Addictions are usually culturally associated with the small pleasures in life that the majority of the population recognizes as such: sweet or carbohydrate foods, Internet use, tobacco (for smokers), etc.
However, addictive behaviors related to tasks that not everyone knows how to appreciate can also occur. Work addiction is an example of this..
Work addiction and other associated psychopathologies
Work addiction, or workaholism in English, it may seem positive from the point of view of short-term productivity, but it has very negative consequences for health. The fact of dedicating more time than necessary to work causes the rhythms of eating and sleeping to change and the schedules become much more compressed, the hours of rest become scarce and the stress levels skyrocket, in addition to impoverishing life. social of people.
However, a study recently published in PLoS ONE links work addiction not only to health problems, but also to fatigue and poor diet,and it also does so with the risk of the appearance of symptoms associated with mental disorders.
OCD, ADHD depression…
The results found show a correlation between work addiction and similarities with typical symptoms of disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), depression or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Thus, workaholics or work addicts have a tendency to present mental disorders in a greater proportion than the population that does not experience this type of addiction.
This research is based on the study of 1,300 people residing in Norway, who filled out a series of questionnaire pages. Each of these volunteers received a score on a workaholism scale based on options such as “how often in the last year have you worked so much that your health suffered as a result?” But the questionnaire also included questions about indicators of certain mental disorders.
The link, or significant correlation, between the presence of work addiction and sets of symptoms associated with mental disorders emerged once these data had been cross-referenced. Specifically, around 8% of participants showed tendencies towards workaholismand among these people the proportion of those affected by disorders was much higher.
Specifically, 32.7% of people whose characteristics matched those of the workaholic presented symptoms associated with ADHDwhile for the rest of the volunteers the percentage was 12.7%. 25% of them could have OCD, and 33% had stress disorders. As for the proportion of people whose description matched the diagnostic criteria for depression among workaholics, it was 9%, compared to 2.6% among the rest of the group of volunteers.
Conclusions and reflections
These results are not so surprising when we consider how far the effects of workaholism can extend into modern life. With the widespread use of laptops, tablets and smartphones with Internet access, work hours increasingly become hours that were previously dedicated to leisure, and are mixed with household chores and personal life. outside the office.
New workaholics do not have a clear reference to know when the professional side ends and when the hours dedicated to leisure, rest or family conciliation begin. That is why, if before work addiction was limited to the walls of the building in which one works, now these walls have fallen and the horizon of possibilities to add hours to work (and subtract them from private life) has expanded. far beyond what is sometimes healthy.
In light of studies like this we can reach a clear conclusion. The tools and strategies to prevent coming to work must bear not only the responsibility of turning us into efficient workers in the long term, away from the burnout syndrome that can cause our productivity to plummet, but, more fundamentally, they must preserve our levels of health and well-being.
