Why being a Workaholic could indicate you have Low self Esteem
Being addicted to your work can hardly be considered to be a positive thing, since it means that you have not managed to strike the right balance between your work and home life. If you work over 10 hours a day out of choice there’s clearly something wrong. Some people have to work ridiculously long hours because they can’t afford not to, but if you spend all your time in the office looking for odd jobs to do because you don’t want to go home then you may have a problem. Indeed, being a workaholic could be an indication of low self-esteem.
After all, if you spend a great deal of time working it’s bound to get you noticed and not always in a positive way. You may be aware of the resentful glares that your colleagues give you as you’re always the first to volunteer to work overtime or to do some other job which nobody else wants to do. What seems to be your enthusiasm just makes everyone else look bad. However, you may not be particularly enthusiastic about your work; you just have a compulsion to do something and at least when you’re doing something constructive you don’t have to think about your troubles.
You may try to tell yourself that you’re not popular at work because everyone is envious of your superior abilities, when the reality is your work is often substandard. If you’re working long hours and not getting enough sleep or eating properly this is bound to have an impact on the quality of your work. When you’re a workaholic your main focus is just getting the work done, though, and so you lose sight of everything else. All you have to get up for is your work and it’s not as though you’re even going to receive any thanks for all the effort you put in.
Being a workaholic generally means that you don’t have a social life, since you spend all your time working. It’s hard to meet new people when you’re always at the office, but maybe that’s the point, since then you don’t have to deal with the possibility of rejection. When you have low self-esteem you automatically assume that everyone is going to reject you and your experiences at work often seem to support this. Throwing yourself into your work may distract you from your loneliness and dissatisfaction with life, but it won’t fundamentally alter the low opinion you have of yourself.
