All work and no play...

Over the last few years, the amount of time we spend working has consistently been in the headlines. Multiple trials showing the overall positive effects of a four-day work week, including this one from the University of Cambridge, have been published, demonstrating significant drops in anxiety and fatigue, with an increase in productivity. Elsewhere, people have begun to rebel against pressures to overwork, and in 2016, French workers got the "right to disconnect" from their emails after 6pm in an attempt to encourage more healthy working practices. 

Many places continue to foster unhealthy work cultures, however. Karoshi, the Japanese term for working oneself to death, remains a pressing issue in Japan, and here in the UK 53% of employees (as of March 2023) feel overworked, with a quarter reportedly overworking by more than 10 hours per week.

Of course, many of us don't want to be working this hard – low wages after years of stagnation has left those in the UK £11,000 worse off (as of March 2023), necessitating more hours on the clock. Many employers are becoming increasingly demanding to meet their tighter bottom line, with others harnessing exploitative work practices, and workers often left with no choice but to meet harmful demands in order to stay in employment.      

Yet some overwork not out of necessity, but compulsivity, continuing even when it poses a detriment to mental and physical health. Being a so-called 'workaholic' isn't about working long hours because of external pressures, but a sense that one has no control over how long they work. This leads to extreme behaviour, such as staying extremely late, working through the night, or obsessively thinking about work. Some argue that it constitutes an addiction, much the same as gambling or substance use.  

Writing in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, a team of Italian researchers explore how these individuals actually feel at work. They find that the mood of workaholics is worse than those not engaging in workaholic behaviours – even when at work. Data was collected from another, larger study looking at workplace stress, with 139 participants who were full-time workers engaged in office-based work in Italy. Most were engineers, business professionals, and clerks. 

After completing measures on 'workaholism', in which they indicated how much they agreed with statements related to compulsive work ("I feel that there's something inside me that drives me to work hard") and excessive work ("I stay busy and keep many irons in the fire"), the participants downloaded an app, which sent them seven questionnaires a day over three non-consecutive work days. In each instance, participants reported how positive or negative they felt, before indicating whether or not they had had "too much to do" in the previous ten minutes. 

Analyses revealed that those with higher levels of workaholic traits experienced, on average, lower mood during their working day than those with lower workaholic tendencies. This echoes literature indicating that workaholism can cause a decrease in mood outside of work, suggesting that workaholism has an impact on mood inside the office, too. The team notes that results from this study are in line with other theories of addiction which find poor mood "even when the individual is immersed in the addiction experience." 

However, and contrary to predictions from the team, reductions in mood were less marked across the working day for those with higher workaholic tendencies. The team believes that this suggests workaholics may be more resistant to daily stresses at work, as well as things like increased workload or the accumulation of frustrations across a day. 

Finally, workaholic tendencies had a stronger impact on women workers than on men. Though factors contributing towards this weren't directly probed by this investigation, the team suggests this may be because women are also under pressure to perform duties in the home, making compulsive working behaviours even more draining as they add to physical, mental, and emotional strain. Some research has found that workaholic new mothers spend no less time parenting even when working time increases, making gender a pressing issue here. 

Future research, perhaps with a greater number and greater diversity of participants, could explore which policies help with workaholism. This is likely to be a combination of external factors – employers stressing that overwork is frowned upon, and keeping a close eye on working habits, for example – and internal factors, such as counselling or therapy to get to the root of workaholic tendencies. 

In a press release, co-author Cristian Balducci gives some advice to organisations on how to deal with workaholism. "Organisations must send clear signals to workers on this issue and avoid encouraging a climate where working outside working hours and at weekends is considered the norm," he says. "On the contrary, it is necessary to foster an environment that discourages excessive and dysfunctional investment in work, promoting disconnection policies, specific training activities and counselling interventions." 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000365