Workaholism researcher and psychologist Malissa Clark and I are laughing at the irony of the work it’s taken to get us to this interview. The assignment came at short notice – I’ve spent a chunk of the weekend tracking down publicists, reading Clark’s book and, in a multi-email exchange with the author, organising our Zoom call across the world’s time zones. It is my morning, her evening.
“I felt like such a hypocrite,” she says, reflecting on our weekend of asynchronous communications. The irony had struck me, too, although not until I’d fired off several emails to get the process started.
It’s a minor example of what Clark explores in her book, Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture is Bad for Business – and How to Fix It. In it, and in her research work at the University of Georgia, where she is associate head of the psychology department and director of the Healthy Work Lab, Clark examines how being constantly connected to work – physically, electronically and psychologically – has become the norm for so many people, and how it affects us.
Clark is no stranger to workaholism. She describes taking just a week off after the birth of her daughter. Before the birth, she was remote-working in a coffee shop right up until she was forced to head to the hospital, having timed her contractions as she sat typing. As the contractions became more and more painful, she recalls, “it didn’t even cross my mind to email my professor and ask: ‘Can I have an extension on this exam?’”
Clark is now keen to bust a number of myths that have grown up around the stereotypical idea of the workaholic. Most of us, she says – whether workers or leaders – have an erroneous sense of what workaholism is. Often, we think it’s directly correlated with how much we work. And we tend to think that’s a good thing.
“We tend to use the hours worked as a proxy for performance,” she says. “There’s this performative workaholism that is so prevalent in a lot of organisations.”
It can come to be perceived as even more important than actual objective measures like output or sales, she says.
“Are you the first one in and the last one to leave? Does your boss see that? Does your boss reward that? It’s rewarded oftentimes in organisations. So this is why people tend to do it.”
But workaholism is about more than just the number of hours worked, Clark stresses. Hours worked are not, in fact, a strong predictor of workaholism, though they may be a sign. It also involves “that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you can’t rest, that you ought to be working all the time”.
Workaholism can mean feeling guilty and anxious when you are not working, and even if you are not physically doing work, “you are thinking about that email you should send, mulling over that upcoming work project, or ruminating about something that happened at work that day. It’s living with the fear of losing something – status, money, the job itself – if you’re not working.”
Double burden
The idea of the “ideal worker” – someone devoted to work above all else – is another trap those with workaholic tendencies can easily fall into. This can hit women with dependent children, says Clark, because not only are they striving to be the ideal worker, they’re also trying to live up to expectations around what it means to be a good mother.
“My theory is that women are struggling with their workaholic tendencies and feeling like they’ve got to be working all the time … [that] the ideal worker is someone who prioritises work over family. And they’re also struggling with societal expectations of the ideal parent.”
The expectation is that a woman had better work hard to make it “worth it” to leave her kids. Clark recalls a women’s leadership conference she attended while at graduate school. “There were three speakers, and every single one of them talked about feeling guilty as a mom. Every single one of them. I guarantee you, if you went to a leadership conference and there were three male speakers, they would not mention that.”
Clark’s research has found that, perhaps as a result of that extra pressure, women suffer worse health effects from workaholism than men do, though workaholism takes a health toll on everyone, she says.
“Initially the research was mostly self-reported: negative mental health; greater stress; greater burnout; physical symptoms.”
Now, there’s objective data. In measuring cardiovascular health, blood pressure, sleep quality and other markers, Clark says studies are showing consistently that workaholics have higher cardiovascular risk, worse sleep quality and are much more likely than the average worker to experience severe burnout, which involves overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and feeling a lack of accomplishment. Clark has found that workaholics are particularly likely to experience the exhaustion component.
“There’s even some studies showing links with autoimmune disorders, which makes sense because if you think about it, workaholics are in ‘fight or flight’ mode all the time, with increased cortisol and constant deregulation of their sympathetic nervous system.”
Clark interviewed dozens of workaholics for her book and reports that every one of them faced a health issue that was directly or indirectly tied to their overwork. For some, even a heart attack didn’t slow them down; it took a second one to do that.
“It was like something external had to be the straw that broke the camel’s back; it wasn’t just inner reflection.” Often, a health problem serious enough to prevent them working would force them to “self-reflect and figure out life. Or their spouse was like, ‘I’m going to divorce you, so do something about it.’”
Making changes
Solutions to this problem are often multifaceted and involve systemic and cultural change. This isn’t likely to come easily, especially in cultures such as the United States, where there’s little in the way of federally mandated holidays, let alone parental and sick leave. But organisational changes can make a difference.
Clark encourages leaders of teams to set realistic expectations and boundaries around communication. For instance: “Can we all agree that after hours and on the weekends we’re not going to communicate? Let’s stop with the texting. And do we really need to be emailing back and forth?
“Supervisors can draw those boundaries and literally not respond to emails, to signal, ‘Hey, I meant it when I said we’re not going to be dealing with this over the weekend.’”
Establishing what is truly urgent and what is not urgent can be game-changing, too.
Clark says change is possible in any working culture, “even in the most demanding companies, like Boston Consulting Group. They had an experimental trial of one planned night off a week. And that’s a really hard-driving culture – yet you can still have some change, some pockets of more balance.”
If this is all feeling uncomfortably familiar, at an individual level, Clark recommends paying attention to your habits and patterns. Many of us fall into the trap of ‘working lite’, she says: doing work-related things while on the surface telling ourselves we’re not.
“I didn’t realise until I was doing research for the book that I was working lite: I’d have my computer on my lap in the evening while watching TV. I’d just be doing emails, but I realised, ‘Whoa, I really am just continuing to work.’”
Changes to working patterns that were accelerated by the Covid pandemic and increasing use of technology – things that were supposed to make our working lives better – can in reality mean we are “tethered” to work far more than ever. So, finding ways to untether is useful.
“I have found that not taking my laptop on vacation was, like, life-changing for me”, Clark says.
Another thing that’s worked for her: having “mastery” experiences outside work – things that are challenging but not work-related. It could be something like learning a language or an instrument. For Clark, it’s researching and planning her next holiday.
Focusing on something else helps you to disconnect mentally from work, she says. “And that targets one of the key aspects of workaholism, which is thinking about work all the time.
“There’s a lot of research showing psychological detachment is really effective for rest and recovery, so you can go back to work [and] engage the next day.”
Clark says she’s “in recovery” from workaholism – something that takes practice every day. Having reframed her thinking around work and home life, she says she was able to spend more time with her son when he was born, though she still taught classes remotely.
“I do regret not prioritising that [time with my daughter].
“I think as you get older, you do reflect a lot more on what is really important.”