Are you a workaholic? Detach and be more productive

Do you find yourself compulsively trying to achieve and be productive? You hardly finished one task before your mind is on to the next one. You work hard to clear things off your to-do list, and then immediately fill it up again. Approaching work in this manner — no matter how “productive” it might feel — is actually working against you.

Work addiction, unlike addictions involving alcohol or other substances, is rewarded by our culture with promotions, bonuses, praise, and awards — and therefore considered a good thing. However, what we don’t realise is that workaholism has a long-term negative effect, not only on our well-being, but also, ironically, on our productivity.

Few of us actually consider the cost of workaholism. Research shows that workaholism:

>Harms your physical and emotional health and well-being

>Lead to 120,000 deaths per year >Doubles your risk of diagnosable depression and anxiety

>Lowers your productivity and decreases your performance

>Increases sleep problems which further reduce productivity and performance

>Reduces attention span Workaholism actually leads to greater costs to organisations too due to stressrelated accidents, absenteeism, employee turnover, diminished productivity, medical costs and workers’ compensation.

Why have we gotten caught up in such a frantic approach to productivity? People think that success requires extreme sacrifices in the present — foregoing personal happiness, enduring negative feelings and tremendous stress because the eventual payoff is worth it.

Thanks to smartphones and e-mail (70 per cent of people sleep with their phones next to their bed) boundaries between work and our personal lives are more blurry than ever. Many people take work home and on holidays with them. As a consequence, the stress of the day blends into evenings and vacations and eats up recovery time. Sabine Sonnentag, professor at the University of Mannheim in Germany, has found that people who do not know how to detach from work experience increased exhaustion over the course of one year and are less resilient in the face of stressful work conditions.

Sonnentag has found that psychological distance from work is the fastest path to recovery and leads — surprisingly perhaps — to increased productivity. It’s not just a lack of work-life balance that is burning us out, however. We play an active role in exhausting ourselves by keeping our adrenaline levels high. In the name of productivity, we have learned how to activate our stress response daily — often fueled by copious amounts of coffee. Although the “fight or flight” stress response is meant for rare and lifethreatening occasions, we choose to activate it voluntarily. In fact, most people depend on high adrenaline to meet the demands of the day.

What we don’t realise, however, is that we are burning our body and mind out in the process. Is it surprising that, when we come home at night, we’re still buzzing from the day and can’t relax and go to sleep? Overstimulated and unable to calm down, we turn to sleeping pills or anti-anxiety medication for balance. The constant backand-forth between stimulant-induced anxiety and depressant-induced drowsiness wreaks havoc on our already exhausted nervous system.

Research shows that consciously breathing can help significantly reduce our stress and anxiety levels, sometimes in minutes. Breathing sounds simplistic, but it’s arguably the single most important action of our life. It is also the most neglected one, because it mostly happens on its own and below the level of our awareness. What makes breathing so unique is that it can happen automatically (like digestion and heartbeat), or it can be controlled through will. It is the one autonomic function you have a say over. Research suggests that taking deep breaths into your abdomen and lengthening your exhales so they are longer than your inhales helps your nervous system relax.

There is little evidence that leading an adrenaline-fueled life makes you more productive. However, there is plenty of evidence to show that a chronically stressful lifestyle damages your physical health and your cognitive faculties. And that consciously taking deep slow breaths reduces your anxiety, heart rate and blood pressure. —Psychology Today

Psychological distance from work is the fastest path to recovery and leads to increased productivity