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Between teaching MBA students and speaking to a lot of business audiences, I’m often interacting with successful people who work extremely long hours. It’s common for me to hear about 13-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks, with few or no vacations. What I see among many of those I encounter is workaholism, a pathology characterized by continuing to work during discretionary time, thinking about work all the time, and pursuing job tasks well beyond what’s required to meet any need. Workaholics feel a compulsion to work even when they are already earning plenty of money and despite getting minimal enjoyment from doing so.
Does this sound familiar? If you do little else but work—and are mentally absent when not working—you are likely to find your life feels bereft of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Worst of all, compulsive overworking is incompatible with healthy intimate relationships, which take time, energy, and effort.
As with other addictions, telling a workaholic they’d be better off not doing the destructive behavior is unhelpful—as though just suggesting “Hey, why not work less?” will result in the person slapping their forehead and saying “I never thought of that!” Instead, I try to look behind the pathology to discover its origins. Typically, what I find in highly successful people is that an addiction to work is, in fact, based on an inchoate belief that love from others—including spouses, parents, and friends—can be earned only through constant toil and exceptional merit. Unchecked, this mistaken belief is catastrophic. But understanding the reasons behind this delusion can lead to healing.
Life offers two kinds of reward, which social scientists define as intrinsic and extrinsic. The first kind involves immaterial things that can’t be bought, such as love and happiness. The second kind involves material things that can be procured, such as money and goods. We want both kinds of reward, of course—even though we all know what research has shown over and over again: that once we have achieved a basic standard of living, we gain much greater life satisfaction from intrinsic rewards. Compare the scenario of driving to a fancy restaurant in your new Ferrari, where you will eat alone because you have no friends or family, with that of driving to Denny’s in a 1999 Corolla to hang out with people who truly love you.
And yet, millions of seemingly successful people act as if extrinsic rewards are all that count. Although they may not be totally bereft of loved ones, they live almost as if they were so, neglecting family and friends in favor of work, earning far more than their household needs to survive, even thrive. You can think of this as a crossed psychological circuit, resulting in a false conviction that intrinsic rewards can be bought with extrinsic currency. If I work hard enough and am sufficiently successful, thinks the workaholic, albeit unconsciously, then I will be worthy of the love I truly crave.
Why might someone fall prey to such an erroneous belief? It could be the way you were raised. Workaholic parents tend to have workaholic kids. If you grow up seeing adulthood modeled by people who work all hours and are rarely home, you can be forgiven for regarding this as appropriate behavior for a responsible spouse and parent. This is at least partly the same mechanism behind the fact that you are much likelier to become an alcoholic if you were raised by one.
Researchers have also shown that when parents express love for a child in a conditional way based on the child’s behavior, that person is likely to grow up feeling that they deserve love only through good conduct and hard work. This might sound as though I’m describing terrible parents, but I don’t mean to do so at all; well-intentioned parental encouragement can be heard by a child as a message about their worthiness.
In the workaholic’s case, it might look like this: Your parents wanted you to succeed in school and in life, so they gave you the most love and attention when you got good report cards, won at sports, or earned the top spot in the orchestra. You were a bright kid, and put two and two together: I am extra lovable when I earn accolades. In my experience, this describes the childhood of a lot of people who strove to be special to gain their parents’ attention, and who carry this behavior into adulthood by trying to earn the love of others through compulsive work.
If you’re tending toward workaholism, you may very well be discovering that the returns to work are falling below the costs to your life. You are likely defensive about your heavy work habit, and confused about why such a noble virtue is earning complaints at home, instead of praise. Here are three steps you can take to resolve this issue.
1. Look at your origins and face the truth.
Think back to your childhood: Did you struggle, say, to get your parents’ attention and affection unless you excelled in school or outside activities? Did being a “special” or a “bright” child make you feel loved? If so, don’t get mad at your folks: They were probably doing their best, perhaps trying to give you a better life than they’d had; or they may have been diligently following some now-outdated parenting advice. But the result is very likely that there’s a script in your head that says, You’re not inherently lovable as you are, so you better win the spelling bee. You are still trying to win some grown-up version of the spelling bee, even if your parents are long dead.
2. Give what you want to receive.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that “if you would be loved, love, and be loveable.” The profound truth behind this assertion is that you should give what you want to receive. So if you want more courtesy, start by being courteous to others. And if you want true love from your beloved, give them true love, in the intrinsic currency that satisfies our deeper needs. That means giving your self, not more money or things. Try this: Take a day away from work, turn off your phone, and give the person you love the attention they crave, all day.
3. Make plans to change.
One day is not enough to repair your relationships, and big changes in your habits don’t take place overnight. If you were dependent on alcohol, say, I wouldn’t be so naive as to imagine that not drinking for a day would fix the problem. Breaking any addiction takes a lot of planning and resolve. Own up to your workaholism, acknowledge the roots of the problem, and work with your loved ones to make a long-term plan to live differently. That might mean planning a career or job change, in six months’ to a year’s time; scheduling weekend trips and tech-free vacations from now until then; and asking your family to hold you accountable for making progress.
Let me close with one of my many conversations with work-addicted strivers that makes the point better perhaps than any studies can. An older, very wealthy man told me how he worked himself to a husk to earn his fortune. While he ground away at building his company over the decades, barely talking to his wife and kids, he dreamed about how marvelous it would be to be wealthy. I asked him what he imagined it would be like to be so rich. He said that he thought of the obvious stuff, such as houses and cars. “But mostly,” he said, “I thought if I was rich, my wife would love me.”
“And?” I asked, noting that he was not wearing a ring.
“She didn’t.”
The post If I Work Harder, Will You Love Me? appeared first on The Atlantic.
