There's a word we don't use about ourselves. We use it about other people. We use it about our parents, our exes, the bloke down the road who drinks too much. We sometimes use it about a person we love, with a quiet sadness, because we know the shape of what it has cost them.
The word is "addict."
We don't use it about ourselves when we mean work.
We say "driven." We say "dedicated." We say "I love what I do." We say "I'm a hard worker." We post photos of our laptops at midnight with a smug little caption about hustle. We brag about our weekends.
I've done all of it. So have you, most likely. So has nearly everyone I've ever worked with at a senior level.
And it took me a long time to admit what was going on.
The socially-accepted addiction
Here is what the research says, and it's worth sitting with for a moment.
A 2023 meta-analysis pulled together 53 studies and 71,625 people across 23 countries. The pooled prevalence of workaholism came out at 14.1% after correcting for publication bias. Roughly one in seven working adults shows signs of compulsive overwork severe enough to register on a clinical scale.
In a nationally representative study of Norwegian employees, 8.3% met the threshold to be classified as addicted to work. Not "busy." Not "stretched." Addicted. To the point where their relationships, health, and judgment were measurably suffering.
Now, you might be thinking, "Right, well, Norway is Norway, and 14% sounds high to me." Fair. But notice your reaction. None of us would shrug off a similar number if it referred to a substance.
Picture the headlines. One in seven working adults is dependent on alcohol. Front page. Government inquiry. Public health campaign. Documentaries.
One in seven working adults is dependent on work? Yeah, those are the people getting promoted.
The seven signs nobody wants to look at
The Bergen Work Addiction Scale was built by Cecilie Schou Andreassen and her team at the University of Bergen. They mapped the seven core elements of any addiction onto work specifically. Read these slowly.
- Salience. You think about how to free up more time to work. Work occupies a disproportionate share of your headspace.
- Mood modification. You use work to lift your mood or numb something.
- Tolerance. You spend more time working than you initially intended, because the old dose stopped doing it.
- Withdrawal. You feel stressed, anxious, or low when you're prevented from working.
- Conflict. Work has damaged your health, relationships, or other priorities.
- Relapse. You've tried to cut back and failed.
- Problems. Important people in your life have told you, point blank, you work too much, and you've waved them off.
Schou Andreassen's research suggests one threshold. Answer "often" or "always" to at least four of those, and you're already in the territory.
I read the list for the first time and felt a bit sick. Salience, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, problems. Five out of seven, easily. I would have told you I was dedicated.
What it cost
I'm not going to do the noble martyr routine here. Plenty of people have written it. The "I missed my daughter's school play and now I am wiser" essay is a whole genre, and it usually ends with the writer still working too much.
But the costs are real, and they are not theoretical.
The research links workaholism to anxiety, depression, burnout, cardiovascular disease, sleeping problems, work-family conflicts, lower job satisfaction (yes, you read it correctly, the people who work hardest tend to enjoy it least), and an increased risk of accidents at work. The body keeps the score. The body always keeps the score.
In my own case, the costs showed up as a slow erosion. Sleep went first. Patience went next. Then the small kindnesses... the quick text to a friend, the willingness to be interrupted, the calm response when something went wrong at home. All of it got eaten by the same animal. The animal was hungry, and I kept feeding it, because feeding it felt like winning.
Why HR will not fix this with fruit
Kelly Swingler has been talking about this for years. She's a former HR Director who burned out twice before she rebuilt her career around burnout prevention. She has coached over 700 leaders through it. She calls work addiction what it is, without flinching.
Her line on this is one I keep coming back to. Free fruit, yoga at lunch, and an Employee Assistance Programme do not fix work addiction. They cover it. They make the company look like it cares while leaving every structural cause untouched.
Think about how most organisations are built.
The bonus structure rewards overdelivery. The promotion path rewards visibility, which usually means hours. The hero of the quarter is the person who saved the launch by sleeping under their desk. The annual award goes to the team who worked through Christmas. The CEO posts on LinkedIn at 6am on a Sunday, and we all clap.
Then HR sends out a wellbeing survey and wonders why people are tired.
I'm not blaming HR for this. Most HR professionals I know are good people in an impossible job, trying to make a humane experience inside a system designed to reward the opposite. But the framing is wrong. You don't solve an addiction by putting blueberries in the kitchen. You solve it by changing what gets rewarded.
Handing it back
Here's the bit I find hardest to write, because I'm still in it.
If work is your addiction, then "handing it back" is the same kind of work as handing back any other dependence. It is not a one-week holiday. It is not a digital detox weekend in the Cotswolds. It is not a Sunday-night promise to leave the laptop closed which dies by Monday lunchtime.
It is a slow, structural change to how you live.
For me, a few things have helped. None are revolutionary. All are harder than they sound.
Name it. Out loud, to someone who matters. Not "I'm a bit of a workaholic, ha ha" with a self-deprecating shrug. Try this version instead: "I use work the way other people use alcohol, and I am not currently winning the argument." It changes the conversation. It also changes how you feel about the next late night.
Watch for the dopamine, not the deadline. The deadline is usually fake. The dopamine of clearing the inbox is real. When I notice myself craving the hit (not the outcome, the hit) I try to stop and ask what I am trying to feel. Productive? Useful? Safe? In control? Loved? Most of the time it's the last one, dressed up as the others.
Build a finish line. Not a goal. A finish line. A specific time on a specific day when the screen closes and another thing begins. Without the other thing, the addiction wins, because nothing else is competing for your attention.
Tell your team you're doing it. The cruellest part of work addiction is the way it spreads. The harder I worked, the more I implicitly told my team they should too. When I started enforcing my own boundary out loud, they started enforcing theirs. The work didn't suffer. It got better, because the people doing it were better rested.
Expect to relapse. I do, weekly. I'm not a recovered workaholic. I'm a person who is paying attention. It's the whole trick. Nothing more.
The question I keep asking
If you'd told me, ten years ago, about one in seven working adults being functionally addicted to their job, I would have nodded sagely and assumed you meant the people in the next office.
It is always the people in the next office. Until you check your own desk at 11pm and realise you're still there because being there feels better than being anywhere else.
So here's the question I'll leave you with. Not a call to action. A question.
If you handed back your addiction to work, tonight, what would you have to face?
Because the thing... whatever it is, the awkward marriage, the silent house, the grief you haven't sat with, the identity you don't know how to rebuild, the boredom you're afraid of... the thing is what work has been protecting you from.
The work has been the medicine.
The next question is whether you still need it.