You’re the first one in and the last one out. A work problem lands and you drop everything, and you almost never turn down a new project, even when your plate is already overflowing. People keep telling you to slow down. You don’t, because working hard is just what you do. So is that dedication, or is it something closer to compulsion?
For some people the honest answer is that the work has stopped being a choice. It’s become the thing that quiets an anxious mind, fills the silence, and pushes off feelings that surface the moment they stop moving. That’s the version of overwork that matters clinically, and it rarely travels alone.
Workaholism has been studied for decades, and there’s still no single agreed definition. It isn’t a formal diagnosis. The DSM-5-TR doesn’t list work addiction as a recognized disorder, and neither does the ICD-11. Researchers who study it treat it as a behavioral pattern with addiction-like features, defined by a drive to work that the person can’t seem to control and that starts to damage their health, relationships, and time away from the job.
Is Workaholism Really an Addiction?
Addiction researchers often describe the behavior using a set of shared features. The pattern tends to involve a preoccupation with the activity, a sense of relief or escape that only lasts a while, a loss of control over how much you do it, and real consequences that pile up over time. Excessive working hours on their own don’t meet that bar. Plenty of people work long weeks and feel fine. The difference shows up when the working becomes the way you regulate how you feel, and you can’t stop even as it costs you.
That’s also where the more useful question lives. Not “how many hours,” but “what is the work doing for you.” When work is the only thing that holds anxiety, low mood, or a restless mind at bay, the overwork is usually a symptom sitting on top of something else.
What Workaholism Is Often Hiding
This is the part that gets missed when overwork is treated as a willpower problem. A large 2016 study published in PLOS ONE surveyed more than 16,000 workers and found that people who scored as workaholics had far higher rates of psychiatric symptoms than those who didn’t. Among workaholics, about 33.8% met the criteria for anxiety (compared with 11.9% of non-workaholics), 8.9% for depression (compared with 2.6%), 25.6% for OCD, and 32.7% for ADHD. The researchers concluded that these conditions were positively associated with workaholism, with anxiety and ADHD carrying the most weight.
Read that the right way and it reframes the whole problem. For a meaningful share of people, the compulsive working isn’t the root condition. It’s how an underlying anxiety disorder, a depressive disorder, or an attention or obsessive pattern shows up in daily life. Treat the overwork without treating what’s driving it and the relief doesn’t hold.
How Common Is Workaholism?
Estimates vary because the definition does, but studies using validated cutoffs in representative samples put the rate in the range of roughly 7% to 8%. A nationally representative Norwegian survey published in PLOS ONE found a prevalence of 8.3%. The same line of research has reported that workaholism tends to run a bit higher in younger workers and among people higher in neuroticism, which fits the picture of overwork as a way of managing anxiety.
Health Effects of Workaholism
When work crowds out rest, recovery, and relationships, the body and mind tend to register the cost. Commonly reported effects include:
- Insomnia and other sleep problems
- Ongoing physical exhaustion
- Heightened anxiety and low mood
- Stress-related physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach trouble, and elevated blood pressure
- Burnout, the kind of emotional depletion that leaves you feeling detached and ineffective even at the thing you’re overdoing
Burnout and an anxiety or mood disorder can feed each other. The exhaustion makes the underlying condition harder to manage, and the underlying condition makes it harder to step back from the work. That loop is one reason overwork is so stubborn once it sets in.
Signs You May Be Working Compulsively
Researchers at the University of Bergen built a brief screening tool, the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, modeled on the criteria used for other addictions. It asks whether you recognize patterns like these in yourself:
- You think about how to free up more time to work
- You spend far more time working than you intended
- You work to push down guilt, anxiety, helplessness, or low mood
- People have told you to cut back and you haven’t been able to
- You feel stressed when you’re kept from working
- Work has crowded out hobbies, rest, and the people you care about
- Your hours have started to harm your health
Answering “often” or “always” to four or more is the threshold the scale’s authors use to flag a likely problem. A screening tool isn’t a diagnosis. What it can do is tell you it’s worth talking to a clinician, especially if anxiety or depression is part of the picture.
Treating Workaholism by Treating What’s Underneath
Cutting back through sheer willpower rarely sticks, and the reason is the same reason cold-turkey fails for other compulsive behaviors. The work is doing a job. When it’s holding down anxiety or filling the space a depression has hollowed out, taking it away without addressing the underlying condition just moves the distress somewhere else.
That’s why effective help starts with a real psychiatric evaluation rather than a productivity plan. At Destination Hope, the work begins by identifying what’s driving the compulsion. For many people that’s an anxiety disorder, a mood disorder, or a trauma history that overwork has been masking for years. Evidence-based therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy help untangle the thoughts and beliefs that make stopping feel unsafe, while psychiatric care addresses the underlying condition directly. The goal isn’t a better schedule. It’s reaching the point where you no longer need the work to feel okay.
Our residential mental health treatment is built for exactly this kind of layered problem, where a recognizable behavior sits on top of a condition that hasn’t been treated. If anxiety is the engine underneath the overwork, our anxiety treatment program addresses it as the primary issue rather than an afterthought.
If you recognize yourself or someone you love in this, the next step is a conversation, not a commitment. Our admissions team can walk you through what an evaluation looks like and help you understand the options. Start with our admissions page or call (954) 302-4269 to talk with someone today.
Crisis and Emergency Resources
If you or someone you know is in a substance use or mental health crisis, help is available now. Contact the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for free, confidential treatment referrals 24/7. Reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741. For emergencies, call 911.
