ALT-1 How becoming a Workaholic can Affect your overall well being
It can be a pretty miserable existence being a workaholic, as you can’t just take a break from work, since doing so leaves you with immense feelings of guilt and anxiety. Whereas everyone else looks forward to going home to see their kids and are counting down the days to their vacation; you spend your whole life focused on working and working some more. It’s not something you can just snap out of, as you have become used to doing things this way and so you don’t have a clue how to change the situation and whether it’s really worth changing, anyway.
Clearly, if you’re unhappy then you have to find a way to change. The trouble is that it may have been your workaholic tendencies that brought you success in your career and you become fearful that if you try to slow down you will lose it all. No longer will you be the best in your field and respected by your colleagues; you will suddenly be perceived as lacking ambition and as not being good enough for the top job. This, of course, isn’t the case, but you can become rather paranoid that everyone is after your job.
It can be extremely hard to be content with life if you measure success in terms of how far up the career ladder you are. There is much more to life than just work, but you don’t always see this when you’re a workaholic, as you don’t allow yourself to. You can’t be distracted by what you see as unimportant trivialities, even if these ‘trivialities’ actually mean something to other people. You end up alienating everyone around you, so that nobody wants to be around you even if you do decide to take a day off, simply because you’re too distracted by not being at work to notice how everyone else is reacting to you.
It can be very lonely when you’re a workaholic, as you don’t usually have much of a social life, while you tend not to take the best care of your physical health either. Thus, you end up miserable and, if you’re not careful, ill. If you work all the time the chances are you eat a poor diet, don’t take regular exercise and don’t get enough sleep. If that is the case, you’re setting yourself up for a heart attack or a nervous breakdown, as both the mind and the body suffers when you find yourself obsessed with work.
