 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Lab. Somebody said something about, you know, most people they just look at the job that I had and they said they just think of it as a job. You think of it like a crusade. It didn't matter what kind of performance reviews I got. It didn't matter how people were saying what I was doing was great. It was never enough. And every single day at work, I mean really my whole career have been in pain that I'm not doing enough. Sound familiar? Does your work feel like a crusade? Wondering if you might be a workaholic? I know I do. There's a self-test you can take and it asks questions like do you take work to bed? Well, check. Do you underestimate the length of time work projects will take and rush to finish them? Check. And this one, have friends and family stopped expecting you to show up on time. Oh, yeah. Lately, I've been reading a lot of research on workaholism. I've gone to a local meeting of workaholics anonymous and later on this episode, we'll hear stories from a couple of the regulars there. One finding is pretty surprising and it may be a bit demoralizing for some of us. And that's workaholics for all the intensity, all the commitment and all those long work hours actually aren't any more productive than people who work a normal work week. That's according to a study by Melissa Clark. Hello? Yeah, hey, Melissa. It's Bridget Collin. How are you doing? I'm good. Melissa's an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. She studies workaholism in America. She told me it's more rampant here and less studied than elsewhere in the world. So we got to talking about what workaholism really means. I think we all have a layperson's opinion of what it is, but from a scholarly perspective, I realized there was a lot we still did not know. Right. Well, it's true. You see it everywhere sort of almost half joking. You know, people will say, oh, I'm so-and-so as a workaholic or I've been a workaholic lately or you'll see it kind of in the popular press thrown around very lightly. Right. But what is workaholism? So one of the components of workaholism is that someone has an internal pressure that makes them feel obligated to work as if they should be working. They are also constantly thinking about work and preoccupied with thoughts about working even when they're not. That sounds familiar. Oh, no. The aspect of the criteria of workaholism does not necessarily mean that you are a workaholic. Okay. So there's internal pressure, that feeling of obligation. What are some of the other traits? Well, kind of one of the most obvious ones is that you are working all the time, right? So you're excessively involved in your work. But this is often to the extreme, perhaps more than what your job would require of you. But one of the key components is also that you might be driven to work because it's feeling anxious when you're not working or just fearful that you should be doing something. One thing that struck me that you said a little earlier, you said that there wasn't a whole lot of research being done in the United States at the time that you were looking at all the studies that were out there. And yet the United States, I don't know, do we have more workaholics than others other places? We certainly have people who work among the longest hours when you look at some of the international comparisons. Why do you think we don't have people studying workaholism here and where are people studying it? Right. Well, that's always been a mystery to me. Perhaps maybe it's more normalized here in the U.S., so we don't really think of it as a problem. Maybe it's something that people would almost brag about with our Protestant work ethic that this is something that's valued. It's an okay problem to have, whereas European countries study workaholism a lot. And I know they have a very different way of thinking about having a balance between work and home. But it seems that we all know someone that we would think of as a workaholic or maybe we feel that way about ourselves. And so it's definitely worth exploring the implications of that here in the U.S. All right, so Melissa, I'd like to listen together to the stories of two people I met at a workaholic synonymous meeting here in Washington. Sure. The group meets in a nondescript old building in a busy D.C. neighborhood. You climb the stairs to a meeting room. It's a pretty simple space with worn but serviceable wooden chairs. My producer arrived on time, and for a while, he was the only one there. But soon enough, two of the regulars came up. They agreed to talk with us about how they first realized they needed help with their workaholism. Hi, my name is Christina and I'm a workaholic. It was like around midnight on a Friday night, and I was freaking out and desperate, and I did a Google search for workaholic synonymous, and lo and behold, there it was. I ordered all the books that night. I call into a phone meeting the next day, and people started talking from all over the country on this phone meeting, and I just started crying. Hi, my name is Jeff and I'm a workaholic and a procrastinator. Before I came to the first meeting, I kind of, I don't think I thought of myself as a workaholic. I thought of myself as a person who didn't use her time effectively. And, you know, somebody said something about, you know, most people, they just look at the job that I had, and they said they just think of it as a job. You think of it as like a crusade. I think the one that did it the most, kind of a protege of mine at work, he sent me a thank you card, he got married, we sent a wedding present, and at the end he said, you know, I really appreciate all the time you've ever spent with me, but I think you need to go find a mentor to help you to spend less time at work. We get a lot of kudos, okay? I have always been high achieving, getting a lot of recognition, but always being in pain that I just felt that I wasn't good enough. And it didn't matter what kind of performance reviews I got, it didn't matter how people were saying what I was doing was great, it was never enough. And every single day at work, I mean, really my whole career have been in pain that I'm not doing enough. I think the biggest things that have been helpful is awareness, awareness of how my workaholism and how I viewed work affected how I talked to other people, and how I, a lot of times would just jump right to bottom line behavior of, okay, I'm just here, I need to know about this thing, instead of like, hey, how are you doing, what's going on in your life, and actually wanting to know or at least expressing an interest in where other people were coming from. The biggest changes I've made had to do with working with a sponsor. She pointed out to me the four ways that I play God, because I was talking to her about conflicts at work and so and so is doing this wrong and they should be doing that and, you know, I had all kinds of opinions and the first one is that I think I'm all seeing, I see everything that's going on and the second is that I'm all knowing I'm interpreting it correctly, what's going on correctly. And the third is that I have the solution, the one and only solution and the fourth is that it's my job to implement that solution. And all of these things she says are completely false. So in hindsight, I look back and thought, wow, in the past I've been, at times, pretty horrible to people. I think of something I hear my wife say is that, you know, recognizing you have a problem is half of the battle. Unfortunately, there's a whole other half of the battle, but it's a big step up from not recognizing that you have a problem. Working on a perfectionism has been a huge thing. My sponsor ordered me to write something that was so bad that when I turned it in to my boss, he would come back to me and tell me to make corrections and changes and that then I would purport back to her that I had had a success, a recovery success, instead of being so perfect that I've preempted all possible criticism. And I did that and then he came back to me and said, well, this needs some work and could you change that and could you add this? And I discovered that that wasn't terrible. And in fact, it saved me a whole lot of time. I absolutely always in my work have had a calling, but I could have a calling and not be driven by fear. Yeah, I think that there are folks out there that have a calling but can still have an appropriate relationship with work that's not necessarily a workaholic relationship. I can remember listening to somebody who talked about alcoholism and not understanding somebody who could put down and leave half a drink on the table. And I said, okay, I understand that. And then I started realizing there are people that I work with that are very effective and work very hard and they could just put it down. I think it's a fear and to some extent a trying to fix the hole in you by, well, if I just did this one more thing. What distinguishes being a workaholic is being fear driven. People can work really hard and not be workaholics. The difference is the emptiness inside that you're trying to fill by work. Those are the stories of Christine and Jeff, two self-identified workaholics. So Melissa, what do you think? There's lots of talk about fear and trying to fix the hole in you, trying to fix that through work. In terms of what is going on in the minds of workaholics and this idea of being driven by fear is one of the critical components that I think distinguishes workaholicism from a related concept called work engagement. And someone that's an engaged worker is driven to work because they enjoy it, this intrinsic motivation. However, someone that is a workaholic, they are driven to work because of these negative emotions such as fear and anxiety and that inner compulsion driving their behavior that is a negative way of approaching work. I'm really curious when you talk about that maybe it's become normal in the United States or it's something to brag about how much we work. So what have you found in your research when it comes to workaholicism? Does that make us better at what we do? Does that really lead to better work? What are the outcomes that you found in relationship to workaholicism? Workaholicism was basically taking all of the prior research and statistically summarizing what did they find and overwhelmingly the results were that workaholicism was related to negative outcomes for the individual, for their families and for just their general well-being in work and outside of work. And funny enough, we didn't even find that it was related to being a better performer at work so it was not related to job performance which is what you would think if someone's spending all this time at work that they would be a better performer but we actually didn't find that in our study. Wow, so you didn't see any association at all with higher productivity or getting more stuff done? No, the relationship with job performance was non-significant so it was unrelated to job performance. The work outcomes are not good related to more job stress, lower job satisfaction, even higher rates of counterproductive work behavior which is certainly not good for the organization. So from the work that you've done and then looking at other work done around the world, it's pretty clear that workaholicism is pretty bad for people, it's bad for families, it's bad for relationships and it looks like it's even bad for business. So I guess the questions are, number one, what's driving it? Why do we do it? And number two, why do you think it's still so valued? Well, that we don't know. What we do know is that it tends to be related to personality traits such as being a perfectionist, high achievement-oriented personality traits. I also think it might be enhanced by the environment that the person is in. So they might seek out an organization that's acceptable for employees to put long hours in the job and be obsessed with their job all the time and through working in this environment, those behaviors are almost reinforced by the company culture, by the supervisor, by everyone around them and this can enhance the natural tendencies that someone might have. You know, what I'm curious about is how much of it then is individual personality, almost like a blame the worker, if you will, sort of like, well, you've got the problem, figure out how to fix it and how much of it is working in this larger environment where we do value overwork, or you do get kudos, as Christine said, for putting in those kinds of long hours. You know, is it the environment that might be enough to kind of push somebody into workaholism, whether you've got that personality or not? And I guess the other thing that I'm wondering about is, you know, fear and anxiety is so much of what drives it. You know, you look at what's happening, nobody knows what the future of work holds and are we all going to be contract workers and is there no security? So there's just this growing sense of kind of fear and anxiety about work in general out there. What I'm wondering is how much of it is individual and how much of it is us swimming in these kind of larger workaholic waters? Well, that's a very good question. I think it's a little bit of both. I think the company culture that someone works in is definitely going to this negative approach to work if that's what the company is all about. I remember in my early research in workaholism, I came across an organization that they came up with a slogan that if you don't come in on Sunday, don't bother coming in on Monday. Oh, my. Wow. This was the slogan for the organization. So what does this send in terms of a mess act idea that you should be devoted to your job in a way that is excluding all other aspects of your life? Forget about having a family on Sunday or a life outside of work. No, your life should be your work and that's what we're all about here as an organization. I think that's a very negative message to be sending to employees. But I think if you take it up a level and then you look at the approach to work here in the U.S., our Protestant work ethic and this devotion to work has been ingrained in all of us, and as you pointed out, the U.S. has one of the longest work weeks in the world compared to other countries and why is that? I think there can definitely be a healthier balance between work and life. You know, I did want to ask you about the research that you found where you looked at how workaholism, it has a different, men and women have different experiences with it. What did you find? I think is that workaholism might be the same across gender or even that men might tend to be workaholics more so than women. And my research has found the exact opposite, in fact. When you look at the relationship level, women tend to be workaholics more so than men, but furthermore, women tend to experience negative outcomes of workaholism to a greater degree than men. Yeah, and negative outcomes meaning with their health or stress. I say this as someone who's broken out in wicked stress eczema before because of some of those very same things, feeling anxiety and overworked at work and also at home. Why do you think that is? We've got so many women who are expected to be the primary caregivers at home, whether for children or for parents, and people have just expected them to tack on work on top of that without any changing of the work structure. We don't have a lot of family-friendly policies or we do, but then the cultures don't allow people to really use them or if you use them, then you're sort of punished for them. Why then would women be the ones who work more when they're still carrying a little unequal and heavier load at home, too? Well, those are all very because of our traditional gender role for women when they are devoting a lot of their time and energy to work. It's going against these traditional gender role expectations. I believe that this causes not only greater internal conflict for these women, but it also can create external stressors and they might be chastised by family and friends and other individuals in the community much more so than men because it's still less acceptable for them to be heavily invested in their work and this might be one reason why the research is showing that women are experiencing greater negative outcomes as a result of their work-allism than men. Wow, that is really fascinating. Certainly something that, you know, I just look even at the way that I work and the way my husband works, you know, he... I always thought maybe he's just more efficient than I am or maybe he's just more confident but I always seem to have work that hangs over, work that doesn't seem to be done but, you know, it's always been that way and I do wonder if, you know, I was raised in an era where if you were going to work and you're a woman you needed to work twice as hard, three times as hard. It was going to be tough and so you kind of went into the workplace with this kind of like head down, like, you know, you're just going to drill your way through this mountain. I remember in graduate school I went to a women's leadership seminar and there were all these women in very high-level positions within organizations but in that seminar I can't tell you the number of times that the word guilt came up in their speeches and it was guilt about the fact that they didn't feel that they were being a good enough mom in addition to being successful at work and I feel like women put these additional expectations on themselves. You know, it's like Christine saying she just didn't feel like she could do enough. Those feelings of a real sense of lack. And maybe working is one way that they can kind of try to fill that void and the void is, again, one of the components of workaholism that you feel like you need to fill it somehow but unfortunately, people never tend to get there. They tend to constantly feel that no matter how much they put in they always should be putting in more. All right, well, Melissa, thank you so much for talking with us today. It's just been great talking to you. Melissa Clark. She's a psychologist on the faculty of the University of Georgia in Athens. Much of her research has focused on workaholism in the American workplace. And thank you for joining me for our podcast on the art and science of living a full life. Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts and maybe even write us a short review. Those reviews help other people find the podcast and help us get the word out. For more resources on working healthier and more effectively, you can also visit us online at newamerica.org. Click on the link for Better Life Lab. Our project is a collaboration with Ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Our producer is David Schulman. From New America's Better Life Lab, I'm Bridget Schulte.