Why Days Off Feel Worse For Workaholics

Two people can put in the same 60-hour week and be in completely different places. One is absorbed in the work and looks forward to it. The other keeps going because stopping brings on guilt or anxiety. From the outside, they look identical.

Researchers have spent two decades separating these two groups. Their findings suggest that long hours say very little about which group a person is in.

Same effort, different fuel

Organizational psychologists call the first pattern work engagement and the second workaholism. Both involve heavy investment of time and effort.

The difference is the feeling behind it. Engagement is high effort with positive feelings, and workaholism is high effort with negative ones (Shimazu et al., 2015).

Workaholics describe a drive they can't easily turn off. One of the standard measures, the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, asks whether you work to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness, or depression.

A person who answers yes is using work the way other people use a drink at the end of the day.

A meta-analysis that pooled the research concluded that workaholism is best understood as an addiction to work. It is linked to burnout, job stress, conflict between work and home, and poorer physical and mental health (Clark et al., 2016).

What happens over time

Shimazu and colleagues (2015) followed 1,196 employees at a Japanese company for two years. Workaholism predicted worse outcomes over that period, including more distress and lower life satisfaction. Engagement predicted the opposite: better health, greater life satisfaction, and better job performance.

That last finding matters for anyone who manages people. Workaholics may log more hours, but only engagement predicted better performance down the line.

Who it shows up in

Andreassen and colleagues (2016) surveyed 16,426 working adults in Norway. About 7.8% met the cutoff for workaholism. Compared with everyone else, they had higher rates of several conditions:

• Anxiety: 33.8% vs. 11.9%

• ADHD: 32.7% vs. 12.7%

• OCD: 25.6% vs. 8.7%

• Depression: 8.9% vs. 2.6%

Younger workers and people in management roles were more likely to score as workaholics.

The study was a one-time survey, so it can't say which came first. Anxiety may push people toward compulsive work, compulsive work may produce anxiety, or both may share a common root. The authors left the question open. Their practical point was that a successful workaholic may also have an undiagnosed condition, ADHD in particular.

Where the difference shows

Workaholics and engaged workers can be impossible to tell apart on a Tuesday afternoon. Saturday morning is where they split. An engaged person can close the laptop and actually rest. A workaholic closes the laptop and starts feeling the pull to open it again.

The more useful question is what happens inside you when you stop.

References

Andreassen, C. S., Griffiths, M. D., Sinha, R., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2016). The relationships between workaholism and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study. PLOS ONE, 11(5), e0152978.

Clark, M. A., Michel, J. S., Zhdanova, L., Pui, S. Y., & Baltes, B. B. (2016). All work and no play? A meta-analytic examination of the correlates and outcomes of workaholism. Journal of Management, 42(7), 1836–1873.

Shimazu, A., Schaufeli, W. B., Kamiyama, K., & Kawakami, N. (2015). Workaholism vs. work engagement: The two different predictors of future well-being and performance. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22(1), 18–23.