- What is a workaholics or workaholic?
- Typical characteristics of workaholics
- How do you know if someone is workaholics?
- Causes of workaholism
- forms of treatment
We explain what a workaholic or workaholic is and its characteristics. In addition, we tell you what are the causes of workaholism.
What is a workaholics or workaholic?
A workaholic, also called workaholics (of English work, “work”) is a person that has a relationship of addiction to worked, that is to say, that he is linked to his work world in a compulsive, incessant and unhealthy way. This term has become popular since the end of the 20th century, especially in its Anglo-Saxon form, despite the fact that it has valid equivalents in Spanish, such as workaholic either ergomaniac.
Although this condition is neither psychologically nor medically described, nor does it constitute a formally recognized addiction problem as the alcoholism or drug addiction, workaholism emerged as a term in English speech in the mid-20th century. Although it has clear negative connotations, it is often used in everyday speech to indicate that someone is very committed to their work or that they prioritize their career over other aspects of life.
The first recorded formal use of the term workaholics dates from 1968, but its popularization is due to the book Confessions of a Workaholic (“Confessions of a workaholic”) by the American Wayne Oates. Later, in 1990, it was a term widely used in the jargon of self-help and the New age, was used to describe the increasing fixation on work and office life that the Western world has since experienced.
Typical characteristics of workaholics
Broadly speaking, some characteristics of a workaholic are:
- He conceives work as the central, fundamental and vital aspect of his life. existence, above other traditionally important issues such as the love, the family, entertainment, etc., for which he shows disinterest.
- Devote time and effort to work even on holidays, vacation periods or when you are sick.
- He works tremendously long working hours, both alone and telecommuting from home. This is due to the difficulty in setting limits to work.
- Demonstrates behaviors anxious either depressive when it is impossible for you to work or due to labor absences, even if they are justified.
- He is unable to refuse new responsibilities regardless of the toll these new responsibilities have on your personal life.
- Demonstrates eagerness for recognition in the professional field and difficulty receiving it in other areas.
- Shows feelings of superiority over others, including co-workers, and often also arrogant or authoritarian attitudes towards them.
How do you know if someone is workaholics?
A person workaholics it is different from a hardworking and committed person, and this is a difference that everyone can notice except, precisely, a workaholic. There are degrees of addiction to work, and this is generally reflected in fundamental aspects: personal life, pleasures and hobbies, and the affective way of living and understanding hits Y failures from work.
A workaholic makes work his entire life, just as an addict does with the substance he consumes. Therefore, as a self-assessment in this regard, we can ask ourselves the following questions:
- Do we invest in work the time it deserves or do we let it invade all the spaces of our existence?
- How often do we sacrifice central and vital issues in our lives for work? What do we feel when doing it? Do we recognize it as a sacrifice?
- How many social relationships meaningful do we have outside of work? How much of our life is interesting, exciting or relevant to us outside of work?
- What would the loss of our job mean for us, beyond the socioeconomic aspect?
Causes of workaholism
A workaholic is a person who works even when they are away from work, that is, who has trouble putting limits on their work life. This can be due to different factors.
Many workaholics have learned to value their work above everything else in their lives. This can happen due to personal situations of lack of financial resources in the past, for example. In this sense, the excess of work is due to a strongly installed anguish in the individual.
This distress can also reveal other underlying factors, which are not necessarily related to intense or traumatic work-related experiences. For example, many workaholics suffer from a low selfsteem and a feeling of worthlessness that convinces them to dedicate 100% of their lives to work, otherwise they run the continuous risk of being fired.
Other possibilities have to do with the world outside the workplace of the person with workaholism: it is common for a workaholic to take refuge in the office so as not to have to face personal or daily issues that are heartbreaking for him, and that constitute for him great vital failures: the inability to find love or friendship, the absence of a family, among others.
These people, then, take refuge in work and end up fulfilling their own prophecy, since dedicating everything to work makes it difficult to meet new people, visit family, and even attend to emotional aspects in psychotherapy.
forms of treatment
To combat work addiction, it is best to go to a specialist: a psychotherapist or psychologist who can unravel the causes of addiction and treat it. The effort of the patient is necessary, as with other types of addictions, and the process can often be facilitated with the use of medical or alternative therapies, at the discretion of the specialist.