Hi, I'm a workaholic: Why recycle is bad for career and life
"Hi, I'm Alice and I'm a workaholic." - "Hi Alisa!" If I lived in the States, then a meeting would begin in some American club of anonymous workaholics who are trying to deal with their main bad habit - to build life around work and working interests. At meetings of anonymous workaholics most often fall forcibly after a severe burnout at work, there also often want to record friends and acquaintances who for months have not been able to switch from their projects and deadlines to a careful conversation with the interlocutor.
The generation of millennials, to which I and the young people working now, compared to the generation of parents, has postponed the institution of real children for several years and brought a child never maturing - a job that takes away all your free time and attracts attention for any reason. “I am my work” is a common formulation of many respected people, and no one criticizes celebrities for enduring and working tirelessly.
During the crisis, the danger of workaholism increases: hired employees are afraid for their place and work beyond the plan, and business owners take on additional workload in order to survive in unusual and unfavorable conditions. With the extracurricular work and the refusal of many companies to encourage even the most sober-minded employees, it may seem that they are not working enough. This false feeling and guilt from non-working life in your free time is the beginning of workaholism, in which there is little productivity and a much more inadequate strong desire for approval. In order to figure out what is really behind the constant desire to work, you can use the test (for example, detailed it), from which it becomes clear that passion for work can turn into mania, if you do not give yourself a break.
The problem of workaholism, including the fact that the word "workaholic" itself seems at first glance to be a positive characteristic. A person who resolves working questions from morning to evening, knows how to dig into affairs and knows the answers to almost all the questions, it seems to be much more organized and professional than someone who does not answer calls and disappears without warning. But we must understand that the first case is also an extreme, only socially approved. From processing, it’s really easy to get on to a nervous breakdown and a lingering depression, and an unchallenged success story easily turns into a story of ordinary insanity - with sleep disorders, hallucinations and paranoia.
Of course, processing is not a medical diagnosis, and in the column "cause of death" no one will indicate "sent 100 letters before dinner." First, there is an enduring feeling of guilt for living your life outside the office - and only then protracted depression and chronic diseases. Everyone has their own diagnoses: often an ulcer, stroke, insomnia, and panic attacks are the result of inattention to their own body, sedentary lifestyle, pathological dependence on coffee and stimulants, and the inability to live an interesting day without a phone and computer. Every economic miracle has its price, which is not by chance that no one calls, and, for a long time, reworking the generally accepted 8 hours, a person obsessed with the result always links efficiency with workaholism.
We hear horror stories about work for wear in call-centers and factories (one of the documentary studies on women's work for wear was received this year by the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale), but we rarely understand that round-the-clock work with small intervals of rest and sleep is also a form of dangerous and destructive addiction. The saddest, but not uncommon, end in this case is a serious illness or death. Most suicides occur in youth and mature working age - it is from 20 to 45 years old that the likelihood of pushing oneself to the limit is highest.
Death in the workplace from an instant heart attack in Japan has long received a separate name - carosi. It is there that the least days off during the year is taken - from the laid-in month of vacation, the Japanese rest for the most part 5-7 days, removing work stress with sports, bathing procedures, but more often with a hearty meal and alcohol in the company of their colleagues. In China, from complications caused by recycling, up to 600 thousand people die annually - an unimaginable figure, the population of the whole city. In the United States, on average, they go on vacation for 10-12 days a year, while large corporations like Google acquire offices in which they can live around the clock.
In Russia, rarely which companies let an employee go on vacation for more than two weeks at a time, and the time when you can go on vacation cannot be chosen at will - most vacations are distributed according to the standard work schedule. Soviet trauma, replacing almost all the values of life with merciless labor, discredited the concept of "collective work" and "responsibility" and deprived several generations of the right to begin labor relations voluntarily, with pleasure and curiosity. And many working arrangements are often not regulated at all. We know firsthand what a 24/7 schedule is: a lot of nervous and distracting affairs, notifications, letters and unplanned situations that need to be addressed quickly and at any time.
Workaholism in character is not taken on level ground: most often it is the result of improper upbringing and motivation of parents and mentors. What is called conditional love is love with the condition "I love you if." Remember the movie about the drummer "Obsession"? Very often, adults already become dependent on the location of teachers, colleagues, and then supervisors who copy parents' attitudes towards them in their childhood - most often demanding, sarcastic, imperative and uncompromising. Many children get used to the fact that parents will finally pay attention to them if they show a tremendous result. Often, this feature of the personality is affected by people who have not had a carefree childhood - for example, parents with bad habits or the same workaholic parents who shifted the duty of taking care of themselves and younger children to an older child.
“My daughter will not study for the three” freely changes to “Do you understand this well, can you not do it for me?”, And then to “Why are you not left after work?”. It is difficult to say no to children with an excellent student complex as an adult and to protect themselves from work duties on weekends, because to maintain the same level of performance for them is a failure or boredom. Perfectionism in such people completely replaces work on oneself and an awareness of the gradual growth. And just as workaholics demand from themselves, they are hard on asking from others and are often unconsciously manipulated by colleagues and subordinates. That is why working with workaholics is very difficult and many of them sooner or later turn into obsessed singles in endless competition with themselves. But if to become a workaholic is often an unconscious and emergency choice, then stop it being - an adult choice, difficult, but conscious.
Work on wear several times very complicated my life and called into question my health. Most of these problems and anxieties have grown from insensitivity to the body, sleep disturbances and many years of neglect of the regime. Even a favorite thing in this case for the majority turns into a nightmare. As long as there are so many interesting things around, of course, the whole world is not enough, and I want to die in a parachute jump at 104 years old, and not at my desk at 30 with something. We all know what gives us pleasure, and many of these things are hard to feel if you leave behind the brackets of working exploits. And while for workaholics they are re-inventing a universal scheme for getting rid of work dependency in 12 steps, I’m trying to figure out with my own example how and when to feel denial, anger, bargaining and depression and still accept that time is short and everything is impossible to do. Yes, I'm not a workaholic at all, but an ordinary person. What the hell can they all do, and I don't? Another couple of hours and rewrite this article for the third time - then it will definitely be perfect. Oh, everything.
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4 via Shutterstock
