There is a grey area between being a high performer and a workaholic.

While on the one hand, it is enviable to work hard, excel career-wise, and climb the corporate ladder – increasing your power, status, and earning potential. Doing so at the expense of everything else can lead to burnout, poor self-care, abandoning relationships, and an expensive divorce.

The American psychological association defines workaholism as “the compulsive need to work and to do so to an excessive degree. A workaholic is someone who has trouble refraining from work. This type of over-involvement in work is often a source of significant stress, interpersonal difficulties, and health problems.”

Workaholism differs from high work engagement – someone who is a high performer, genuinely enjoys and gets fulfillment from their work, and who also can set appropriate boundaries.

By learning to tame your workaholism, you can still succeed at work while staying on top of your health and relationships, too.

Clocking sixty-hour plus hours of work a week. You have spreadsheets open and are answering emails well into the evening, and frequently respond to work calls and texts after hours. You’re often typing away on a laptop in bed and have trouble falling asleep. Does this sound familiar? For many millennials and boomers, these behaviors are seen as an expectation to be successful. In New York City, as well as other big cities in North America, people flaunt workaholism with a sense of pride, striving desperately to climb corporate ladders with the promise of great wealth and the illusion of a perfect life. For many, though, an excessive work habit can feel like chasing a mirage in the desert: leaving you feeling emotionally and psychologically parched.  

Workaholism invariably leads to health issues, including weight gain, insomnia, excessive substance use, and burnout.  Other consequences are parental and spousal absenteeism. Emotional absence in your important relationships – meaning you are physically present but not consistently emotionally available or connected with the important people around you. This takes a toll on the quality of your relationships. Perhaps you come across as cranky, irritable, or a shell of the person you once were. In a few short years, a compulsively excessive work lifestyle can throw your entire life out of balance with devastating consequences. Workaholism has a way of leading to divorce misery, making divorce attorneys and rehab centers very rich in the process.  

The first step to reigning in workaholism is recognizing it as a problem.

Below are ways to know if workaholism is secretly ruining your life:

• Your weekly stress levels are 8/10 or higher because of work.
• You regularly have trouble shutting off work at the end of your workdays.
• You regularly work on weekends, vacations, and other non-workdays. 
• You’re too exhausted from work to connect with your family emotionally and physically.
• You’re missing important family events or not meaningfully engaged in those events because of excessive work commitments.
• Your sex life has gone down the drain, or you’ve developed a sex addiction.
• You don’t have time for self-care activities like exercise, relaxation, and hobbies you used to enjoy. 
• To cope with work-related stress, you engage in unhealthy behaviors (drinking too much, drugs, junk food, prescription medication abuse.)
• You have health issues directly linked to excessive work, such as physical pain and high blood pressure.

While workaholism is a huge problem among high achievers, there are ways to both succeed at work and get your life in balance:

• Set appropriate boundaries and expectations with work – if you answer emails after work hours, it creates an expectation that you will continue to do so. 
  • Same if you work on weekends and vacations. Your coworkers and subordinates will continue to contact you, and implicitly feel they should do the same on their vacations.

• Stop using your work computer at a specific time of day. Put your work phone, laptop, and other devices in a drawer when you return home from work – or when you want to stop working if you work from home. Out of sight, out of mind, really works.
• Set tech boundaries, such as un-syncing your work email from your personal phone
• Treat recreation, leisure, and exercise activities with the same level of importance as work meetings. Put activities like tennis, golf, Peloton – or therapy- in your calendar, and don’t move them. Treat them with a level of high importance like you would a client meeting.
• When going on vacation, practice the art of a firm and tactfully worded out-of-office message. Elicit support from colleagues, letting them know you will be unavailable, and arrange coverage plans. This article has some other great tips.
• Choose to work for companies and employers who embrace the importance of self-care and work-life balance. If you’re the boss, it’s your job to create a culture that fosters happy and healthy employees.
• Pull the plug on all technology at least 30 minutes before bedtime. No TV, social media doom scrolling, or other cell phone use. Let your mind unwind, turn off, and prepare for its overnight shift (when you are sleeping.)
• Normalize using all or most of your vacation time rather than letting it go to waste. It’s important to make time to unplug and connect with friends and family. 

Regardless of where you are on the workaholism spectrum, It’s never too late to change course and get your life back on track.

Even starting with one small change to reign in toxic work habits or shift corporate culture can turn the tide, have a powerful impact, and pay quality-of-life dividends for years to come. A change journey always starts with one step.

While considering change, it is important to reflect on your values, and what matters to you outside of work. Is it being a parent and having strong relationships with your children? Your relationship with a partner or spouse? What makes you feel genuinely fulfilled? Ask yourself what you want your life to look like 5 years from now or 10 years from now. Are your behaviors and routines today on a path to get you there? If you keep at the pace you’re going, will you even make it to retirement alive?

It’s never too late to start making it to your kid’s lacrosse games and other family events, to show up emotionally and physically for your partner, or get your wellness back on track. While the best time for change was yesterday, the second-best time is today. You can both excel at your job and have a great quality of life.