What kind of workaholic are you, or who will the karoshi come to?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In a guest article from the League of Cultivating Professionals, you will learn how workaholism differs from normal professional passion, how to recognize the first symptoms of this disease, and why workaholism is serious and very dangerous.

In April 2000, Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi suffered a stroke in his workplace. Karosi - this word, perhaps, flashed in the head of every inhabitant of the country. Karoshi is death by overwork, and this phenomenon is well known to the Japanese. For 20 months of work, Obuti took only 3 days off and worked 12-16 hours a day. If your schedule is like this, then you are in trouble. You are probably a workaholic, and this is serious.

Scientists from the University of Massachusetts, having studied over 100 thousand personal files of employees, found that people who constantly overwork are 61% more likely to get sick or receive various kinds of injuries. Working 12 or more hours a day increases the risk of illness by a third, and a 60-hour work week by 23%.

Workaholism deforms the personality: emotional emptiness grows. The ability to empathize, sympathy is impaired. The addicted workaholic is characterized by an inability to intimate relationships, an inability to play and have fun, relax, and just live a calm life. In other words, he cannot be happy. His abilities for joy, creativity, easy spontaneous self-expression are blocked by his own tense state.

The workaholic's houses of thought are constantly focused on work. He cannot immediately switch to rest, he needs a kind of decompression, like divers. Therefore, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, he is no longer at work, but also not quite at home. Family relationships, the family as a whole are perceived by the addicted workaholic as a hindrance, conversations with loved ones seem boring to him. He avoids discussing important family problems, does not participate in the upbringing of children, does not give them emotional warmth.

In everyday life, a workaholic is gloomy, uncompromising, vulnerable and in panic avoids the state of "doing nothing". Workaholics are 40% more likely to get divorced; workaholics have problems with sex. Working around the clock, they don't even turn off their cell phones at home. “Four in bed: you, your partner and two smartphones” - the joke is just about them.

If you recognize yourself, we add that workaholism is not hard work.

Workaholism is a devastating disease. This is not a consequence of working excitement, but a wake-up call that something is going wrong.

Workaholism disease was first named by psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in 1919. It was for this ailment that he treated his patients, who fell ill at the end of the working week, and then recovered sharply on Monday morning. It was he who described workaholism as a disease that today is diagnosed in 5% of all workers in the world.

Psychologists distinguish four stages in the development of workaholism:

1. The first, initial, usually passes unnoticed and begins with the fact that a person is delayed at work, thinks about it in his spare time, personal life fades into the background.

2. The second stage is critical when work becomes a passion. Personal life is completely subordinated to work, and the patient finds many excuses for this. Chronic fatigue appears, sleep is disturbed.

3. The next stage is chronic. A workaholic voluntarily takes on more and more responsibilities, becomes a perfectionist - a person constantly striving for excellence, but he does not succeed in doing everything.

4. During the fourth and final stage, the person becomes sick both physically and psychologically. Efficiency is reduced, the person is practically broken.

Psychologist Olga Vesnina proposed the following classification of workaholics:

• Workaholic for others works very hard and is very pleased with it. He believes that he is working for the sake of his family (which usually does not share this opinion), does not admit his illness. It is impossible to help such a workaholic - it is like treating a drug addict who does not want to be treated.
• Workaholic for yourself works very hard, but has conflicting feelings about it (he knows that he works too much and that this is bad). Realizes that close people can suffer from his work. He is not hopeless.
• Successful workaholic thanks to his work, he achieves great professional and career success. He practically does not see his family, however, thanks to a successful career, he can provide his loved ones with a comfortable life.
• Loser workaholic engages in useless activities, imitates work, filling the void in his life. He earns little, feels all the hopelessness of his existence, while burrowing into work more and more.
• Hidden workaholic in public he laments how he does not like to work, but in fact he devotes all his strength and love to work. He realizes that his workaholism is a disease, and therefore hides his disease, constantly telling how he is tired of working. At the same time, he cannot live a day without work.

However, not every person who works hard is considered a workaholic. For example, there is the concept of "false workaholism", in which a person simply hides behind work and wants to be considered a workaholic. At the same time, he accumulates cases until the last, and then works in an emergency mode. These people are not dependent on work, they often complain that they do not have time to do anything, but it is just convenient for them to seem like workaholics.

If a person has a 12-hour working day, this does not mean that he is a workaholic. Workaholism is a psychological addiction, and there are a number of signs by which it can be identified.

• After a day of work, it is almost impossible to switch to other activities. Rest loses its meaning, does not give joy and relaxation.
• Only by working or thinking about work does a person feel energetic, confident and self-sufficient.
• There is a strong belief that real satisfaction can only be experienced at work, everything else is a surrogate.
• If suddenly a person turns out to be not loaded with work for some time, then he begins to feel irritation, unmotivated dissatisfaction with himself and others.
• They say about a person (and not only close ones) that in communication he is silent and gloomy, unyielding, aggressive. But all this disappears, as soon as he is at work - in front of you is a completely different person.
• When the end of any business is close, a person experiences anxiety, fear, confusion.
• To save himself from this, he immediately starts planning the next work tasks.
• Everything that happens outside of work for a person is idleness, laziness, self-indulgence.
• Magazines, television programs, entertainment shows only irritate a person.
• Increasingly, there are no sexual desires, but a person explains this by the fact that "today is tired, but tomorrow …".
• The lexicon often contains words and expressions “everything”, “always”, “I must”, “I can”, and when talking about work, a person uses the pronoun “we”, not “I”.
• A person gets into the habit of setting himself clearly unsolvable tasks and unattainable goals.
• A person begins to perceive all problems and failures at work as personal.
• Due to overload at work, family relationships are gradually deteriorating.

At the same time, the bosses love workaholics. Indeed, by destroying themselves, they reach heights and become an asset of the company. Workaholics are good at certain situations: starting or ending projects, seasonal increases in the volume of work, the need to prepare for some kind of audit.

It is not uncommon for leaders to foster a culture of “high wear and tear” in the company. They should be upset: such a position leads to economic losses, and not at all the prosperity of business. A chronically tired employee is incapable of innovation, full dedication and empathy. Workaholics, exhausted by their pursuit of work, often make costly organizational mistakes and clash with colleagues. And they get sick with an unenviable regularity, and this entails the payment of sick leave. In addition, workaholics, by their exploits, allow “lumpen-cadres” to exist in the organization, who do not increase labor productivity, but regularly receive wages. It is difficult to motivate both workaholics and "lumpen", since normal work motivation no longer works here, which means that employees become poorly managed.