Workaholism Explained: How It Differs From Working Hard

The man who coined the word workaholism was describing himself. The American minister and psychologist Wayne Oates used it in 1968 for his own addiction to work, and researchers today still put the compulsion, not the hours, at the center: they define workaholism as working excessively and compulsively, doing far more than the job asks while feeling driven to keep going and uneasy whenever you stop.¹ Malissa Clark and colleagues’ 2016 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary judged that workaholism is best understood as an addiction to work, and linked it to more burnout, job stress and work-life conflict and to poorer physical and mental health.²

That makes the useful question not how long you work but what happens when the work stops. After your next heavy stretch, watch the first free evening or weekend. If you rest and come back ready, the hours were hard work. If the time off brings guilt, or you find it hard to relax away from work, you are noticing two of the feelings researchers ask about when they measure the compulsive side.¹ Workaholism upsets the fit between a job and everything else from the inside.

Two parts, both required: heavy work and a drive you can’t switch off

Workaholism, as Wilmar Schaufeli, Akihito Shimazu and Toon Taris defined it in 2009, has two parts that must occur together: working excessively hard, which is the behavior, and working compulsively, an obsessive inner drive that makes work hard to put down. Long hours on their own do not qualify.¹

Oates had already put the drive first: in his 1971 book Confessions of a Workaholic he described workaholism as a compulsion or uncontrollable need to work without stopping. Schaufeli’s team kept that core and split it in two for a practical reason. People put in long hours for plenty of reasons unrelated to addiction, such as money worries, pressure from a supervisor, the culture of a workplace or a run at promotion. Hours show the behavior but not the motive, and the motive surfaces when work stops, which is why the short questionnaire the team built, the Dutch Workaholism Scale, asks whether people feel guilty when they take time off and whether they find it hard to relax when not working.¹

Picture two colleagues who both work every evening for three weeks to hit a grant deadline. Once the application is in, one takes a long weekend and sleeps well. The other is restless by Saturday afternoon, clears the inbox “to get ahead” and starts hunting for the next project. Their timesheets for those weeks match. Only the second pattern fits the compulsive half of the definition.

The split also tracks who struggles. When Schaufeli’s team sorted Dutch and Japanese employees into four groups by their scores on the two parts, those high on both reported high exhaustion more often than hard workers, compulsive workers or relaxed workers, in both countries. The samples were large but gathered through workplace surveys and online recruitment rather than drawn at random, and each person answered once, so the finding is an association: it cannot say whether the drive wears people down or tired people feel more driven.¹

Across: working excessively. Up: working compulsively. Each is split at the middle score.

1. Relaxed workers low on both parts: lighter work and no strong inner drive
2. Hard workers heavy work without the compulsive drive
3. Compulsive workers the inner drive, such as guilt about rest, without the heaviest work
4. Workaholics both at once; in Dutch and Japanese samples this group reported high exhaustion more often than the other three

The hours still matter for other reasons, and the evidence on strokes and heart disease is set out in what long working weeks do to the heart.

How researchers measure workaholism

Most studies measure workaholism with short self-reportself-report: A measure in which people describe their own behavior, feelings or circumstances, usually by answering a questionnaire. When the same person supplies both of the things being compared, shared habits of answering can make the link between them look stronger than it is.Full entry in the glossary questionnaires. The one built most directly on addiction criteria is the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, published in 2012 by a University of Bergen team in Norway led by Cecilie Schou Andreassen: seven questions, one for each core feature of an addiction.³

Each question asks how often, over the past year, a person experienced one feature, from never to always. Answering often or always to at least four of the seven counts as workaholism in research, a rule the authors chose to mirror how psychiatric manuals count symptoms.⁴

The seven features, as the Bergen group describes them, are preoccupation with work (salience), working to relieve bad feelings (mood modification), needing ever longer hours for the same effect (tolerance), distress when unable to work (withdrawal), giving up relationships, social activities or exercise for work (conflict), failed attempts to cut down (relapse), and harm caused by working so much (problems).⁵

In ordinary working life, and these examples are ours, that might look like planning tomorrow’s tasks during a friend’s birthday dinner, opening the laptop after an argument because work feels calmer, or a “no email after dinner” rule that lasts four days. Many people will recognize one or two of these in a busy month. The scale asks how many turn up often, so the scoring rule carries a great deal of weight, and a national survey in Norway shows how much.

The study

Limited evidence

Norway's national survey: the cut-off decides the count

About 8% of Norwegian employees met the scale’s cut-off for workaholism. Younger employees were more likely to meet it than older ones, and men and women did not differ. Moving the cut-off changed the answer sharply: counting anyone who answered often or always to a single question would have labelled nearly half the sample, while requiring all seven labelled fewer than 1 in 100.⁴

The authors, who also designed the scale, note that the survey was taken once and relied on self-report, so it describes how common the pattern was in Norway in 2012, not what causes it or how common it is elsewhere.⁴

Across countries the spread is wider. A 2023 systematic review from the same university pooled workaholism surveys from 23 countries and put the average at about 14 to 15 percent. Representative samplesnationally representative: Describes a sample drawn by random selection from a country's whole population and weighted so its results stand for that population. The label describes how people were picked, not how many of them agreed to take part.Full entry in the glossary gave lower figures than non-representative ones, and studies using the Dutch scale described above gave higher figures than those using the Bergen scale.⁶

The lesson for anyone reading a headline figure, or their own score on an online quiz: the number reflects the ruler as much as the people measured, so treat it as a prompt to look closer rather than a verdict.

Workaholism or work engagement: pushed versus pulled

Work engagementemployee engagement: A term with two main meanings: in research, a positive state of energy, dedication and absorption in one's work; in workplace surveys such as Gallup's, the conditions thought to produce it. Figures from the two kinds of measure are not interchangeable.Full entry in the glossary is the healthy counterpart of workaholism: a fulfilling state of mind at work marked by vigor, dedication and absorption. Schaufeli and colleagues argue that engaged people may work just as hard as workaholics, but the motive differs: engaged people are pulled toward work because they enjoy it, while workaholics are pushed by a drive they cannot resist.¹

The two do overlap. A 2019 meta-analysis of 35 studies by Giovanni Di Stefano and Maria Gaudiino of the University of Palermo in Italy found the clearest overlap in absorption (we saw only its abstract).⁷ Schaufeli’s team describes absorption as being so engrossed that time passes quickly and detaching from work is hard.¹ In our reading, absorption is not a warning sign on its own; how you feel when it ends is. Engagement as a workplace idea has its own research history, set out in how research and workplace surveys define engagement differently.

The difference shows up over time. In a study that followed about 1,200 employees of one industrial machinery company in Tokyo over two years, from 2009 to 2011, workaholism went with rising ill-health and falling life satisfaction and brought no gain in self-rated job performance. Engagement went with falling ill-health, rising life satisfaction and better self-rated performance. It was one company in one country, and the design shows links rather than causes, but it cuts against a belief the authors say many managers hold.⁸ The wider evidence is mixed: a 2022 meta-analysis by Bang Cheng and Jiajun Gu in China found workaholism weakly linked to better performance overall, through extra effort such as helping colleagues rather than core job tasks, where it found no clear link.⁹

Myth

Workaholics are a company's best performers.

Fact

The evidence does not show it. A 2022 meta-analysis found only a weak link with better performance, and in a two-year Japanese study workaholism brought no gain in self-rated performance while engagement did.

As an illustration, an engaged designer loses track of time in a problem she enjoys, then closes the laptop and goes to dinner without a second thought. A colleague with a workaholic pattern keeps the laptop open because closing it brings a knot of guilt. From the outside both look dedicated; set side by side, the two patterns differ like this.

The amount of work can be identical in both columns. What to watch is the motive and the ability to stop, in yourself and in anyone you are tempted to praise for their late nights.

Is workaholism a diagnosis?

No. Workaholism is not a recognized diagnosis in the manuals clinicians use. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11ICD-11: The World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, eleventh revision, the global standard for recording diseases and health conditions, in effect since 2022. It also lists some factors that are not illnesses, such as burnout, classed as an occupational phenomenon.Full entry in the glossary, in its 2026 release, names only two specific disorders due to addictive behaviors, gambling disorder and gaming disorder.¹⁰ The American Psychiatric Association (US) says gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction in its 2022 manual, DSM-5DSM-5: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, the American Psychiatric Association's handbook of criteria for diagnosing mental disorders; the current version is the text revision, DSM-5-TR. Burnout and impostor feelings are not diagnoses in it.Full entry in the glossary.¹¹

Researchers disagree about whether that should change. The Bergen group’s 2023 review notes that workaholism has yet to be formally regarded as a behavioral addiction and argues that recognizing it as one would help the development of treatments.⁶ A 2018 review led by Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK expects work addiction to stay out of the DSM for some time, partly because large population studies are scarce and research on the brain is missing.¹² Clark’s analysis also sketches who tends to score high: workaholism went with perfectionism and a hard-driving, Type A personality, but was generally unrelated to gender, parenthood or marital status.²

No diagnosis does not mean no problem. In a 2016 study by the Bergen group, an online survey of more than 16,000 Norwegian workers who chose to take part, workaholism went with more symptoms of ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression, though a one-off survey of volunteers cannot say which came first.⁵ Those symptoms are things a doctor can assess and treat, whatever label fits the working pattern. Use the word to name a pattern you want to change, not as a label you give yourself from a quiz.

Help for workaholism: thin evidence, clear routes

Help for workaholism has barely been tested. The Bergen group noted in 2014 that no well-controlled treatment study had been published, although approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing and the 12-step program of Workaholics Anonymous had been suggested.⁴

A 2021 review of 15 studies on preventing workaholism, by Thomas Cossin and colleagues in France, sorted the proposals into three levels: a workplace culture that promotes balance and does not expect constant availability, individual training and counselling, and cognitive and behavioral interventions for people already affected. It gives occupational physicians a central role, because they can act on working conditions and individual care, and concludes that intervention studies are still needed. The one trial of meditation awareness training for workaholism that it describes was not randomized.¹³

A sensible order follows, in our reading rather than as a tested plan. First, notice the compulsion. Then pick one limit you can check, such as a fixed finishing time on weekdays or a phone left in another room on Sundays, and see whether it holds. If it keeps slipping, that is the point to ask for professional help. If your hours are set by an employer, a second job or caregiving, cutting back may not be yours alone to decide, and the conversation belongs with a manager or an occupational health service.

How soon to act is our own grouping, drawing on the organizations cited in each tier.

• Now: if you have thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or someone’s life is at risk, call your local emergency number before anything else. For free, confidential support, the International Association for Suicide Prevention directs people to Find A Helpline, whose verified helplines span more than 150 countries.¹⁴ Two national examples: in the US, 911 for life-threatening situations and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text), both listed by the National Institute of Mental Health;¹⁵ in the UK, 999 or A&E when someone’s life is at risk, and Samaritans, free on 116 123, both given by the NHS.¹⁶
• Soon (days to weeks): in the World Health Organization’s description, a depressive episode means sadness or lost interest in activities nearly every day, for most of the day, for two weeks or more, often with poor sleep, low energy, guilt or hopelessness.¹⁷ Signs like these, or anxiety that will not settle, deserve a visit to a doctor or other health professional; that timing is ours.
• Routine: if attempts to cut back keep failing, or people close to you keep raising it, bring it up at a routine check-up, or with an occupational health service or employee assistance program if your workplace has one.

The bottom line

Hours tell you how much someone works; workaholism is about whether they can stop. The research definition needs heavy work and a compulsive drive together, and the drive is the part linked to trouble: in the studies here it went with exhaustion and poorer health, and with little or no gain in performance. If time off brings guilt more often than rest, take that as the cue to change something, and get help if the limits you set keep slipping.