492 - Workaholics Aren’t Actually More Productive
What is workaholism?
A lot of us struggle with being workaholics. The term workaholism was first used in 1971 by psychologist Wayne Oates. He defined it as “a compulsion or an uncontrollable need to work incessantly.”
A workaholic is a person who works compulsively. A workaholic experiences an inability to limit the amount of time they spend on work despite negative consequences such as damage to their relationships or health.
Wikipedia
Some forms of stress, impulse control disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder can be work-related, but there isn’t a specific medical diagnosis of workaholism. Additionally, the phenomenon of hustle culture may contribute to or exacerbate workaholism.
Some of the negative effects of workaholism can be:
Anxiety.
Low self-esteem.
Intimacy issues.
Depression.
Chronic fatigue.
Lowered overall immunity.
Why do we do it?
It’s safe to say workaholism is dangerous, both to our health and our relationships. So why do we do it to ourselves?
It can be hard to break out of habits, especially when:
Working hard is seen as a positive trait, especially in the US.
Hard work and a lack of having a good work/life balance tend to be rewarded.
Workaholism is also tied to things like perfectionism, so the two traits may go hand in hand.
Workaholics often are seeking outside, external approval that is hard to ever achieve.
There are common tropes of one partner working all the time and ignoring the needs of the other partner in our media.
Additionally, family of origin and childhood experiences can contribute to the possibility of workaholism:
Workaholics often see this trait first in one or both of their parents, and grow up thinking that this is the only way to work effectively.
Workaholics may have also had stressful childhoods, or needed to grow up faster than their peers.
Workaholics may have had parents who withheld love or gave it based on academic or extracurricular performance.
Workaholism may happen due to past traumatic experiences.
Some of us also use workaholism as a coping mechanism to shield us from something we don’t want to face:
We may have a situation at home that we don’t want to deal with, and therefore choose to spend substantial amounts of time out of the house and in the office.
We may use work as a means of escape or a way to relieve ourselves of needing to be intimate with our loved ones.
Work may help distract us from other areas of life that aren’t going well.
Workaholism may give us a sense of meaning and purpose that we fail to find internally and from other important avenues in life.
It’s worth noting that there is a difference between workaholism and working long hours. Workaholism often is paired with a sense of guilt that you’re not doing more or enough. Additionally, researchers have found no positive correlation between workaholic behavior and productivity.
What to do about it
Before tackling a problem, you have to determine you have a problem. If you’re concerned you might be a workaholic, start by asking yourself these questions:
Do you constantly work longer hours than are expected or required?
Do you cram work obligations into every moment of your schedule?
Are you accessible nearly 24/7, dealing with endless emails and messages?
Do you tend to ignore health issues, “pushing through” them to meet work deadlines?
Are you using work to avoid unpleasant relationship issues?
Do you sacrifice spending time on activities you (used to) enjoy and work instead?
If you answered yes, try these suggestions:
Create a specific work schedule and stick to it as much as you can. This also means setting down work when working hours aren’t happening, as well as choosing to not answer texts or phone calls from colleagues when you aren’t on the job.
Try to set down perfectionism by working with your colleagues, delegating tasks to other people, allowing a project to be good enough as opposed to “perfect,” and picking and choosing what actually is the most important part of a project as opposed to making everything perfect.
Make a to-do list that contains only 5 things for work each day.
Take breaks. If you have to schedule breaks in your calendar, do it! Also, plan a vacation if you haven’t had one in a while!
Get better at setting boundaries. Talk to your boss about this and listen to MA 423: Boundaries are all about YourSELF to help you learn to set better boundaries.
Create new hobbies or return to ones that mattered to you in the past. Additionally, re-invest in friendships or other relationships that may have been left by the wayside because of your job.
If you realize that you are constantly working to escape parts of a romantic relationship, evaluate the reasoning behind that impulse and take steps to change or exit the relationship.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are talking about workaholism and its effect on relationships. Many of us in Western society, especially the United States, pride ourselves on working hard, never taking a break, and possibly worst of all, the ability to multitask. Yet with only so much time in the day, things like our relationships can suffer because of this, if we fail to have a healthy work-life balance. Today we're going to talk about why many of us are workaholics, some habits to look out for that may not be serving you, and some things you could do to try to change those workaholic tendencies and help your relationships thrive.
If you're interested in learning about some of our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it at Multiamory.com/book or wherever you get your books. Of course, check out the first nine episodes of this podcast if you have not already, where we cover some of our most fundamental episodes that we reference a lot on this show.
Emily: We talk about work a lot and we talk-- in Western culture at least it tends to be the thing that people ask about you first. What do you do?
Jase: You mean we in general, not we, Multiamory?
Emily: We do.
Dedeker: Because we Multiamory talk about work too much.
Emily: I know we do.
Dedeker: Especially behind the scenes.
Emily: That is part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode. Now we have done episodes on work before, of course, and their effect on relationships as well. I think since I have moved, I really haven't had many days off if any days off since moving. It has caused me to question yet again, "Wait a minute, what's going on here? Is this really how we're supposed to live? Is this really how we're supposed to exist in this short time that we have in our lives to just constantly be working, and what is it for?"
Dedeker: Obviously you're like a perfect little gear in the capitalist machine working so nicely and efficiently and-
Emily: I guess
Dedeker: -living up to the capitalist dream of the robot worker. That's where it's all headed to. In the meantime, before we actually have robot workers, you got to act like one, damn it.
Emily: All three of us also, Jase is a little bit more than the two of us, but we work for ourselves a bit, the two of us do at least, and Jase, you also own this business with us. All of us are still fulfilling our own internal dreams and living out maybe, yes, that capitalist dream, but a little bit more in a direction of we're getting self-fulfillment from this. I think just the question is, how does this affect our lives overall and how does it affect our relationships?
Because I know a big sticking point in my last relationship was my partner always said to me, if I had more time, then I would just be putting it into Multiamory and not necessarily into spending time with him. That was a big contentious thing, for instance. Now I don't know that he was wrong. I may have, or I may have just been filling that time with other projects and stuff that weren't necessarily relationship-based things. I wonder what's going on there. What is the reasoning behind that? What is the theory as to why I personally tend to work so much and maybe why the two of you do as well.
I was wondering, just to start this out, has workaholism ever negatively impacted either of your relationships, either with each other or in other relationships that you've had?
Dedeker: That's interesting because if I look at my relationship with Jase, it's really hard to disentangle our romantic relationship from also our coworker and co-business owner, co-podcast host relationship. I think we do try, and I think especially in recent years, we've tried to minimize the amount of work-related talk or Multiamory-related talk that happens when we're in our "off hours," or when we're just hanging out or having date time or chilling in the evening or stuff like that.
It's the thing where I look at my relationship with Jase and I think of all of my relationships, probably this relationship has been the least negatively impacted, question mark, because we're in the same boat together. At the same time, we also really enable each other and the three of us enable each other to just work all the time. Then another factor that's part of this is, I've run into conflict in relationships before when I've been in relationship with someone who either has much better boundaries around their work or their work is primarily as an employee. They're not running the show necessarily.
I think that I've been in relationships with people who, because of that situation, they're better able to leave work at work and to just close the door and not think about it at the end of the day, versus for myself, where I'm already predisposed towards this hyperfunctioning and-
Emily: Perfectionism, which we'll get into.
Dedeker: -perfectionism. There's already a predisposition there, plus I'm running two businesses. I'm running my own business and then helping to run this one as well. That's a different ball game when it's hard to get a sense of off hours when you're the one who's calling the shots. A lot of the decision-making responsibility's on your shoulders, a lot of-- I don't know, if someone drops the ball, it's like the podcast doesn't come out. It's not like the machine necessarily just keeps going if the three of us fuck off for a certain amount of time.
That also creates a little bit more of this needing to be always on or needing to work on weekends or stuff that I have found has been harder for people to relate to if they haven't had that same experience. Then I've also had a hard time sometimes relating to that other side of it-
Emily: Me too.
Dedeker: -when there's the benefits of being a small business owner, which can be, last minute, "I feel really sick and so I'm going to take a half day off," without needing to approve it with anybody, for instance.
Jase: The interesting thing that's coming up for me in thinking about this is that I feel like a way I've seen that workaholic tendency show up negatively-- We'll talk about this a lot more through the episode. My therapist was just talking to me about this a couple of weeks ago. The one that's coming up right now is about how in my not-work time, so if I'm not working on Multiamory and I'm not working on my day job, then it's like, "Okay, now I have time to work on some project or my own creative projects or whatever," that I can still fall into this tendency to go, "Oh no, I feel guilty if I'm not doing a project, if I'm not accomplishing something."
I'll actually spend a bunch of that time doing some errands instead or organize something first, or I'll take a creative thing I want to do and make it more official, give myself a deadline for it to help push myself to do it, which can be really useful, but I do feel like can then end up in that situation where it's just all work-like even if it's not work. If it's not officially work I'm getting paid for, it can still be work-like.
Dedeker: I had this funny thought the other day where-- Since my breakup at the beginning of the year, I haven't jumped into dating quite yet and Jase hasn't jumped back into dating quite yet. It was like, "Gosh, all this time that we spent dedicated to creating a podcast that helps support people having multiple relationships has left us with not a lot of time for multiple relationships." Ironically.
Emily: This is our relationship.
Dedeker: I know.
Dedeker: The relationship to the podcast.
Dedeker: Exactly. This is my-
Jase: Very sure.
Dedeker: -second partner.
Emily: Exactly. Ditto.
Dedeker: God, maybe it might be a hierarchical primary partner if we're being totally honest.
Emily: Yes, I do think that this has come up a lot in my relationships and unfortunately the fact that I have dated people that don't share the same "workaholic tendencies" that I do, has led me to resent them for not having that same drive and ambition. Which I--
Dedeker: Same.
Emily: -find for myself is probably a bad thing that I do that, I don't know. Maybe somebody could argue that, "No, you need to find someone who is more aligned in that way." It's difficult.
Jase: It is hard.
Dedeker: It's hard.
Emily: It's really challenging because it's great to be with someone who stops and smells the roses and is able to put things down more easily and doesn't need things to be so perfectionistic all the time. It's also sexy to see someone with that kind of drive and ambition as well. It's tough and I think that this plagues so, so many people. I'm excited to get into all of this today.
Dedeker: Can you believe that the term workaholism has been with us since the '70s? It's been around for quite a while. That would probably suggest that the phenomenon itself as a problem has been around since well before that. The term was coined in 1971 by Wayne E. Oates, in his book, Confessions of a Workaholic, the facts about work addiction. Now, what's interesting is that over the years when this term first entered the popular lexicon, it was literally tied to just number of hours worked if someone was working 50 plus hours a week, but over time it started to shift to include more one's attitude to work, not just the number of hours that somebody is working.
The definition has started to become much more tied to a compulsive attitude towards work, a struggle with limiting the amount of time that somebody spends on work, even in the face of negative consequences such as damage to their health or damage to their relationships. Again, this is not something that's in the DSM, this is not formally considered an addiction but it carries a lot of the markers that seem very similar to addiction like that. That even when there's negative consequences, there's still this compulsion to keep repeating the behavior.
Also as we've seen the rise of hustle culture and I think especially as we've moved into this gig economy where the alleged trade-off is considered to be like, "Oh, you have all this flexibility. You can choose your hours." That means you can choose your hours to be all of the hours .
Emily: Every hour.
Dedeker: Every hour. Then also there's the realities of capitalism where sometimes it's like, "Yes, I have to choose every single hour because that's the only way I'm going to be able to pay my bills that were not really set up for a healthy work-life balance." If anything, I think our culture definitely wants to push us towards these workaholic tendencies while also layering on, I think a certain amount of guilt of you need to be attending to your relationships, you need to be tending to your family and you need to be hustling all the time. Again, I think we're put often in this very impossible position.
Jase: I could even see that being a case of workafying your relationship maintenance rather than just enjoying it of that like, "Oh, I feel this pressure. I need to do that. That's another marker of being successful and a good citizen, a good person. I've got to do that too." It could even fall into some of those traps of workaholism. Now this is so hard because like Emily said, there's a certain attractiveness to it. It does feel good. One could say that about a lot of addictions, a lot of compulsions. It's like you do it because it feels better to do it than to not do it but there are a lot of negative effects.
If we're just focusing on some of the key negative health effects of workaholism, this is things like increased anxiety, lower self-esteem, intimacy issues, depression, chronic fatigue, lowered immune system functioning, the list goes on. We'll probably get into some of this more later through the episode as we talk about some studies but it is significant. This is not just like, "Oh yes, you spend a lot of time on that thing." It's like, "No, this actually has some pretty serious negative health effects and it is worth thinking about this and looking into this if you think this might apply to you or someone that you love."
Emily: I did want to touch on that low self-esteem thing. I think that it's an interesting thing that doesn't sound like it would be tied to workaholism, but it's again this external validation that you're constantly looking for that potentially may never be fulfilled if you are only looking for validation outside of yourself within the realm of getting praised at work because of how hard I'm working or how much I'm doing. If you're constantly on this hamster wheel of, "I have to keep doing stuff in order to get that praise," you're not really looking internally at what the issue is there. I think that that can contribute to things like low self-esteem.
Dedeker: If we really want to get deep with it, I think that this can affect anybody, this sense that, I'm only worth what I do or what I provide or how I contribute. I don't have inherent worth. Therefore I need to keep doing, providing, contributing, doing, providing, contributing. Whether that's through work or through domestic labor or through emotional labor, I think I can see that link pretty easily.
Jase: I feel like with several of these, I wonder if there's a feedback loop or which one maybe started first because I could also see low self-esteem and depression leading to that. Like, "Oh, well, I get some reward for accomplishing these tasks or doing these things. That's a way to help me feel a little bit better when I'm not feeling good," in the same way that we might self-medicate if we're feeling anxious or depressed through drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes or smoking pot or something like that.
Emily: I want to get into this study that was published in 2020 by just a million people. 14 people published it. It was a lot. It was called Exploring the link between work addiction risk and health-related outcomes using job demand-control model. Essentially, that's just what they were trying to find. They were trying to find this link between the work addiction risk and then also how demanding your job is and whether or not higher-demand jobs tend to make people more workaholic, for instance versus low-demand jobs. That's essentially exactly what they found.
They did this study on French workers and they found that there were five times more workers with a high risk of work addiction among those with strong job demands than those with low job demands. I'm not exactly sure. I think it was just a self-study where you wrote down the demands of your job and they used a scale and were able to determine whether or not those with really high job demands if they're going to be more addicted to work. That makes sense to me. It's interesting because I think to some of my friends for instance, who are ER doctors.
Now, ER doctors do a really grueling schedule of 12 hours on, 12 hours off, 12 hours on, 12 hours off over the course of-- I don't know. It's three days or something. It's really intense. They do a very intense schedule, but I feel like it's a compacted compressed amount of time and then they do get times off. That to me seems like clearly, a really stressful, intense job, and yet I do wonder is that something that would contribute to having these workaholic tendencies versus somebody who is a toy manufacturer for instance. Maybe it depends how high up in terms of where you are in the toy manufacturing company.
Maybe if you're the CEO or if you are the vice president, then you're going to feel like you have more workaholic tendencies versus somebody who is simply making the toys in the factory.
Jase: That is a really interesting question and I feel like we don't have all the answers to this right now, but things that come up for me just intuition-wise is that the high demand they're talking about here might relate more to feeling like there's a large number of things I'm expected to complete. Whereas I think--
Emily: Or people that are relying on me, for instance.
Jase: That's what I'm wondering about though, is if there's a difference between, "I work very hard while I'm at work but I can't do anything when I'm not there." Like emergency room doctor or nurse, something like that.
Emily: No.
Jase: Sure. Maybe you could be researching and thinking about patients and stuff like that, but I could see there being a certain like, "Yes, this is really intense." Then I can't do anything about it when I'm not there, so I won't because I can't." The same if you are the person physically executing a job that's assigned to you and you do it while you're at work and then when you're done, you're done. You can't keep working on it. Legally you can't show up at the construction site and keep working on it after hours.
I wonder if that's different from the more white-collar salaried, you've got all these things you're expected to complete. Your hours are up to you, you just need to get them done. I wonder if that might have a higher correlation with workaholism. I don't know, but that's my intuition says that it might because you have that freedom to be thinking about it and feeling like, "Oh, I could be working on this all the time." Like Dedeker said about running your own business or the hustle culture, gig economy, it's like, "I could be working all the time, so I probably should." I wonder.
Emily: I think that makes a lot of sense. They also found that workers with a high risk of work addiction exhibited greater stress at work. There is that trope of just somebody exploding at work and being super stressed all the time and just it bubbling up and over at some point just because of all of that stress. Then also, sleep quality was lower in workers with high risk of work addiction compared with workers with a low risk of work addiction.
Finally, high job demands are strongly associated with the risk of work addiction. That's essentially what we've been saying. Work addiction risk is associated with greater depression and poor quality of sleep. All of those things, it just leads to potentially bad things happening physically and mentally within you.
Dedeker: There's the famous Japanese word Karoshi that refers to death from overwork that I think has now disseminated into our popular culture as well, and it's still very much a talking point in Japan. I don't know if anyone's doing anything about it. I think the same thing that we have here where we can all talk about how negatively a 40, 50, 60 hour work week impacts us, but there isn't a lot of push towards reducing the standard work week.
In Japan, in the year 2000, the Prime Minister died of a stroke, Keizō Obuchi, and overwork was the popular thing to blame for what it was. Again, it's hard to pin something like that specifically on overwork, but heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, heart disease, these are all things that can be influenced by stress. A huge channel of stress is overworking.
Jase: There is some data to back this up. According to the latest estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization from 2021 in Environment International, they said that long working hours led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016, which was a 29% increase since 2000. Even in the 16 years after the Prime Minister of Japan died from a stroke, possibly caused by overwork, even more people are having strokes and heart disease because of overwork. There is actually some data to back this up. It's not just wild speculation and headlines. Let's dig into this a little deeper. I think this is near and dear to all of our hearts.
As you can tell, we can relate pretty strongly to these tendencies and to workaholism. Before we do that, we want to take a quick break to say if you need some people to talk to about what's going on in your life, our Patreon community is a really cool way to do that. You can join at patreon.com/multiamory and get access to our private Discord server, private Facebook group, as well as other tiers with ad-free episodes, monthly discussion groups, early access to episodes, things like that.
Then also, take a moment, check out our sponsors. If they're interesting to you, go check them out, use our promo codes. That does help support us in continuing to do this show and bring this content to all of you out there.
Emily: As we move forward into this episode, I wanted to touch on why are we even doing this to ourselves? What is the reasoning behind wanting to work so hard? We spoke about this a little bit. It really can be challenging to break ourselves of this habit, but workaholism and just working really hard is seen as a very positive trait in the US. I think if you go over to a place like Europe, they take things like siestas and have month-long holidays. I think you tend to think of a place like Europe as having a much better sense of work-life balance, but not here so much.
Jase: I remember-- when was this? This would've been in maybe 2016 or something. There was a Super Bowl commercial. The whole premise of the commercial-- I couldn't even tell you what it was advertising. The whole premise of the commercial was this guy talking about how great and how powerful America is and would give digs to, "And we only take one week off a year." These things about, "This is what makes us great, these things," and it is that it's seen as good.
It's a point of pride that we don't give ourselves breaks, that we do work all the time. It's a hard thing to break out of. I find even for myself right now, my manager is European. He lives in London and so he has a much, I think, healthier approach to time off and what's appropriate for that. I still really struggle to get over my very American sensibility of I should feel really guilty anytime I'm asking for any time off for any reason really, and I better have a damn good reason because otherwise, it's not acceptable. That's so hard to break out of.
Emily: As an example, this week we are doing a bunch of Multiamory episodes in order to get ahead for the next 12 weeks, which is great, but I had to take time off of my restaurant job in order to do this. Now, we moved our schedule around a little bit, so we compressed that time even further, and I was like, "Well, should I keep that Saturday off that I'm getting now?" I decided not to. I was like, "No, I should make some more money, so I'm not going to go in." I know. I'm just going to work seven days this week again, which probably-- yes, I don't know.
Jase: Maybe by the end of this episode, you'll think differently about that.
Dedeker: Maybe we will convince you otherwise.
Emily: I know. It's not great. There is that thing of hard work and this lack of having a good work-life balance that does tend to be rewarded in a lot of ways or it's seen by your managers or people higher up than you as, "Wow, I can really rely on that person. I'm going to maybe reward them in some way because they're always a person who I can trust to come in and do the thing." Also, Dedeker, this is aimed towards you. That workaholism-
Dedeker: I am ready.
Emily: -is tied to perfectionism. The two traits I think often really go hand in hand. Then that makes sense. Wanting to make something as perfect as possible, that probably means that you're going to have to spend a long time on it, and therefore you're just going to be constantly chasing that perfect iteration of that project or whatever it may be, and you also may never be fully satisfied.
Dedeker: That's the bummer of all of it is even if I make something up to my standard that it's still not enough.
Emily: Not good enough.
Dedeker: It's still not enough.
Emily: I'm sorry to hear that.
Dedeker: I've really been trying in the past year to adopt this good enough is good enough sensibility for myself.
Jase: We've been trying to help each other with that too reminding each other good enough is good enough.
Emily: Yes, for sure. Again, finally, in terms of relationships, that really common trope of one partner working all the time and leaving the family at home or the other partner at home is just pretty normalized in our culture. I think that we see it in Mad Men or shows like Scandal or Grey's Anatomy, things like that. It's normal. It's what people do. If it happens in your own life, it's not a really strange thing although it may be very damaging in a lot of ways to relationships.
Dedeker: If there's an intersection with relationships, I think that if you're experiencing conflict around this in your relationship, it's a great opportunity to dive into some family of origin work or talking about childhood experiences or doing some trauma work. Either doing this with a professional or using this as an opportunity to open up that conversation with a partner, I think that you can ask each other questions like, "In the house that you grew up in, what was the narrative about the importance of work? What did you see your parents do when it came to work? What was the meaning of their work?"
Then often this is tied to money as well. It's probably going to open up a conversation about money, but we're going to try to just focus on work for this particular conversation. You can dive into like, "As a child, how did you first internalize that message that you need to be performing in this particular way or not performing in a particular way? As a child, did your caregivers withhold love or withhold validation and only give it when it was based on academic performance or extracurricular performance or sports performance or something like that? Is there a past traumatic experience that's driving this compulsion towards giving all your time?"
I think we've talked about this on a few episodes before. There's this phenomenon that there's increasingly more research about known as relaxation-induced panic.
Emily: That just hit me hard because it's so true.
Dedeker: I think relaxation-induced panic can happen on a very wide scale. It can be everything from, "I just have a hard time relaxing, or I feel guilty when I'm relaxing, or I feel like I'm shirking my duties, or I feel like I should be working more when I'm relaxing," all the way up to something very traumatic happened to you when you were relaxed and had your guard down, and therefore your system has a really hard time letting you put your guard down, and so it makes it easier for you to throw yourself into work or productivity.
Jase: Workaholism could also be a coping mechanism to shield us from something else that we don't want to have to face. It could be a situation at home that we don't want to deal with, so we'll just stay at work extra hours or lock ourselves in our office or busy ourselves with projects and tasks, and things so that we don't have to deal with some looming issue that we don't want to deal with at home in our relationship.
It could be a way to just distract us from areas that aren't going well. This is an interesting one because I feel like I've seen it on the other side, too, where if you feel like your work life is not going well, there can be this tendency to really want to throw yourself into dating a lot as his way to sort of distract from the frustration or the powerlessness or disappointment or whatever that you feel with not finding a job or having trouble getting a different job or getting enough work if you're doing more of a gig working kind of thing.
There can also be the other side where it's, "Maybe, I'm struggling more in my dating life, so I'm just going to throw myself into work because at least that rewards me right away for my work instead of this other thing, which seems like more of a crapshoot or I'd feel less empowered there." Then it can also give us a sense of meaning and purpose. I think that what's interesting about this conversation about workaholism is I honestly think that money is not the biggest part of it.
In a lot of the research, it's not really about money. It's looking at amount of time and emotionally how people feel about their work and how compelled they feel to be working. I think there is this certain by accomplishing tasks, I know that I've contributed to something and I get a reward from that. Just the reward of the work itself. That idea of, "I did a thing. Yes, I turned that thing on on time. I did a great job on that report," or whatever it is, or, "Look at how many things I got done today." There can be this sense of reward there and that is attractive.
Emily: Yes. Now that I live in a city where pooled tips are the norm, consistently, I just want to say, "Bring in the most tips of all of my colleagues," and it makes me feel really accomplished. Then I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'm still getting the same amount as everybody else, even though I am consistently doing the higher thing." That's tough. That's like, "Wait a minute, why are you working so hard? What's going on here?" When you don't get that reward in a monetary fashion, for instance, I think it is a question of, "What is driving this? What's actually going on there?"
I talked about this a little bit in our book, actually, when I was talking about the fact that I was doing three jobs at once, and it was very much taking a toll on my relationship. Finally, a manager was like, "What are you trying to prove?" He was right. I don't know what I was trying to prove. I was trying to prove something to myself and I didn't need to be doing that.
We discussed at the top of the episode, the fact that workaholism used to just be thought of as you are a person who works a long schedule or a lot of hours, but there is a big difference between simply working long hours and then workaholism. The Harvard Business Review did this study back in 2010, and they surveyed 763 employees at the Dutch subsidiary of an international financial consulting firm. They were basically asked about workaholic tendencies, things like, "I feel guilty when I'm not working on something."
Jase: Yes. Sorry, that question, I was like, "Yes, 100% that question. That's me." I feel guilty if I'm not working on something.
Emily: Yes, I understand, or, "I put myself under pressure with self-imposed deadlines when I work." Jase, you also said that. They also asked about their work skills, their work motivation, and their work hours in an average week. It also asked if they experienced various psychosomatic health issues such as headaches and stomach problems. This is interesting. That just comes up or is more apparent maybe when you're working or when you're not working.
Something that they did in addition was that they did health screenings to give more information about people's various biomarkers. They referred to this as the risk for metabolic syndrome. They're talking about things like blood pressure, cholesterol, weight management, all of those things, and taking that into consideration when they're also looking at, "Okay, is somebody going to be at a higher risk for developing any physical problems through their work-life balance?"
Jase: It's self-reported as well as some more objective measures of their health and their hormones and stuff.
Emily: Exactly. They also controlled for a host of factors such as gender and age and education, also family history of cardiovascular disease, things like that. They found that work hours were not related to any health issues, but workaholism specifically was.
Dedeker: Against the attitude, not the hours.
Emily: Exactly. Again, that just goes to show the mental is so tied to our physical, and I've always really believed that. Clearly, they're talking about that right here, that it's really your attitude about things as opposed to just simply the numbers, for instance. Specifically, employees who worked long hours, maybe more than 40 hours a week, but they didn't obsess about work, they did not have increased levels of RMS, which is that risk for metabolic syndrome, and reported fewer health complaints than employees who demonstrated workaholism.
Jase: Wow.
Emily: Then workaholics, whether or not they worked long hours, which was really interesting, reported more health complaints and had increased risk for metabolic syndrome. They also reported a higher need for recovery, more sleep problems, more cynicism, more emotional exhaustion, and more depressive feelings than employees who merely worked long hours, but did not have workaholic tendencies.
Dedeker: Yes. I know we're all like, eeeeeeh.
Emily: I know. We're all like, "Whoa, let's re-evaluate our whole lives right now." That's very, very fascinating.
Jase: Oh gosh. Then to add to this, researchers have also found that there is no positive correlation between workaholic behaviors, like long hours and that compulsion feeling like you should be working every waking minute, and productivity. That there's actually not a connection between workaholism and actual productivity. Melissa Clark at the University of Georgia did a meta-study looking at a bunch of research on this and found that "even though workaholics may spend more time thinking about and physically engaging in work than the average worker, this might not be of any benefit to their employer."
Dedeker: That sucks.
Jase: It does.
Emily: It does suck.
Dedeker: It's good to know. It's good to know, but it sucks.
Jase: It's good to know because it might mean that employers realize, "Hey, actually, there's an incentive for us to teach people about this and have them not be workaholics because that's actually just going to result in health problems and not actually more productivity for us. It'd be better for us to discourage workaholism and help people not do that so we have healthier, happier workers doing the same amount of work."
If you are your own boss, you're doing your own gig work or running your own business or whatever it is, you as the boss can remember that, you encouraging the employee to be a workaholic is not actually going to help you. That's still a struggle for me. This study in particular was a little hard to read. It's like, "Yikes."
Emily: It's eye-opening for sure.
Jase: Yes. As I mentioned, I was just talking to my therapist about this where she's like, "Do you think that you may have workaholic tendencies?" I was like, "Ooh boy, let me tell you all about it."
Emily: You're like, "Do I?"
Dedeker: I just want to jump in though to drop in one of our favorite phrases. Please don't weaponize this shit that I think that if you love someone who has these tendencies, going to them and saying, "All your hard work means nothing," is not going to be the way to cure them.
Jase: No.
Emily: True.
Dedeker: No, this whole thing.
Jase: It may cure them of wanting to be with you. Maybe don't do that.
Dedeker: Don't lead with that one anyway.
Jase: Yes,
Emily: This wasn't something that I researched for this episode, but I do know that they are experimenting with things like four-day work weeks or shorter work days, for instance, in certain countries. I think even certain companies are experimenting with that here. From what I've heard, this absolutely applies, this idea that a shorter time at the office doesn't necessarily mean that productivity goes down. It's just that you have a shorter amount of time to do so, and that's okay, but people will still fill the time in a way that is productive, even if there is less of it.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I just feel the need to point out also that the labor movement was pushing for an eight-hour work day, not as in, "Great, we lock that in and that's the solution to a healthy working life or an appropriate amount of work." That was supposed to be the beginning. It was supposed to be, "Let's at least get some limitations on it." Again, I'm not a labor movement historian, but my impression was that it was always meant to be, "We're going to keep pushing for less and less in order to have a healthier balance in one's life."
Emily: That happened.
Dedeker: The eight-hour thing was never meant to be the end of that fight.
Jase: Also, it's supposed to be the max rather than like, "Oh, that's the normal. You can go above that." Like how speed limits are meant to be the max, but then we actually drive and we don't quite follow that. We're going to take one more quick break here to talk about some sponsors for this show. If you would rather listen to ad-free versions of this show, you can become one of our patrons at patreon.com/multiamory and join at the ad-free tier there. If you are able to take the time, check out our sponsors. If any are interesting to you, use our promo codes because that does directly help support this show and help us keep this content coming.
Dedeker: We are back from the break and we're going to dive into what the heck do we do about all of this?
Jase: Yes. What do we do about all this?
Dedeker: The first to solving a problem is to admit that you do have a problem. Obviously, the three of us admitting that we have a problem has not necessarily helped us to--
Jase: Not yet at least.
Dedeker: Maybe it's helped us a little bit. I think this has been an ongoing conversation for many years between the three of us.
Emily: Mindfulness is a good thing.
Dedeker: I think because we're all in the same boat, even though the dark side is that we can all enable each other, we also can relate to each other and help support each other when we're trying to lay in some boundaries around work or trying to carve out some rest time.
Emily: I think even though you're the most perfectionistic of the three of us, you actually have the best boundaries around work or have created that or been the most intentional in terms of creating boundaries around it.
Dedeker: That's because my therapist pointed out to me, "This perfectionist side of you can also be used in service of your own rest and well-being."
Emily: Damn. That's good.
Jase: That's good.
Dedeker: I know.
Emily: Everyone for you out there. Yes. That's great.
Dedeker: I think I'm just got to drop the mic and we just end the episode there. That's all you need to know.
Emily: For those of you who aren't necessarily perfectionistic but have workaholic tendencies as well, let's talk about some of the ways that you can change this.
Dedeker: There are some self-reflection questions that you can pose to yourself. Things like, "Am I constantly working longer hours than are expected of me or required of me? Am I cramming in work obligations into every moment of my schedule? Am I accessible in a work capacity nearly 24/7? Am I expected to be accessible in a work capacity nearly 24/7?"
I think that's a really tricky one where I do think there are certain roles in certain positions where that's very clearly laid out in the job description that, "At these particular times, you need to be accessible or you are the point guy for if the system comes crashing down, we need to be able to call you on a Saturday night or whatever."
Increasingly because of the fact that we're just accessible in general through our phones, it started to creep into this unspoken expectation at workplaces, and that's not clearly delineated. That's something to look at as well, or if you're someone who's in a position of power, are you expecting people to be accessible 24/7? That's another thing that you can be checking yourself on. Do you tend to ignore health issues?
Do you push through them in order to continue working or to continue to meet work deadlines? Are you using work to avoid something like avoiding an unpleasant relationship issue? Are you sacrificing the time that you would normally spend on life-giving activities like your hobbies or time with friends in order to work? You can also ask yourself, "In doing this, does this feel like a work engagement and a passion for what I do or does it feel compulsive and does it feel fear-based?"
I know sometimes it can be hard to tease that out, but generally, we can have a sense of, "Is it one way or the other?" We can have a sense of, "Am I getting into a flow state with my work because I find it so fascinating and that's what sucks me in for hours at a time, or is it I feel this anxiety that I can't step away from it?"
Jase: If I do, I feel guilty and so it's like, "Well, I should just go back to it." A few things to try in terms of the amount of work that you're doing. The first one here is to create a specific work schedule for yourself, especially if you have control of your work schedule, whether that's because you're salaried and you get to set your own schedule or whether you do your own gigs work for yourself, but is to make a schedule and then try to stick to it as much as you can.
Part of that means setting down work once those work hours are over, as well as specifically not answering texts or phone calls from colleagues when you're not during your working hours. This is, of course, assuming that you're not on PagerDuty, you're not expected to respond at that time. I'll see a Slack message come in in the evening, especially from colleagues in other time zones and there can be this urge, with a text from a friend to be like, "Oh, I'll just respond to it right now," but instead to put some things in place like setting your status to away and turning off your notifications in Slack or wherever you get those messages.
Doing some things because often people don't expect you to respond outside of business hours. If you don't, no one's really disappointed by that. You may need to change that if people are used to getting you at all hours. You may need to say, "Hey, I'm actually not going to be available at these hours." Just trying to put some of those barriers in place almost to force yourself to think about something other than work and to engage with something else.
Another way to do this is to set down some of your perfectionism or your need to control by delegating tasks to other people. Allowing good enough to be good enough, like we were talking about before, as opposed to things being perfect and also choosing what's actually the most important part of a project as opposed to making everything important. I know that I, for one, have been guilty of spending hours tweaking some small aspect of a design when really the presentation or this project or this video is not about that little piece of design.
It's about the main content, but it's just, "Oh, but I want it to be perfect. I want it to do this." Becoming aware of that can be helpful. Maybe even before a project, identifying, "These are the parts that need to be really good. Everything else just needs to be good enough," would be a way to approach that. I feel like I see Dedeker reacting emotionally to this.
Dedeker: Yes. I feel you.
Jase: I mentioned before that my therapist was talking to me about this and we talked about this over a couple of sessions. At first, she brought up this thing of, "Do you think you might be a workaholic?" I was like, "Boy, howdy. Here we go." Something that she suggested, because I talked about how I'll have my day job that's task-based and then I'll have Multiamory, which is also task-based. Writing episodes, taking care of administrative things. She said, "At the beginning of each day, what if you try making a to-do list and the rules are this. Your list cannot contain more than five things in that day and that each thing can take at most an hour to do.
That was her system that she proposed, was to set yourself up for, "If I get these five things done, I've done enough. That's my enough." Obviously, you're going to fill some of your day with other little things like responding to messages or talking to people. That's why max of an hour each. What I mentioned to her when she told me about this was that something I'd done in the past, and I think Dedeker still does, is called bullet journaling.
I don't remember if we talked about it on the show before, but it's this idea where instead of having one huge long to-do list, instead you have a little mini to-do list for each day of the week or each day of the month or however far out you want to plan it. Then you have a limited number of spots of how many items you can put per day. If a new task comes along, rather than just, "Let me add it to the bottom of this big long to-do list," you add it to a specific day that has a spot open, or maybe it's like, "Ooh, this needs to get done sooner, so what can I bump to later so this can happen sooner?"
It's based around that same idea of limiting the number of things that you're trying to do each day and avoiding this infinitely long to-do list. The thing that was interesting is I mentioned that to her and she's like, "Wow, I've never heard of that. That sounds really cool though I think most of my clients, even seeing all their stuff to do in that format would be too overwhelming. That's why I encourage this, just make the one list every day but I do think there's value in both."
Dedeker: I was going to point out I want to be of two minds on this. On the one hand, bullet journaling has saved my life in order to be able to feel like I'm not just saddled with this constantly growing to-do list and I can compartmentalize my days a little bit. I also want to point out that sometimes we can be on the hunt for the perfect organizational system that's going to deliver the perfect balance and perfect boundaries to us and the issue may actually go deeper. It may not just be about, "If I can just find the right system," even though that can be extremely helpful for many people.
Jase: Then in a similar vein is taking breaks and specifically scheduling those into your day. This was something that, when I worked at a VFX studio, I was really bad about taking breaks and would try to get better at it by putting it on my calendar of-- because you get your lunch break, and then you get your two 15-minute breaks during the day. I would always just work through those 15s, and I would also usually work through my lunch, or at least do a quick lunch so I could get back to it.
Dedeker: Oh, Jase, I'm going to be retroactively mad at you for doing that now.
Jase: I know.
Emily: I don't ever take a break at work either.
Dedeker: No, I'm going to be mad at you, Emily.
Emily: The New York labor laws, I think, are different or something because in California they're very, very specific. You have to take a 30-minute before the 6th-hour mark, and then you're entitled to two 15-minute breaks. Here, they're like, "Go nuts." If you want to stand up for 8 hours straight, go for it.
Dedeker: Oh my goodness.
Jase: My point is, in that case, trying to give yourself that time of saying, "Yes, I am going to take that 15 minutes to just go for a walk around the block, or do some push-ups," I don't know, something. Space out for a moment, listen to 15 minutes of the Multiamory podcast, whatever it is, and similar to scheduling breaks, actually plan to take some vacations. If you're someone who doesn't do that, if you're self-employed, I know Dedeker has done something where she's set aside money in advance to give herself time off, I would recommend that.
If you are someone who gets time off, actually use it. If you're someone like me, scheduling it farther in advance might help you to actually stick to it and plan for it, and also hopefully feel less guilty about it by the time it comes around if you've had it on the books for a long time.
Emily: We talk about boundaries a lot on this show. A big one, in regards to getting better about your workaholic tendencies, is to try to set some boundaries. You can talk to your boss about this as well. Again, if you are a person that tends to be available at all hours of the day and night, and you're like, "You know what? I should change that," then set some expectations with your boss or with your colleagues and let people know, "Hey, that's not going to be something that I'm going to be doing anymore. When I'm at work or between these specific hours, I'll be available, but otherwise, I will not be."
Dedeker: If you're able to. We realize not everybody has a job where you have that luxury.
Emily: That is true. If you are able to, yes, but there are other things that you can probably create boundaries around, including just internal boundaries, your own time, et cetera. You can listen to our episode 423, Boundaries are All About Yourself, to help you learn how to better set boundaries, or go to our amazing book that has an entire chapter all about boundaries as well.
Another thing that you can do is you can try to create some new hobbies or return to ones that mattered to you in the past. I think realizing that there is life outside of work is really important to do. I will say I've been wanting to play some video games by myself for weeks now, and every time I'm like, "I have a second, maybe I could right now," I'm like, "Well, no, I should do something work-related or do something--
Emily: I feel that.
Jase: I can relate to that, yes.
Emily: Yes, exactly. I really would like to actually sit down and have a little bit of time to just go and do a fun thing, do a hobby, something for myself that is not just work-related. You also can reinvest in friendships or other relationships that may have been left by the wayside because of your job. That's a big thing. So many of us who are adults say to our friends, "I'll see you when I see you. I don't know when that's going to be."
That's just normalized as well because we're all so busy that we tend to not necessarily hang out with our friends as much as maybe we once did. If you can really take, again, some intentional time to see people, it can show you there are a lot of great things about hanging out with people and doing things other than work.
In terms of relationships, if you realize that you're constantly working to escape parts of a romantic relationship, whatever reason that may be, if it's because things are not going great in that relationship, if it's because you don't want to maybe necessarily be intimate with that person or reach a relationship milestone with that person in the way that they want, for instance, if there are various reasons why it's a coping mechanism to keep yourself working all the time in order to escape parts of the relationship, then really evaluate that and take steps to change that, or maybe it's okay and time to break up.
Jase: I think related to that, just thinking about how we talked earlier about workaholism being connected to depression, to anxiety, and that it's also possible that addressing those issues with a therapist can also help the workaholism in tandem, rather than just thinking, "Oh, if I solve one, it'll solve the other." You might need to approach both, whether that's because of your relationship troubles, maybe addressing that at the same time as addressing the workaholism, or if it's depression or anxiety or something else like that.
Dedeker: If you are looking for more resources regarding the intersection of one's relationship to work and one's romantic relationships, we highly recommend that you go check out our episode 408 titled When Work Gets in the Way of Relationships.
Emily: We hope all of you learned something today. I know that this episode gave me a lot of things to think about. Something that I've realized, at least for myself, that I do is I create episodes that are because something is happening in my life that I need help with, and so I want to research more about them or learn more about them, and this is definitely something that I've thought about a lot recently.
Again, that intersection between how are my relationships affected by the work that I'm doing and the amount of hours that I put into it, and how is my health being affected, all of those things. We hope you out there also think about that and also try to instill a better work-life balance because I think ultimately not only is that going to be better for your mental health and your relationships, but it sounds like workaholism really doesn't do a lot for your overall productivity.
Jase: Anyway, yes.