Work Addiction Wears a Suit

I think work is as addictive a behavior as drugs, alcohol, and gambling. And I think the reason it does more cumulative damage to successful men than any of those is that work addiction is justified. It is celebrated. Nobody stages an intervention for the man who works 70 hours a week. They give him an award.

The razor I use is simple. I do not say "addicted," because somebody will hear that and say, "I'm not addicted, I'm just successful." Fine. Then answer this: are you miserable? Because the man working 70-hour weeks who is energized, present with his family, sleeping well, and genuinely enjoying the work is not the man I am describing. The man I am describing is grinding, exhausted, eating dinner at 10 p.m. when the family is already asleep, and telling himself this is what success requires.

That is the man who has a Body problem wearing a Business suit. Or a Being problem wearing a Business suit. Or both.

The mechanism is specific. Work fills every available hour because work provides immediate feedback: revenue, deals closed, problems solved, the dopamine of accomplishment. The gym does not provide that feedback on a daily basis. The marriage does not provide that feedback on a daily basis. The internal question of "what am I doing this for" definitely does not provide that feedback. So the man fills his time with the thing that rewards him fastest, and the things that reward him deepest get starved.

The all-nighter analogy is one I use often. After 11 o'clock at night, you are not learning anything. You are just getting tired. You might as well take your C and go to bed. You learned it weeks ago or you do not know it. Same thing with working too much. After a certain number of hours, you are not producing more value. You are just getting tired. And the tiredness accumulates in the body, in the relationships, and in the quality of the decisions you make the next day.

The bridge here is between the Being leg and the Business leg. The man who cannot stop working usually has a Being problem he has not addressed: an empty sense of purpose outside the company, a marriage that needs attention he is not giving it, a fear of what he would find if he stopped. The work is not the problem. The work is the hiding place.

The coaching move is not to tell the man to work less. It is to ask what he is hiding from. Once the Being leg has something real in it, once the man has relationships that matter, experiences that feed him, a sense of purpose beyond the next quarter, the work finds its proper size on its own. Not because he became lazy. Because he found something worth protecting his energy for.

What would you do with the hours if you stopped hiding in work?

~b