- Being tied to your job not only interrupts sleep, diet and exercise
- Workaholics are more prone to psychiatric disorders, experts warn
- Study reveals they score higher for ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression
Lizzie Parry For Dailymail.com
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We all know them, those people who just cannot bear to leave work at the office.
Checking emails at all hours of the day, refusing to switch off at weekends or while on holiday and seemingly chained to their desks.
Being a workaholic in itself can impact on a person’s sleep patterns, what they eat and how much exercise they get.
But, now a new study has warned, working all the hours in a day can impact on a person’s mental health.
Being a workaholic in itself can impact on a person’s sleep patterns, what they eat and how much exercise they get. But working all the hours in a day can impact on a person’s mental health, experts have warned
Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway found workaholics are more likely to suffer ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression.
Dr Cecilie Schou Andreassen, who is also a visiting scholar at UCLA, said: ‘Workaholics scored higher on all the psychiatric symptoms than non-workaholics.’
After analyzing 16,426 workers, Dr Schou Andreassen’s team found:
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- 32.7 per cent of workaholics met ADHD criteria, compared with 12.7 per cent of non-workaholics
- 25.6 per cent met the OCD criteria, compared with 8.7 per cent of non-workaholics
- 33.8 per cent met anxiety criteria, compared to 11.9 per cent of non-workaholics
- 8.9 per cent met depression criteria, compared with 2.6 per cent of non-workaholics
Dr Schou Andreassen said: ‘Thus, taking work to the extreme may be a sign of deeper psychological or emotional issues.
‘Whether this reflects overlapping genetic vulnerabilities, disorders leading to workaholism or, conversely, workaholism causing such disorders, remain uncertain.’
The pioneering study, published in the open-access journal PLOS One, is co-authored by researchers from Nottingham Trent University and Yale University.
According to Dr Schou Andreassen, the findings clearly highlight the importance of further investigating neurobiological deviations related to workaholic behaviour.
She said: ‘In wait for more research, physicians should not take for granted that a seemingly successful workaholic does not have ADHD-related or other clinical features.
‘Their considerations affect both the identification and treatment of these disorders.’
In order to determine who was deemed a workaholic, Dr Schou Andreassen and her team used a seven-point criteria.
The points were used to draw a line between addictive and non-addictive behaviour.
Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway found workaholics are more likely to suffer ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression
Experiences over the past year were rated from one (never) to five (always):
- You think of how you can free up more time to work
- You spend much more time working than initially intended
- You work in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness or depression
- You have been told by others to cut down on work without listening to them
- You become stressed if you are prohibited from working
- You deprioritize hobbies, leisure activities, and/or exercise because of your work
- You work so much that it has negatively influenced your health
Scoring four (often) or five (always) on four or more criteria identified a workaholic, researchers said.
Accordingly, the Bergen Work Addiction Scale operationalizes workaholism by the same symptoms as traditional addictions: salience, mood modification, conflict, tolerance, withdrawal, relapse and problems.
In line with previous research, 7.8 per cent of the current sample classified as workaholics, which is close to an estimate (8.3 per cent) found in a – and, to date, only – nationally representative study conducted by Dr Schou Andreassen and colleagues in 2014.
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