In my early “Entrepreneurs Workaholics” recovery, I turned back to my entrepreneur workaholic addiction as a way to cope with the feelings that came up. I found myself excusing my obsessive work behavior by saying that I was making up for lost time, but in fact I was simply transferring my unhealthy coping skills from one addiction to another. Then shortly after celebrating two years of sobriety, I suddenly lost my job in a startup I co-founded, and the feelings from my drug attention that I had yet to process rushed back in waves that almost closed over my head. Realizing I was drowning emotionally and in the next moment might seal my fate by picking up a substance, I returned to using the recovery tools I’d been given. Over time I had let work and my business become my new obsession. I would numb out using the socially acceptable addiction of workaholism and thereby set myself up to pick up a substance sooner rather than later. When I was hit by another big wave of disappointment or loss, which inevitably comes to all of us, I had to learn to swim. Since then I never miss recovery meetings, therapist appointments, or gym sessions under the guise of being too busy. Placing self-care at the front of my life has made my recovery stronger than ever.
We should face the fact that workaholism is a form of addiction, and like most addictions, the individual will see their mental and physical health begin to suffer, have weak boundaries, and difficulty maintaining relationships. Similar to the obsession associated with most addiction, the obsession with working long hours changes the personality of workaholics who can then lose their integrity, making it all-to-easy to commit small unethical acts paired with destructive numbing behaviors.
Besides keeping dangerously busy to outrun their unresolved feelings, trauma survivors also increasingly withdraw from intimate relationships and family ties until they are left with only work-related acquaintances and without any trusted and tested relationships to rely on when the road suddenly gets rocky.
Work addiction is most commonly characterized by the excessive hours that the individual works, but this is only one of a series of symptoms. Barbara Killinger PhD, a pioneer in the field of workaholism, defines a workaholic as “a work-obsessed individual who gradually becomes emotionally crippled and addicted to power and control in a compulsive drive to gain approval and public recognition of success. These driven men and women live a Gerbil-wheel, adrenalin-pumping existence rushing from plan A to B, narrowly-fixated on some ambitious goal or accomplishment. Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters. As the breakdown progresses, conscious and unconscious stress causes them to suffer panic attacks, claustrophobia, depression, and acute sleep disturbance.”
As an entrepreneur, establishing boundaries around your work can be difficult because our business begins to creep into our personal, financial, and emotional lives. We become a slave to our business. I can usually identify a workaholic when I ask a client, “What aspect of your business keeps you up at night”, and their reply is, “Where do I start?”
Practical approaches to handle workaholism:
- Disassociate your successes and failures of work from your personal life.
- Reserve at least 25% of your energy to bring home every night
- Put a fence around your personal time and if a true emergency does come up, handle it quickly and return to your personal time.
- Establish clearly defined boundaries with your work-life-recovery balance
- Practice self-care
- Learn to let go of control and delegate
- Realize that your family’s love is not conditioned on your success in business
- Take time to acknowledge and reward your successes
- Learn to say No when you’re already overworked and overstressed
- Limit your compulsion to perfection and embrace the concept that some things can be “just good enough”
- Apply your existing tools of recovery to your work addiction (group meetings, therapy, meditation & prayer)
