends are now only a few hours long.

6. You have distanced yourself from everything else

You communicate better at work and you have distanced yourself emotionally and socially from your family and friends. You feel anxiety and irritability in your free time and you have difficulty relaxing. Work is the core of your life and of your self-esteem; you need recognition at work.

With all this, we could define a workaholic as that worker who dedicates a large part of their time to work activities with negative consequences at the family, social, and leisure level, who constantly thinks about work when not working, and who works a greater number of hours than normal workers, since they are satisfied by work itself (Machlowitz, 1980).

Although many self-employed people will see themselves reflected in this definition, I would add as a differential characteristic that the workaholic is characterized by extreme dedication to work (they work outside hours, on weekends, or on vacation), by excessive dedication in terms of time (there is a loss of control over the time spent at work, they forget to eat…), by compulsion and effort at work, by disinterest toward other activities outside of work, by a disproportionate work involvement, and by a significant deterioration of personal life, both social and family.