Workaholism and Its Impact on Your Personal Life

Workaholism could be defined as a type of behavioral addiction that compels a person to keep working, to the detriment of everything else that matters in their life. It's a compulsion that causes associated destructive behaviors. Workaholism is believed to be the cause of 1,000 deaths per year, as nearly 5% of Japan’s stroke and heart attack cases cause deaths in employees younger than 60.

In the United States, workaholism is considered a "respectable addiction", but still an addiction or an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It should not be confused with simply working hard or putting in long hours because you are ambitious. Although "workaholic" is not an official medical or psychological term, it remains in widespread use and can be seen as a helpful working term to describe the impact of excessive work.

Defining a workaholic

Put simply, a workaholic is a person who is addicted to work. Medicine still doesn’t recognize this as a disease because there is no generally accepted medical definition of such a condition, although some forms of stress and obsessive-compulsive disorder can be work-related. Although the term workaholic usually has a negative connotation, it is sometimes used to express one’s devotion to one's career in positive terms. Workaholism is most often considered negative because it is characterized by a neglect of family responsibilities and other social relations, as well as leading the person to neglect self-care and rest.

A psychological perspective of workaholism

As mentioned before, experts agree that workaholism can be considered an addiction — and specifically a behavioral addiction rather than a substance addiction, with gambling addictions also falling into this category.

Various discomforts in life cause a person to seek relief from those discomforts. In the case of a workaholic, his or her primary form of relief is accomplishing something as part of their job. However, all this would be great if only it could last; as the workaholic attends increasingly to getting things done at work, their personal life begins to suffer from lack of attention. As their personal life suffers, it causes more discomfort for the workaholic, which causes the workaholic works even harder, in a vicious circle.