To get an accurate view of yourself and figure out if you might be a workaholic, it’s absolutely essential that you ask yourself specific questions in regard to your attitude towards specific scenarios. The answers that you provide can help you to truly examine the relationship that you have with your work and help you to see how you honestly feel. To accomplish this, you can try asking yourself the following questions.

1- Do you ever try to free up time to complete extra jobs at work?

If this is the case, then it’s entirely possible that you’re simply trying to make things more efficient. Having more time at work can be a great thing, especially if you work in a field where evaluations of completed tasks is a major part of getting the job completed. This can help you to identify where strengths and weaknesses lie, but it could also just be another way for a person to retreat into their work as some sort of escape.

2-Do you find yourself working for longer hours than you told yourself or a loved one?

Sometimes you make bad judgement calls on the amount of time that you planned to be at a specific task, but maybe you’ve just gotten accustomed to focusing on lots of unimportant details about your job. If you’re getting caught up and lost in time during tasks, it could be a sign of obsessive behavior.

Generally, people who obsess over specific and unimportant details are possibly using these obsessions to avoid or circumvent dealing with unpleasant components of their life. The need to escape dealing with these types of personal issues is completely normal, but at a certain point it becomes obvious that these things should be confronted.

3- Do you ever work to avoid confronting feelings of depression, anxiety, or guilt?

Negative emotions are powerful catalysts, and if you’ve been following a pattern of burying yourself in your work to avoid emotions then there’s definitely serious issues that need to be addressed. People who have a guilty conscience will often retreat into their work.

This can be particularly seen in cases where work can cause a person to feel isolated. A person who feels that they have no other alternatives will undoubtedly find way to fill their free time with more work. Later, in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate stress it’s possible that they will find the time to engage in vices that cause them guilt, only to be trapped in a cyclical relationship to their own shortcomings.

4- Have you begun to put work above relationships, person enrichment activities, and other things that contribute to your general happiness?

When you lose interest in the things that you love, it can show that you’ve become unhappy in some way. It’s difficult to remain happy when you don’t engage the things that make you happy. If you discover that you continually find reasons to avoid or cancel chances to engage in these types positive interactions, then it could be a sign that you’ve begun to go down that path towards becoming a workaholic, but it could also just be a sign of typical depression.

5- Do you work so much that it has put your physical health in danger?

Over the last few hundred years, a large percentage of the population in developed nations have gone from tending the field to the office. Though this way of life has its perks, the lack of physical activity puts a large section of people in danger of being completely sedentary.

A sedentary lifestyle causes the heart to become weakened and can lead to an alarming number of complications. Exercise is an important part of our biological life cycles, and they should take place at least 3 – 4 times a month to be sure that you can maintain a good quality of life.

Being a workaholic can have both a positive and negative side. The positive side is that if you have a project, by working hard you will get very good results. The negative side is that you are going to alienate yourself from the people who love you. Working hard to not confront a problem or a person, are most of the time signs of depression. I assure you that life is about balance. Taking refuge in work to avoid something is not the solution. If you see any of these signs, seek help as soon as possible!

See you soon,

Ludmilla!