Are You Addicted To Work?

Behavioural addiction can happen to anyone. While it’s great to love what you do, like anything else, love it, but keep it in balance with the rest of your life.

The nature of addiction revolves around how the brain perceives pleasure. The word addiction comes from the Latin meaning “enslaved by” and while the word addict tends to conjure up the image of someone who is addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling, addictive behaviour develops from how the brain registers pleasure.

And let’s face it; if a particular behaviour makes us feel good, that extra dose of dopamine experienced through the brain’s reward circuitry drives us to seek to experience all over again.

So we start to crave that chocolate, cigarette or playing another session of World of Warcraft. From a brainy perspective the development of addiction from simple pleasure is thought to result from the interaction of dopamine with another neurotransmitter glutamate, that leads to the development of compulsion, seeking out that reward, even when we know deep down that what we’re doing isn’t healthy.

While we’ve had the term “workaholic”, (meaning being compulsively addicted to working excessively hard and long hours) for a while, many more of us are at risk of work addiction because of the change in the how we work coupled with our increasing integration with technology, which is specifically designed to grab our attention and is potentially addictive in its own right.

Look around any public space, café, train or pavement and it appears everyone is deeply engrossed with their smart phone. While going down in a lift to exit a hotel last week, I noticed how every additional passenger was either already engaged on their phone as they entered the lift, or quickly started scrolling down their screen during that short passage of time to the ground floor

According to Adam Alter, author of “Irresistible” behavioural addiction comprises six ingredients:

1. Compelling goals just out of reach. 

The element of “so close, I’ll just keep going for a little bit longer to try and reach my goal”.

2. Irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback. 

The anticipation and pure pleasure of positive reward stoking our internal motivation.

3. A sense of incremental progress and improvement. 

This is working well, so let’s keep going!

4. A gradual increase in the level of challenge of tasks over time. 

I’m learning so much and getting far better at this.

5. Unresolved tensions that require resolution. 

I need to keep working on this to get rid of these glitches getting in the way of my success.

6. Strong social connections. 

It feels so great having the support of others.

All of these are highly motivating, to make us want to strive harder to reach our goals, which is fine. What’s not so fine is when the motivation becomes so compelling that we lose sight of how much is enough, and when to stop.

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