THE SHRINKING UNIVERSE
Married to the job
VIJAY NAGASWAMI
|
Workaholism, in spite of its sense of security and comfort, is an addiction and the cure depends on hard choices…
|
PHOTO: THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Designer spaces: The evolving aesthetics of the workplace.
One of the major issues that HR professionals are required to deal with in recent times is what is referred to as “Work-Life balance”. The term itself seems to indicate that “work” is something other than “life”. H
owever, work has come to occupy a central part of our lives today. All our emotional energies are directed towards our work where we are obsessed with excellence; whatever dregs we can spare, we scatter tiredly around all our personal relationships. Work dominates our thinking, whether we are in the office or at home. While many of us are able to somehow get our acts together and find the balance between work and the rest of our lives, some of us end up becoming workaholics who cannot function comfortably outside of the work environment. Although this is an affliction that tends to affect men more than women, the latter are not spared either. I have known several women who feel more comfortable at office than at home, in a meeting than at a party, with co-workers than with family and with Blackberries than TV remotes.
Attractive ambience
The physical environment in today’s offices, particularly some of the more recent and up-market ones, has become increasingly attractive to their employees. A lot of attention is paid to beautifying the physical space that one works in. Office cafeterias aren’t the grubby places they used to be. You might even have a gymnasium and a swimming pool for you to work out in after you’ve been worked up by office frustrations. And overall, the work culture itself tends to breed over-work: contemporary work culture demands a punishing 70-plus hours a week schedule. And if you’re living in a metropolis, the travails of commuting ensure even less time for family and other pursuits.
It would be unfair to pin the rap for workaholism on the stresses and strains of modern lifestyles and cultural norms. We do need to remember that not all those affected by the same stress factors turn to work as a remedy. And certainly there are better ways to deal with stress and even bereavement, than by immersing oneself in one’s work. Often, we tend to “escape” into work. Unable to find the ways and means to handle the emotional vagaries involved in family and social life, many people may progressively spend more time at the workplace, where they experience a greater sense of security and comfort because the expectations of them at work are better defined. Performance appraisals in other relationships and life domains are far less acceptable because the targets are not clearly spelt out. Nobody exemplifies the “work is worship” maxim as much as the workaholic. To the rest of us, work is a means to a larger end, but to the workaholic, it is an end in itself. The “it runs in my family” line is often used by workaholics. But, believe me, this is an excuse, for, workaholism, unlike alcoholism, has no known genetic basis. To a certain extent, workaholism can be a learned behaviour. All of us are looking around for that buzz of adrenaline, that rush of blood that sets our pulses racing. And this can happen not just from bungee-jumping or falling in love, but also from a job well done. Some people keep looking for this buzz through the achievement of excellence at work and therefore programme their lives, habits, interests and behaviour around the pursuit of this buzz which can be heady indeed.
A social addiction
Workaholism can be considered an addiction. Not, perhaps, identical to alcoholism or other drug addictions, where a physiological dependence takes place, but a social addiction nevertheless. And the fact that there are support groups for workaholics in different parts of the world, including the Workaholics International Network, testifies to the fact that workaholism is more than just mere a tendency to work too hard and does require more intervention than just telling the sufferer to “get your act together”.
In the final analysis, workaholism is a choice made by an individual. Like any other addiction, it can be prevented by making an appropriate choice at an appropriate time in one’s life. Curing it requires the individual to appreciate that even inappropriate choices can certainly be reversed. The road to recovery for the workaholic requires a lot of support and belief from loved ones, but it is not as full of potholes as one may imagine. Of course, the starting point for recovery is to get out of the denial mode and stop offering excuses like “I work this hard only for the family”. If you find that weekends and vacations are interminable and you can’t wait to get back to work, that you have little or no interest in anything other than work, or that you forget your spouse’s birthday but never your boss’ wedding anniversary, you need help, my friend. While you don’t have to actually file for divorce from your employer, you might want to consider de-prioritising work and getting yourself a life.
The writer is a psychiatrist and author of The 24x7 Marriage. He can be contacted at: vijay.nagaswami@gmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
