How Workaholism could Interfere with your Personal Life
As a workaholic you probably don’t have much of a personal life, anyway, since your main aim in life is to work hard and succeed in your career. You generally don’t have time for other people when all you care about is getting to work before your work colleagues, staying late and taking work home with you. How can you even go about getting a personal life if you don’t have time for anyone else? Being an addict can make you incredibly selfish, which doesn’t exactly make you likeable.
Thus, it can be a challenge to attract a member of the opposite sex, since you never have time to spend outside of the office. At least, in your mind you don’t. Of course, it’s up to you whether you work longer than your contract demands, but you feel a compulsion to do more than you need to. You’re so preoccupied with your job that you may not even realise what a detrimental impact it is having on your personal life. Because you’re always working you don’t give yourself time to think about how lonely you are, although this doesn’t mean you don’t feel somewhat isolated and depressed by the situation.
To meet new people you obviously have to go out and try different activities and join social clubs, which you can’t do as a workaholic, since your whole life revolves around work. Even when you give yourself a ‘break’ it isn’t really, as all you can think about is work which can make you anxious and frustrated. You’re hardly likely to make a good impression on other people if you appear to be acting strangely. As a consequence, you may not even bother trying to take time off work in future.
Perhaps you have a select group of friends outside of work and have a partner, but if you’re a workaholic you may neglect everyone who is close to you, since all you are able to focus on is your work. You lose sight of what is really important because you worry that cutting down on the hours you work will somehow make you a failure and jeopardise your chance of developing a successful career. Despite the fact your friends and family tell you that you work too hard, you just aren’t prepared to take on board their comments.
Ultimately, then, workaholism could definitely interfere with your personal life, as it is something which you feel you have no control over and which impinges on every aspect of your life, sometimes making it unbearable.
