How to know when You’re becoming a Workaholic
Everyone has to go to work in order to pay the bills, whether they enjoy their job or not, and so you may not even be aware of any workaholic tendencies you may possess. When you get into a routine of getting up to go to work, spending long hours in the office before coming home to do some more work, this becomes your normality and you can’t imagine it being any different. However, if you find that your work interferes with your ability to form relationships and to enjoy life you might discover that you’re becoming a workaholic.
When you’re a workaholic you can’t imagine your days without work featuring in it. While other people spend their working day dreaming of their next vacation, you dread having any sort of break and may even try to take your work with you on holiday. Wherever you are in the world you just can’t escape the compulsion you have to work. You don’t have to be driven by the pursuit of career advancement or making lots of money to become a workaholic, but these can certainly feature.
You may desire to be the best and fear the competition that your work colleagues represent, which leads you to isolate yourself. This is hardly going to help your chances of promotion, since you need to be able to communicate and work as part of a team, but you become so preoccupied with achieving your own goals that you don’t see the bigger picture. Your life revolves around work and so you fail to take into account that your decision to work longer than everyone else just makes them resent you.
It’s not only your work relationships that suffer, though, since you don’t get as much time to meet new people in your social life, which often means that you end up single. Even if you are in a relationship, it tends to come under a great deal of strain and may not be able to survive the fact you’re a workaholic. You rarely spend any time with friends and family and feel increasingly lonely and depressed.
Indeed, when you’re a workaholic you usually stop taking care of yourself, so that you fail to get enough sleep; you eat a poor diet and don’t bother to exercise. You can find yourself overwhelmed by stress and may even fall ill as a result.
In order to establish whether you’re a workaholic or not you therefore have to ascertain whether you are working to live or living for work. If your whole life seems to revolve around work you may wish to re-evaluate your priorities so that work no longer dominates your existence.
