Are you a workaholic — or a hard worker? Why it matters for your health.

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Work ‘addicts’ in a study reported more health complaints than their peers. Work ‘enthusiasts’ reported almost no health complaints.

 

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An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

 

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some people — roughly 15 percent of workers — the job becomes all-consuming. A healthy work ethic develops into an addiction, a shift with far-reaching consequences, says Toon Taris, a behavioral scientist and work researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

 

Taris stresses that the “workaholic” label doesn’t apply to people who put in long hours because they love their jobs. Those people are considered engaged workers, he says. “That’s fine. No problems there.” People who temporarily put themselves through the grinder to advance their careers or keep up on car or house payments don’t count, either.

 

< Take a workaholics quiz at the source page. >

 

The growing consensus is that true workaholism encompasses four dimensions: motivations, thoughts, emotions and behaviors, says Malissa Clark, an industrial-organizational psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.

 

In 2020, Clark and colleagues proposed a multifaceted framework: Workaholism involves an inner compulsion to work, having persistent thoughts about work, experiencing negative feelings when not working and working beyond what is reasonably expected.

Who and where are workaholics?

 

Workaholism crosses demographics and can exist in any job.

 

Jack Hassell, a human resources specialist in Christchurch, New Zealand, interviewed 15 self-identified workaholics who came from a variety of backgrounds, including sports, law and human resources. Some of the workaholics grew up in poverty and felt driven to never go back, while others came from wealth but could never shake the feeling that they should be doing more to get ahead and stay ahead. “The patterns of workaholism are essentially the same, but they arrived there in completely different ways,” he says.

 

Yet some personality types are especially likely to fall into the work trap. Perfectionists, extroverts and people with type A (ambitious, aggressive and impatient) personalities in particular are prone to workaholism, Clark and co-authors have found.

 

They expected low self-esteem to be a risk factor, but it wasn’t. Workaholics may put themselves through the wringer, but it’s not necessarily out of a sense of inadequacy.

 

And certain workplaces are more likely than others to foster addictions to the job, Taris and occupational health scientist Jan de Jonge reported in an overview in the 2024 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. This includes companies that encourage competition and long hours.

 

Managers and self-employed workers also are more at risk than people who work under someone else’s control, a 2016 survey of more than 16,400 workers from Norway found.

 

Workaholism could be on the upswing because of Zoom, Slack and other technological advances that make it easier to work anywhere, anytime. Working from home, which became widespread during the pandemic, probably created a new group of always-on workers who lost sight of the boundaries between work and home life.

 

It’s troubling, Clark says, that “even just your average worker might now start to be more of a workaholic.”

‘Willing to almost die’

 

Any worker who slips into workaholic habits may notice some gains — more sales, more overtime pay, more words in the document — but those small victories may be fleeting. For all their efforts, the never-stop go-getters aren’t necessarily better at their jobs.

 

In a 2016 meta-analysis, Clark and co-authors found no correlation between workaholism and job performance, meaning workaholics aren’t covering themselves in glory or even separating themselves from the pack.

 

A 2015 study found that people who put in extra-long workdays received roughly the same level of performance reviews as those who only pretended to work similarly long hours. Later investigations — including a 2020 Italian study that tracked evaluations of more than 500 workers over two years — also found little to no correlation between workaholism and performance.

 

In fact, for some workaholics, a mediocre performance review could be considered a best-case scenario.

 

“They create a lot of work for themselves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing good work,” Taris says. “We know that if people work too hard, they spend little time on recovery.” This, he adds, leads to fatigue and exhaustion — and that increases the likelihood they will make errors that are harmful to the organization, their clients or themselves.

 

In certain settings, mistakes on the job are dangerous. A 2018 study of 1,781 nurses in Norway tracked the factors that predicted serious work-related incidents, including harming or nearly harming patients, harming or nearly harming themselves, dozing off at work or breaking equipment. Workaholics were consistently more likely than their co-workers to commit every type of error tracked by the study.

 

Clark’s 2016 analysis, which compiled results from 89 other studies, found that workaholics suffer impacts far beyond the workplace. A 2006 study of 174 white-collar workers in the United States and Canada found a correlation between workaholism and life dissatisfaction. The higher a person scored on a workaholism scale, the less they enjoyed life.

 

A 2004 study separated 5,853 full-time workers in Belgium into eight categories, including work enthusiasts, work addicts, relaxed workers and disenchanted workers. The work addicts reported more health complaints than any other group. Work enthusiasts, in contrast, reported practically no health complaints, a reminder of the vast difference between addiction and enjoyment.

 

In her many interviews with workaholics, Clark has seen how overcommitment to the job can go hand in hand with unhealthy lifestyles, including excessive drinking and failing to get enough exercise or sleep. A former llama rancher, for example, told Clark that she wouldn’t allow herself to eat or relieve herself until her work goals were met, even if that meant hunger and discomfort. “I just had to get that stuff done, or I would feel like I was no good.”

 

Hassell interviewed an academic who got a wake-up call during the massive Christchurch earthquake of 2011. When the earthquake started, they were reluctant to quit working and leave their desk, Hassell says.

 

Finally forced to exit the shaking building, the academic had an epiphany. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, I was so consumed with work I was willing to almost die.’”

Curbing a work addiction

 

No interventions have been scientifically proved to reliably cure workaholism, Taris says. Still, there may be ways to blunt the worst consequences.

 

A 2020 study of 400 working adults in the United States found that workaholics who also practiced mindfulness — the ability to be aware of their emotions at any given time — were less likely to suffer from negative moods such as irritation and distress.

 

Built-in recovery opportunities, such as scheduled downtime, are helpful, says Nina Junker, a work psychologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. People who have trouble shutting down from work should try visualizing or memorizing all of the day’s achievements, she says. “That makes it easier to call it a day and enjoy one’s leisure time.”

 

There are also commonsense steps that workplaces can take to help employees find more balance. They include checking on work hours and reaching out to anyone who goes too far for too long; limiting access to work-related materials after work hours; and encouraging upper management to model healthy approaches to work.

 

A 2023 study of nearly 9,300 salaried workers at small-to-medium companies across Europe found that “soft controls” — management practices that encourage autonomy and empowerment — can reduce the incidence of workaholism and burnout.

 

But if workaholics truly want to keep working past the point of no return, Taris says, there’s not much anyone can do to stop them. Friends and family members can make their pleas, and bosses and companies can change their policies, and some workaholics might see the light and scale back. Or they might be too busy writing one more email.

 

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