Transcript
00:00:00Workaholism. What a funny addiction it is. If I just get the billion dollars, if I just get the
00:00:06acclaim that I want, if I just work hard enough, then people will love me. If I work hard enough,
00:00:11will you love me more? You can feel pretty satiated when it comes to the love in your life,
00:00:16but you'll never be satiated with money. There'll never be enough. You know, why do you think that
00:00:21lottery winners have their lives fall apart and they'll blow their fortune and become poor again
00:00:25because there's never enough to buy all the stuff that you want. There's not enough stuff in the
00:00:28world. If work has become an actual love relationship for you that's crowding out real
00:00:33relationships, that's an addiction that we have to address because if you don't, you're going to wind
00:00:38up lonely. You're going to wind up isolated. You're going to wind up anxious. You might very well
00:00:43suffer from depression. And until now, you might not have known why. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office
00:00:55Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about the science of happiness, about how you can use the best
00:01:02ideas based in science to lift yourself and other people up in bonds of happiness and love using ideas
00:01:08that are well validated, that academics have designed their careers to actually understand.
00:01:14And now you can as well. My job is to take the best in science and bring it to you in a digestible form.
00:01:19The reason is because I want you to have the best information. That's the beginning of becoming a
00:01:24happier person. That's the beginning of habit change is having ideas that actually work and are well
00:01:28validated. But I also want you to become a teacher with me. I want together to share these ideas with
00:01:33the world. Please do so. One of the ways you can do so is taking these ideas and talking about it with
00:01:37your friends and family and your kids and anybody who will listen. Another way is to actually share this
00:01:43show with other people. So thank you for continuing to spread the word about office hours with other
00:01:47people. It's spreading really quickly and well, and it's unbelievably gratifying. Please do send this to
00:01:53your friends and your family and anybody else who can use it. You can write to me proposing topics
00:01:58at officehours.arthurbrooks.com. And today is one of those topics that has been proposed to me.
00:02:04In a past episode, I talked about burnout. That was something that people asked about. But in the same
00:02:09messages, most people also asked about workaholism. And that's today's topic. Now, before we get there,
00:02:16I do want to note that if you like this material and you want a little bit more, please do subscribe to my
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00:02:26words of actionable, interesting stuff that you can use with actual links to peer-reviewed research.
00:02:31If you're really into that, you can get my newsletter at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter.
00:02:36And it's peppered with, you know, interesting facts and anecdotes and even some photos of my
00:02:42grandsons because I need to share those because I want to be a happier person as well. You'll also,
00:02:47you can also talk to fellow members of, of, of the community here, people who are involved in this
00:02:53work and meet other people who are interested in this journey, as well as you, by going to my website
00:02:57and you can learn about community activities that we've got going on, communities you can actually
00:03:01join. And there are even live events that you can come to because we're starting to do more and more
00:03:05retreats around this material. You can find out about the retreats at retreats.arthurworks.com.
00:03:11Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life. Or, you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit.
00:03:21It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore. But it's hard.
00:03:28Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard.
00:03:42If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug.
00:03:58Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels.
00:04:10Today, workaholism. What a funny addiction it is. I want to talk about what it is. I want to talk about why it happens. I want to talk about the origins of it, probably in your life if you suffer from it. But most importantly, I want to talk about the steps that you can take to resolve the issue and come back to being fully alive as an individual. Okay, so that's really what the run of show is today.
00:04:38And if I do my job, if this is a problem in your life, I want to put you on the path to recovery, because no joke. One of the things that I'm going to be talking about here is that this is a very serious matter.
00:04:47workaholism is a major source of what we call gray divorce. Gray divorce is classified by social scientists like me as divorce that happens after 25 years or more of marriage. One of the greatest sources of this is that people don't know each other and they grow apart because they're workaholically married to their work, to their jobs. Any holism, any addiction is really just a relationship.
00:05:14You know, one of the reasons that alcoholism drives married couples apart is because the alcoholic partner is more in love with the booze than she is with her husband.
00:05:23Or he is with his wife. You get my point, right? These are really love relationships. And so the problem that I've got here that I've got to talk about is the fact that if work has become an actual love relationship for you that's crowding out real relationships, that's an addiction that we have to address.
00:05:39Because if you don't, you're going to wind up lonely. You're going to wind up isolated. You're going to wind up anxious. You might very well suffer from depression. And until now, you might not have known why. Well, we're going to learn about that. And most importantly, we're going to learn how to fix it.
00:05:56Now, I have a lot of anecdotes and stories about this and personal experiences. And I will first start by confessing that I have very strong workaholic tendencies, which I will talk about. I mean, left to my devices, you know, early on in my family life, when my kids were little and my wife would go to Barcelona to visit her family and she would take the kids. I'd be like, what am I going to do? When the cat's away, the mice will work.
00:06:21I would be like, okay, now I'm going to work 16 hours a day. It was like, oh yeah, fun guy. Right. Um, and yet that's kind of how I thought about things, which might sound virtuous in its own way. And sort of the Protestant work ethic, despite the fact that I'm a Catholic, it's not virtuous. It's dangerous as a matter of fact. And these are real hurdles that I've had to get over in my personal life. And I'll tell you more about that. I'm not going to, you know, break down weeping or anything like that. I mean, everybody's got their struggles to be sure, but, but this is something I know a lot about personally. And it's, it's important that you.
00:06:50That you learn and conquer it as well. But I also have seen it in even worse forms than the people that I've worked with. The people that I've interviewed for my books.
00:06:58I was interviewing somebody for a piece of research at one point and incredibly successful individual, somewhat older than me, um, made orders of magnitude more money than I will ever be able to dream of. Just incredible. As a matter of fact, how successful this person is. And, and, uh, it came from humble beginnings as an entrepreneur. And I said to him, you know, I, I know, I knew about how he had made it to the top, which is basically.
00:07:24Working seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day for decades on end, just working, obsessively working.
00:07:32I, I never saw the guy not working and he was well past the age where he could have and probably should have retired. And, and, and still is working, working, working, working and thinking about work all the time. Just absolutely as workaholic, textbook workaholic as you can possibly be. And I'll give you the textbook stuff here in a second. And I asked him, um.
00:07:50Just telling me about his life. And when you're a happiness specialist, people treat you like a psychiatrist, which they probably shouldn't. And I said, when you were young and you were on your way up.
00:07:58And there was a, there's probably some point at which you knew you're going to be extremely successful and wealthy. I said, yep.
00:08:04I said, how old were you? He says when I was 32.
00:08:06That's when I realized that when, that some point I was going to be, I was going to be rich. And I knew I was going to be, I wasn't rich yet, but I knew I was going to be rich.
00:08:14And I said, what did you think was going to be better about your life? What do you think the major difference in your life was going to be when you got rich?
00:08:23And he thought about it and he said, I actually thought that if I got rich, that my wife would love me.
00:08:30And I glanced at his left hand, he wasn't wearing a ring. And I said, and what happened? And he's sort of silent. And then he says, she didn't.
00:08:41Now, this is a point that I want to make. If you have an idol, if your idol is anything, money, power, pleasure, fame, work. If you have an idol, you will tend to endow it with magical powers to solve your problems, to make all the difficult parts of your life go away.
00:09:03If I just get the billion dollars, if I just get the acclaim that I want, if I just work hard enough, then people will love me.
00:09:12If I work hard enough, will you love me more? It doesn't work. It's not going to work. I know you know that intellectually, but emotionally, you might not. At the visceral level, fellow strivers, you might not.
00:09:24So let's talk about that as a pathology. Let's talk about it the same way that we talk about everything else, which is with respect to the scientific data and facts, what actually leads us to be thinking in this wrong way?
00:09:35What leads us into the patterns of behavior that are so destructive? And most importantly, what can we do to get out of it?
00:09:41Now, workaholism is something that's been talked about since about the 1960s. And it's so weird because, you know, I've lived most of my adult life in two places in the United States and Spain, because Esther's from Spain and, you know, that's where we got married.
00:09:54I lived there through my twenties and I've been going back and forth for extended periods of time for the past 35 years. Workaholism is not a thing in Spain.
00:10:02It's a, it's, it's much more of a leisure based culture. You try to get something done in August. Good luck because the country is shut down. You're not working in August unless you're in tourism, which is a major industry in Spain.
00:10:15But also just, there's this expression called El Puente and that, that means the bridge. But basically it's, if you have a, if you, there's a holiday on a Thursday or a Tuesday, Puente means you take the Friday or the Monday off as well.
00:10:27It's just like your constitutional right practically. And, and, and on the days when you're not working, you're not working.
00:10:33There is not this workaholic tendency to turn everything to, into work. They have a, a much, I guess, healthier understanding of work.
00:10:42It's not very productive in its way. And it can be really frustrating if you're trying to get something done, but people are not suffering from the addiction in the same way that we often are here in the United States.
00:10:51I see it constantly. Look, I teach MBA students at a business school. I talked to business audiences and leaders all over the place and they work extremely long hours and obsessively.
00:11:00So 13 hour work days, seven day work weeks, no vacations. And in point of fact, a lot of them are addicted to their work.
00:11:08They don't know what to do without their work. They're at loose ends. Okay. Let me give you the signs of workaholism clinically.
00:11:15So if you're working with a clinical psychologist and you're this exhibiting addictive work behavior, they're going to look for three signs and I'm going to add four to them.
00:11:24But I've actually studied my own research. The three classical signs of workaholism is that number one, you work during your free time.
00:11:31You're not being compensated for your work. You're not expected to work, but you work nonetheless.
00:11:35You're working during your free time, not just when there's an overload, not just during special periods of swarm, but because you chronically work during your free time because it's what you want to do.
00:11:44As opposed to having free time. Number two is that when you're not working, you're thinking about work.
00:11:50It's what you think about all the time. You can see this in other people where you go out to a bar with your friends and you've got that one friend that has no personality outside of work.
00:11:59That's budding workaholism right there. If you're going to sleep thinking about work, you wake up thinking about work.
00:12:05You're thinking about your job when you're in the gym lifting weights. That's all you can talk about when you're out with your friends.
00:12:11That's number two. Number three is you're always going beyond what's required.
00:12:16Now, sometimes you want to do that.
00:12:17You want to go above and beyond because you're excellent at your job, but you're always going beyond what's required is because you're looking for an excuse to get the relief from that.
00:12:25Now, why would you do this? One of the reasons is because workaholism, like all addictions, is a way for you to treat negative affect.
00:12:33You'll remember from an earlier episode of the podcast, I'll link to that podcast here right now, that affect is the predominant mood that you feel positive or negative.
00:12:43And people who have a very, very high level of negative affect, meaning that they have persistent and intense negative emotionality, that one of the ways that you treat that is through addictive behavior because it distracts you.
00:12:55Drugs and alcohol, gambling, these are classic ways to treat high chronic negative affect, but so is workaholism.
00:13:03And it's an unhealthy thing to do, just like treating your bad feelings with booze, treating your uncomfortable emotions with chronic work is an unhealthy thing to do.
00:13:12And those are the signs that you're actually doing that, working during all your free time, thinking about work all the time and always going beyond what's required.
00:13:20That's in assessments what we do, and I'll put some of those assessments in the show notes, as well as some of the best literature on that.
00:13:29There's a good article, a classic article from 1992, the Stone Age, from the Journal of Personality Assessment that's just cited all the time on this, as well as a chapter on this.
00:13:39Now, let me add four more that I've actually, four more signs that I've seen in my own research on classic workaholic behavior.
00:13:44Number one is hiding in defensive behavior.
00:13:47You know, everybody knows that one of the classic signs of drug and alcohol addiction is that you hide it.
00:13:52And so if you're hiding how much you drink from your spouse, this is a problem.
00:13:56This is a sign of, of dependence on alcohol and even addiction to alcohol.
00:14:00Well, if you're hiding your work from your spouse, it means that this is a sign of workaholic behavior as well.
00:14:06If you know your spouse goes to the supermarket on Sunday and, and, and, and, and when she comes home and walks in the door, you snap, shut your, your laptop and put her under the cushion of the couch.
00:14:15So she doesn't see that you were answering email or working on a PowerPoint.
00:14:19It's the same thing.
00:14:20Another is actually that you're, you're feeling lonelier and lonelier because nobody can actually understand the relationship that you have with your job.
00:14:27Again, this is a classic sign of addictive behavior.
00:14:29Another is that your sense of self-worth is really tied up with work.
00:14:33When you think about your worth as a human being, you start to measure it with respect to how well you're doing at your job.
00:14:38And last but not least is starting to deleteriously affect your relationships.
00:14:41So those are the four that I would add to the first big three, hiding behavior, loneliness, self-worth tied to work and, and damage to relationships.
00:14:51Those are, as far as I'm concerned, should be added to the protocol of, of understanding of workaholic behavior.
00:14:59Okay.
00:15:00Now, what are the origins of this, of compulsive overworking, which is absolutely incompatible with healthy, intimate relationships.
00:15:07They take time and energy and effort.
00:15:09They almost always lead to great unhappiness.
00:15:11When we talk about the, the, the, the solutions to this, what I'm not going to recommend is going to a workaholic or saying to yourself, just stop.
00:15:19Just work less.
00:15:21Right.
00:15:22That's as stupid and ineffective as going to somebody who drinks too much and saying, I think you should cut down a little.
00:15:27Right.
00:15:28Sorry.
00:15:28That's not the way addiction works.
00:15:29Work.
00:15:30Addiction is a compulsive behavior that has an escalation effect to it.
00:15:34It tends to be compulsive.
00:15:36It goes beyond your ability to actually control it.
00:15:39If it's a workaholism, it means it's actually getting out of control.
00:15:42So giving people advice or demanding or, or putting pressure on them to stop that or pressure on yourself to stop.
00:15:48That's unhelpful.
00:15:49So I'm not going to recommend that.
00:15:51I'm going to recommend actual methods that work, but they require that you understand what's behind the pathology of your over, um, reliance on work.
00:16:02To be the person that you want to be, or to get the satisfaction that you want, or to mask your negative emotionality or whatever it happens to be for treating yourself in that particular way.
00:16:11So here's how you need to understand the pathology.
00:16:14And it gets back to a, uh, uh, a slightly different concept, but you'll see how it's all related in a second.
00:16:19There's a big literature on what's called intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation, right?
00:16:25And that just sounds like an esoteric way of saying some simple ideas, which in point of fact it is because that's how we get tenure in my business.
00:16:31But intrinsic motivation is that which is internally generated rewards that are internally generated.
00:16:40Like I just love doing that thing, whether it compensates me or not.
00:16:45That's an intrinsic motivation.
00:16:47That's an intrinsic reward, love and happiness that you get from something or an intrinsic reward of doing it.
00:16:54But you go to a museum, unless you're a curator or something, they don't pay you to do it, but you want to look at beautiful pieces of art.
00:17:00That has an intense, that has an intrinsic motivation to it, is the way that that works.
00:17:05The reason that people hang out together after work with their friends, generally speaking, is an intrinsic motivation.
00:17:11The highest level of friendship is an intrinsically motivated friendship.
00:17:16It's not motivated by, you know, something good that you can give me materially.
00:17:19It's something, the fact that you're useless to me.
00:17:21I just love you.
00:17:22That's an intrinsic motivation.
00:17:25This is in contrast with extrinsic motivations, which is to say,
00:17:29material things that can be procured that come from outside you.
00:17:34Money, benefits, goods, fame, power, glory, that come to you because of something that you do from the outside.
00:17:42Those are extrinsic motivations.
00:17:44So your paycheck is an extrinsic motivation.
00:17:47The satisfaction from your job that you get from a job well done is an intrinsic motivation.
00:17:52Most people in most parts of their life have both.
00:17:55And that's really, really good.
00:17:56Okay.
00:17:57Now that's an important distinction that I want to make because a lot of research contrasts the two and asks, what's better for mental health?
00:18:05What's actually better for your wellbeing?
00:18:06Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?
00:18:08You probably can predict, based on my comments here, what the result of that research actually is.
00:18:14The more that you're extrinsically motivated to do something, the less happiness it will bring you.
00:18:19The more overall wellbeing that you'll actually get from it.
00:18:26Lots of research shows this.
00:18:30There are research on little kids, for example, where they'll have their favorite toys in a playroom and they'll just be blissfully playing with their favorite toys.
00:18:39Then the researchers will offer them something that they want in exchange for playing with those toys and their motivation to play with those toys falls.
00:18:46Why?
00:18:47Because they've tied the worth of the thing to some sort of market that's been created.
00:18:53So for example, if you play with that truck, I'll give you a cookie.
00:18:56You say, well, now that must mean that playing with that truck requires that somebody give me a cookie, which means that it must not be that great.
00:19:03The intrinsic motivation actually falls when the extrinsic motivation rises.
00:19:08You find this with, you know, in college students, when you give them really interesting puzzles to do, and they like doing the puzzles.
00:19:13But if you start paying them money to do the puzzles, they like the puzzles less.
00:19:17In sort of all areas of life, this is how we're wired.
00:19:21Extrinsic versus intrinsic, they tend to crowd each other out.
00:19:24One really interesting study out of the University of Rochester, it asked graduates to say whether their motivation for work after graduating from college was primarily about extrinsic things.
00:19:35Money, position, or intrinsic things.
00:19:39Their motivation for what they were going to do with the next part of their lives was about love and relationships, is what it came down to.
00:19:46Those that were more motivated to make decisions in their careers and their lives, to get more love and happiness, be near their families, to have closer friends.
00:19:54Two years after graduation, they were way happier than those who said, I'm going to make my decisions on the basis of my position about my, you know, where I am in the pecking order, how much money that I'm making.
00:20:05Okay, so bottom line is that they're both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for all the things that we do.
00:20:11But the more it's extrinsic versus intrinsic, the unhappier you're going to wind up.
00:20:16And all of the experimental research shows the same basic pattern.
00:20:20What you want is to do things that have more intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation if you want to have higher wellbeing.
00:20:27As you know from listening to this show, I've never been a super naturally happy person.
00:20:33That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to understand human happiness.
00:20:38Not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically, and you can too.
00:20:44I don't do research, I do me-search.
00:20:47Well, and you-search.
00:20:48My time in academia has reinforced the lesson I continue to rely on today.
00:20:52Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through deliberate learning.
00:20:56Managed through deliberate habits and discipline.
00:20:59I take my personal habits seriously.
00:21:01I need to.
00:21:02I have a morning routine.
00:21:04I've talked about it on this show.
00:21:05It involves prayer, and exercise, and healthy eating, and a lot of coffee.
00:21:10Well, taken at the right time.
00:21:12But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that routine that helps me take charge of my day.
00:21:20I came across Magic Mind.
00:21:22Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the supplement space.
00:21:27And most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience.
00:21:32But Magic Mind has ingredients that I like.
00:21:35Adaptogens, nootropics, such as lion's mane, ashwagandha, cognozine, L-theanine.
00:21:41These are clinically-backed compounds with real research behind them.
00:21:46Magic Mind is a two-ounce shot that you take in the morning.
00:21:49You don't get jitters.
00:21:50There's no crash.
00:21:51It's just your brain working the way it's supposed to.
00:21:54Calm, sustained, and focused.
00:21:56If the same cup of coffee every morning has started to feel more like a crutch than a ritual, or if you're just tired of it, it might be worth trying something that actually works with your neurobiology rather than against it.
00:22:09Right now, you can go to www.magicmind.com, that's all one word, and get 50% off your first order plus a 100-day money-back guarantee.
00:22:20So, you really have nothing to lose by trying it.
00:22:22You can also find Magic Mind in stores near you using the store locator at magicmind.com.
00:22:29Now, why do I point that out?
00:22:31Because people who are workaholic are primarily extrinsically motivated.
00:22:36Here's the thing.
00:22:37If you're extrinsically motivated, the world will tell you, and your biology will tell you, that if you get enough of that thing, that you'll be finally satisfied.
00:22:45But you won't, because there's not enough extrinsic motivation in the world to satisfy you.
00:22:50You can feel pretty satiated when it comes to the love in your life, but you'll never be satiated with money.
00:22:57There'll never be enough.
00:22:59You know, why do you think that lottery winners have their lives fall apart and they'll blow their fortune and become poor again?
00:23:04Because there's never enough to buy all the stuff that you want.
00:23:06There's not enough stuff in the world.
00:23:08Why do you think it is that when people start to get famous, that then they get insecure because they're not as famous as the next movie star, TV actor, or politician?
00:23:20It's like drinking seawater.
00:23:22Extrinsic motivation.
00:23:23Extrinsic rewards are seawater.
00:23:25The more you drink, the thirstier you get.
00:23:27Tons of studies on fame actually show this.
00:23:29The only thing that will inherently satisfy you is the love of your life is what it comes down to.
00:23:36And that means you need to do the things that give you that intrinsic satisfaction, as opposed to always searching for the things that will bring in the extrinsic rewards.
00:23:45People who are more extrinsically motivated never can have enough.
00:23:50And so they'll escalate their behavior and try to finally get to the point where they scratch so much that the itch stops.
00:23:56But it doesn't.
00:23:57And that leads to workaholism.
00:23:59Now, this has such parallels with any addictive substance or behavior, right?
00:24:04It's funny that when you talk to people who are addicted to opiates, for example, they honestly feel at a visceral level that if I take enough heroin, finally I'll have enough.
00:24:13People who are drinking alcoholically, they say at some point I will have enough alcohol, but I need a little bit more.
00:24:20But you know there's not enough.
00:24:21And that's a bottomless pit.
00:24:22It doesn't finish except in very, very dark and bad places.
00:24:27And the same thing is true if you think that when you finally work enough that you will have earned your way, that you will finally be lovable, that you will finally achieve the version of yourself that you actually want.
00:24:40But that's an external validation, that's an extrinsic motivation, and you can't get there from here.
00:24:46You're drinking sea water.
00:24:48Now, if you want to see the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their relative level of satisfaction and fulfillment that they bring, let's do a little thought experiment.
00:24:59Let's say that you can compare two scenarios.
00:25:02In the first one, you're driving to the most expensive restaurant in town and your brand new Ferrari where you're going to eat alone because you have no friends and family.
00:25:13That's scenario number one.
00:25:14Number two, you're driving to a Denny's in a 1999 Corolla that the muffler just fell off of to hang out with the people who truly love you and that you love.
00:25:25Which one sounds better to you?
00:25:27Now, I'm not asking you which one would you choose because we're all imperfect, right?
00:25:32You might choose door number one despite the fact that you know perfectly that door number two is the door of happiness, the door of fulfillment, the door of contentment, the door of satisfaction, but you still might take door number one.
00:25:45Why?
00:25:46Because your biology says just a little more, just a little more, just a little bit more extrinsic reward and you'll finally, you'll finally have enough.
00:25:56I see this all the time in the strivers that I work with.
00:25:59A story that I've told often in, in, in speeches is, um, a woman I was, uh, interviewing for a book, um, I wrote called from strength to strength in 2022 about high achievers and how they struggle in the second half of life.
00:26:11Often is, um, this is an icon in the finance industry, a woman who's at the absolute top of her game.
00:26:18Who's just my age and rich beyond her wildest dreams.
00:26:22And who admitted to me that all she ever does is work.
00:26:26And she's desperately unhappy.
00:26:27And I said, well, tell me more about this unhappiness that you're talking about.
00:26:31She said, well, you know, my husband and I were roommates.
00:26:33We're just roommates.
00:26:34Um, I have not much more than a cordial relationship with my kids, not for anything bad, but because, you know, I've really pursued it.
00:26:43And the reason I didn't pursue it is because the same reason I don't really have any friends, which is that all I've done every day for decades is work and become more and more and more successful and make more and more and more money.
00:26:54Um, it's hurting my health.
00:26:56I drink too much.
00:26:57I don't get to the gym.
00:26:58I'm getting bad reports back from my doctor.
00:27:00What do I do professor?
00:27:01And I said, you know what to do.
00:27:03I mean, take a souvenir from your firm and step away, get to know your husband, get into AA, get in touch with your faith, get to know your kids.
00:27:12Come on.
00:27:13She says, I know, I know.
00:27:14And I said, well, why didn't you do it?
00:27:16If you know it, why didn't you do it?
00:27:18And then she was, she thought about it for a while.
00:27:20She said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy.
00:27:25That's the search for extrinsic rewards that leads to workaholism, that leads to addiction.
00:27:33And that might describe you.
00:27:37Why?
00:27:38Why would you get into such a fix?
00:27:39Why would you mistake the Ferrari for the Corolla to go to a restaurant alone as opposed to going to a restaurant where people love you and you're hanging out and having a great time?
00:27:49Why?
00:27:50Why?
00:27:51Well, there's basically three reasons that we see this actually in the literature.
00:27:56And one of these might describe you.
00:27:58But knowing this is key to being free.
00:28:01Number one, if you're a workaholic, it might just be that you had workaholic parents.
00:28:08And this is an epigenetic expression.
00:28:10Now, by the way, it might actually be genetic.
00:28:12There might be something in the human genome that leads people to be workaholic, that tends to make people work too hard and to be extrinsically motivated.
00:28:22We don't know.
00:28:23There's a lot of parts of the personality that are genetic.
00:28:25Most aspects of personality, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, they're between 40 and 80% genetic.
00:28:34So why wouldn't this be partly genetic as well?
00:28:37It's absolutely possible.
00:28:38But what we do know is that workaholic parents tend to have workaholic kids.
00:28:42I'll put up an interesting article in the show notes from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
00:28:49Understanding work addiction in adult children, the effect of addicted parents and work motivation.
00:28:55You get it.
00:28:56If you grew up seeing adulthood modeled by people who work all hours and are rarely home, that's what being a grown-up is going to mean to you.
00:29:04Plus the fact that you actually might have it somehow encoded into you.
00:29:07The reason that you have workaholism in your life is because you had workaholism growing up.
00:29:12That's number one.
00:29:13Happens all the time.
00:29:14Number two is the way that your parents parented you can lead to this.
00:29:18One of the classic patterns that I see in strivers and people who are deeply addicted to work
00:29:24is often that they learned when their brains were highly synaptically plastic, a.k.a. they were little kids, that love is earned.
00:29:32And this doesn't mean you had bad parents.
00:29:34It just means that you got attention and energy and affection from your parents when you did a great thing.
00:29:41You came home with straight ads on your report card.
00:29:43You got first chair in the orchestra.
00:29:45You made picture on the baseball team.
00:29:47Whatever.
00:29:48You won an art contest if your parents were cool.
00:29:51Whatever it happened to be, but it was something extraordinary.
00:29:53And your little plastic brain concluded that I get love when I do a great thing.
00:29:59Love is earned.
00:30:00Now this is not the recipe for becoming a human being.
00:30:04It's the path toward becoming a human doing.
00:30:07Because if you believe that love is earned and you process that and you reinforce that over the course of your life,
00:30:13you will try to earn people's love through what you do.
00:30:18And that almost always means you're going to work harder and harder and harder and harder.
00:30:21There are other ways that that pathology can become manifest.
00:30:24If you realize that you earn love by being unbelievably beautiful, you might get into pathological and unhealthy body modification.
00:30:33You might spend, you know, nine hours a day at the gym or get endless plastic surgeries.
00:30:37That's another way that people actually try to earn love from other people, as a matter of fact.
00:30:40But for strivers, people great at what they do, maybe you, it might just be that you recorded the lesson that love is earned.
00:30:48And then you go looking to earn love for the rest of your life.
00:30:51I work a little harder.
00:30:52Will you love me?
00:30:53Well, I got news for you.
00:30:54Love isn't earned.
00:30:55It's a free gift, freely given.
00:30:56Love is a grace.
00:30:57If you're living with somebody or you're hanging around with people that make you earn their love, they don't love you because that's not what love is.
00:31:06But your brain might not quite believe it.
00:31:08Who knows?
00:31:09I've seen couples that are torn apart because one partner is chronically workaholic, thinking that if I finally earn enough, work hard enough, achieve enough, become admirable enough in the outside world that then finally I'll be worthy of this other person's love.
00:31:25And what they're inadvertently doing is pushing their partner away and there's nothing sadder.
00:31:29Love can't be earned.
00:31:31Number three is a downstream addiction, which is, I should say, an upstream addiction because really it comes before workaholism, which is an addiction to success.
00:31:43Success winning is unbelievably motivating for people.
00:31:46As a matter of fact, it stimulates the same neurochemistry as many drugs and alcohol.
00:31:51The, the, the reward and anticipation of reward involves dopamine.
00:31:55The locus coeruleus spritzes a little bit of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens of the brain that says, do more of that, do more of that, do more of that.
00:32:03People who have a lot of victories who are really good at what they do.
00:32:06They'll often find that life feels gray when they're not winning, but winning gets harder and harder and harder, which means they have to work more and more and more and more.
00:32:15If you're addicted to success, if you're neuro chemically addicted to success and winning, which many of you probably are.
00:32:22Then you're going to have to work harder and harder to get back less and less and less.
00:32:26That's escalating behavior.
00:32:27And that's just like any other addiction.
00:32:29And that's going to turn into workaholism.
00:32:31We're going to work harder and harder and longer and longer and longer hours to get that feeling that life has some, something, some spark in it.
00:32:38You know, oh, I got that feeling of winning again.
00:32:40I got the deal.
00:32:41I sold the company.
00:32:43I, you know, I got the, I got the attention.
00:32:46I got the applause, whatever it happens to be.
00:32:49That's success addiction.
00:32:51And that's your brain malfunctioning with respect to the rewards that you actually need and that you deserve.
00:32:59All right.
00:33:00Now here's where we get to the main point that I want to get to, which is if this is a problem.
00:33:05Now you understand what you, now you understand what it is and you understand where it comes from.
00:33:10But I really want to talk to you about what you do in the, what to do part.
00:33:14I want to give you three pieces of advice, three steps that you can take to resolve the issue.
00:33:19These are the same things that I would, a version of which I would give you, if you told me you're addicted to, you know, alcohol or gambling, by the way.
00:33:26Number one is look at the origins and face the truth.
00:33:31Look at why this actually happened in your life.
00:33:34Look at the extent to which your parents did hold out love on the basis of your accomplishments, turning into a, a being who believes that love is earned or a success addicted individual.
00:33:45Look at the basis of why this is probably the case in your life and face it with honesty and say, yeah, that actually became a pathology.
00:33:52And don't blame your parents.
00:33:53I mean, I'm sure your parents were really, really good.
00:33:55I know tons of people who example, for example, came from families where their parents were penniless immigrants to the United States who gave everything to give their kids a better future.
00:34:04And, and they thought that they were doing their kids a great favor by holding them to these unimaginably high standards in school and at work.
00:34:11I get that.
00:34:12You just recorded the wrong information on the basis of this.
00:34:15They actually did love you, but they thought that holding back was the way to do it.
00:34:20So, so, so look at the basis of this pathology and face it with actual truth, not with recrimination, not with reproach, but realize that there's a script in your head that says you're not inherently lovable as you are.
00:34:33So you better go win the spelling bee or some grown up version of the spelling bee.
00:34:38Here's the second piece of advice.
00:34:39Start giving the thing that you most want to receive.
00:34:42You want love.
00:34:44How do I know you want love?
00:34:46Cause I live and breathe my friend.
00:34:48I don't need to be a PhD in all this nonsense for me to tell you what is most obvious.
00:34:53Humans exist to love and be loved.
00:34:56This is the, the fuel of human life is love.
00:35:00Not everybody's good at it.
00:35:02Not everybody's good at getting it.
00:35:04And even fewer people are good at giving it.
00:35:06But the truth of the matter is that this is, this is really the mother's milk of the essence of life itself.
00:35:11And so if you want it, if you actually want it, don't try to earn it, stop trying to earn it, go give it instead.
00:35:18There's a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin.
00:35:21If you would be loved, love and be lovable is what he said.
00:35:25So stop trying to earn love and just start going and giving love.
00:35:29And that's what you will start to receive.
00:35:30You'll start to get the intrinsic reward that you want in the first place.
00:35:35Don't, you know, try to earn your spouse's love by working harder.
00:35:38Go love your spouse.
00:35:40Go give them true love in the intrinsic currency that satisfies her or his soul as well as yours.
00:35:48And that means giving of yourself, not money and things.
00:35:52Taking a day off from work, turning off your phone and giving the person you love the attention that they crave all day.
00:35:57When was the last time you did that?
00:35:59This works magic.
00:36:00I promise you.
00:36:01And here's number three.
00:36:03You need to make plans to change.
00:36:05You've got an addiction and that means you're actually going to have to make plans to change and make a commitment to change.
00:36:10Feeling like you're listening to this podcast.
00:36:12Like, yeah, I got to change.
00:36:13Yeah, I got to change.
00:36:14That's not enough.
00:36:15One day is not enough to repair your relationships.
00:36:17Um, and big changes in habits don't take place overnight.
00:36:20They just don't.
00:36:21Um, I've talked about habits on the show.
00:36:22The average habit takes 42 days to break or make.
00:36:25This is probably longer than that.
00:36:27If you were dependent on alcohol, I wouldn't be so naive as to imagine that not drinking for a day would fix your problem.
00:36:32It absolutely wouldn't.
00:36:33It takes a lot of planning and it takes a lot of resolve and it takes a, it takes a strategy.
00:36:39It means in this case, owning up to your workaholism, acknowledging the roots of your problem and working with your loved ones to make a long-term plan to live differently.
00:36:49And that might mean some significant changes.
00:36:52That might mean planning a career or job change in six months, two years time.
00:36:57That might mean deciding to retire, even though you're not ready to retire and setting a date.
00:37:03Right.
00:37:04It might mean doing that because once you do that, by the way, you're not going to work workaholically right up to your retirement age.
00:37:09Most people don't do that.
00:37:10They actually start confronting the fact that you're going to go to a completely different, different platform in your life.
00:37:17And so they start to deal with the issue that would make them drive right off a cliff in advance.
00:37:24It also might require making a plan to working less strategically.
00:37:30So for example, scheduling weekend trips and tech-free vacations right now, starting to do that, making commitments to your loved ones to do that, even though it's actually hard for you at first.
00:37:40And then it requires asking people who love you to make you accountable to this.
00:37:44If you don't have anybody who would make you accountable, that's a, that's a sign, by the way, that they are codependent in your workaholism.
00:37:50I mean, they're probably making you earn their love and they're part of the problem.
00:37:54So if you're addicted to drugs and alcohol, I might recommend that you get new friends.
00:37:59Um, people who are not firing you up in your addiction.
00:38:03If you're workaholic, you might need new friends who are making you earn their love, um, in much the same way.
00:38:10All right.
00:38:11Now, what am I trying to do here at the end of the day?
00:38:14I'm not saying that this quick fix, even if this has given you an epiphany or two about your own life is going to solve the problem.
00:38:20I want to set you on the path to recovery.
00:38:22That's what it comes down to.
00:38:24You might need help on this.
00:38:25You might actually need to seek counseling or therapy or a clergy or close friends or whatever it takes.
00:38:34But the bottom line is this.
00:38:36You need to face the truth.
00:38:37You need to give more love.
00:38:39You need to make a strategic plan to change.
00:38:42And you need to change because the one thing I can assure you is if you don't deal with this in a forthright way, it's not going to make your life better.
00:38:49There isn't enough work in the world.
00:38:51There aren't enough worldly rewards in the world to fill that hollowness in your soul.
00:38:56Trust me, there aren't.
00:38:57And so you need to get after this is the bottom line because you deserve to be happy.
00:39:01You deserve to be intrinsically happy.
00:39:03You need to get, be satiated with a love that you seek, that you really seek, that can't be earned.
00:39:09And it's not going to start to happen until you start taking on its face the problem that you actually are experiencing.
00:39:15And I have to do the same thing.
00:39:17Good luck.
00:39:18A couple of quick questions and we're out.
00:39:19Chris writes standard office hours to the website.
00:39:22After listening to your office hours episode on grief, I have the following question.
00:39:27What is the difference or similarity in grief that arises from loss through death versus loss through divorce?
00:39:33I'm curious if there is a different healing timeline, if there are different steps.
00:39:38So in general, the literature would suggest that death is more severe with respect to grief than divorce.
00:39:46And divorce, and this comes from one 1987 study, but there's been very little written about it.
00:39:50And of course, your results may differ because the circumstances are everything, right?
00:39:54You might have had such an unbelievably traumatic divorce where you didn't want it.
00:39:58You were deeply in love.
00:39:59You got blindsided, whatever it happened to be, that it might be as bad or worse than a death in the family.
00:40:05One thing that we do know is that for kids, especially for sons, it's actually less traumatic to lose a father to death than to lose a father
00:40:15who abandons the mother and is absent from the family.
00:40:18The second is more traumatic.
00:40:20And so, you know, the results really differ.
00:40:23It's highly individual.
00:40:24Bottom line is you should treat grief the same way, no matter what it is that's actually making you grieve and follow the same protocols that we see there.
00:40:32Thanks for that question.
00:40:33That's a really, that's a beautiful question.
00:40:35This is an anonymous question.
00:40:36Once again, written into the website.
00:40:37My question is on the psychology of forgiveness.
00:40:40Tough one.
00:40:41What advice do you have to remedy the physiology, the physical and mental pain of anger and sadness that come from betrayal?
00:40:48This could come from, you know, disloyalty of a spouse, somebody who hurts you, who's very close to you.
00:40:53How does one pursue a meaningful, happy life with or alongside the person that hurt them?
00:40:59This is very classically the case when one spouse is unfaithful to the other, outside of the bounds of their marriage.
00:41:06But the marriage sort of hangs together, but it's sort of this, this, this phantasm over the marriage.
00:41:12Um, and, and, and this is really scarring.
00:41:14It's really, really hard.
00:41:15There is a literature out this about, you know, about forgiveness and, and, and I'll go into greater depth at some point about actually the protocols for forgiveness.
00:41:22It's just like there's protocols for everything.
00:41:25There's a model actually for forgiving that makes you better and better and better at it.
00:41:29If you practice it following a particular progression of thoughts and ideas.
00:41:34And I want to tell you about it.
00:41:35This guy actually comes from the work of the Templeton foundation, which is a great foundation doing really important work.
00:41:40And it's called the reach model.
00:41:42Number one is there is something that's really, really bothering you with somebody that you're not going to get away from.
00:41:47Maybe you have a schism with your brother or sister.
00:41:51Um, these are your kid.
00:41:52These are people that are going to be part of your life forever.
00:41:54I hope, I hope you're not going no contact with a direct family member, or, or this is somebody who's betrayed you like a spouse.
00:42:00Okay.
00:42:01So this is somebody that you've decided to stay together with.
00:42:03Here's what you do.
00:42:04Um, as you're healing to escalate the healing, to heal better and faster.
00:42:10It's the reach model is it's an acronym.
00:42:12R is to recall the hurt.
00:42:14I know you don't want to, but it's very important that you, you make it clear not to re-traumatize yourself, but just to remember the source of your hurt.
00:42:21Then move on quickly.
00:42:22This is even harder.
00:42:23Empathize with the offender.
00:42:25Say I empathize, which is not to say that, that, that it's all good.
00:42:28That's not to say that you accept it.
00:42:30No, it's just to say, I, I understand it.
00:42:32I understand it.
00:42:33I feel what that person was feeling.
00:42:35Right.
00:42:36Not that I would have done it, but I can understand actually what it was that they did.
00:42:40So I recall it and I understand it.
00:42:43Then a.
00:42:44Is I am going to give them an altruistic gift.
00:42:48I am going to be the kind of person that gives, despite the fact that I don't necessarily want to, but because this is the kind of person that I am.
00:42:55That's a C is committing to forgive.
00:42:58That's your act of altruism.
00:42:59I forgive this person and H is holding on to the feeling of that forgiveness because that forgiving feeling of forgiveness is a feeling of sort of wiping clean your soul.
00:43:10Or, or as my wife would put it voluntarily letting go of a bag of garbage.
00:43:15Now it's temporary, especially when the herd is fresh, which means you need to go through the reach protocol, maybe every day for a while.
00:43:23Maybe this is the meditation, your holy hour, how you start your day, but R E A C H and going through it.
00:43:29R is to recall the hurt.
00:43:31E is to empathize with the offender.
00:43:33A is a commitment to give an altruistic gift.
00:43:36That's not earned to an offender.
00:43:38C is committing to forgiveness, which is the altruistic gift.
00:43:43And H is to hold on to forgiveness.
00:43:46And then you'll feel better and it will reset you.
00:43:49It'll reset your nervous system, as a matter of fact, but you're going to have to do this.
00:43:52And again, and again, and again, and again, this will help.
00:43:55This is well validated actually in the literature that can help you.
00:43:58And, and, and I, and I hope it does.
00:44:00We're done.
00:44:01We're done.
00:44:02Please let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbooks.com.
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00:44:33And while you're at it, maybe order the meaning of your life as a special gift for somebody that you love.
00:44:37My newest book about how you can actually find purpose and significance in your life so that you can live a happier life and bring your happiness to other people in a spirit of love.
00:44:47I hope you've gotten that spirit today.
00:44:49I hope this has been useful to you.
00:44:50I can't wait to see you next week.