Are we a nation of workaholics?

Time and time again, I talk to people who don't know what it means to stop.

They live and breathe their work. It is both what drives them, and what breaks them.

Their email is the last thing they see before they go to bed, and the first thing they see when they wake up. They ask themselves why they can't switch off from work at evenings or weekends. They may be physically at home, but their mind is far away, working through problems or reliving the events of the day. They take their laptop away with them on holiday, fearful that without them, the project, the team, the whole organisation will come crashing down.

They feel idle if they don't have something on the go. A quiet day carries a sense of shame. Busyness has become a badge of honour, worn with more pride than the results it's supposed to produce.

Workaholics Anonymous came up in a conversation recently. This twelve-step programme, sitting alongside recovery groups for alcohol and other addictions, has been running since 1983. I went back to the website with fresh eyes. It lists twenty questions designed to help you work out whether you're a workaholic. In my experience of working with senior leaders, I'd struggle to find one who wouldn't recognise themselves in several of them.

Which begs the question: Are we a nation of workaholics?

Why that might be the wrong question

Here's the problem with the word. Workaholism, as Workaholics Anonymous frames it, sits in the same category as alcoholism or gambling: a compulsion rooted in the individual, treated through personal recovery. That framework has helped a great many people. But applying it wholesale to a capable, functioning senior leader who's simply never had a reason to stop misses something important.

It suggests the problem lives entirely in the person. And for most of the leaders I work with, it doesn't.

Look at what actually produces this pattern. Workplaces that reward visible effort over good judgement, so hours logged become a proxy for value because they're easier to see than outcomes. Technology that's quietly dissolved the boundary that used to force an end to the working day. A climate of job insecurity, where being seen to work hard has become a form of self-protection. None of that is personal. It's a set of conditions, and most people are simply responding to them the way anyone would.

Which raises the real question underneath the provocative one. Is this addiction, in the way Workaholics Anonymous means it? Or have we built systems that make it almost inevitable that people lose the ability to stop, whether or not they'd call themselves an addict?

What's actually driving it

Three things:

The first is what gets rewarded. In most organisations, hours and visibility are easier to measure than judgement and outcomes, so that's what ends up recognised, however unofficially. Someone who stays late and answers emails at ten at night reads as committed. Someone who works fewer hours but makes sharper decisions can go under the radar. The incentive is clear even when nobody articulates it.

The second is technology. There was a time when leaving the office meant, structurally, that work stopped. That boundary has quietly disappeared. Work now travels in your pocket, always reachable, which means the decision to stop has to be made deliberately, over and over, rather than happening by default. Most people, most days, don't make it.

The third is insecurity. In an uncertain economy, visible effort can feel like protection, a way of proving your value before someone else questions it. Rest, by contrast, can feel like a risk you can't quite justify. This isn't irrational - it's a reasonable response to conditions that make stopping feel dangerous.

Put those three together and you get something that looks, from the outside, exactly like the individual compulsion Workaholics Anonymous describes. From the inside, it's closer to a predictable response to a predictable set of pressures. Structural, not personal.

The trap: why it outlives the cause

There is, however, a personal element to the continuation of the pattern.

The pattern doesn't stay tied to the conditions that created it. It becomes habit, and habits are stubborn things. Under sustained pressure, the brain's capacity for deliberate decision-making is reduced, which is precisely when we lean hardest on default behaviour rather than active choice, because habitual action costs less than weighing up a decision each time. So the overwork pattern gets wired in, and it doesn't automatically unwind when the original pressure eases.

There's research that backs this up more precisely than intuition alone would. A 2026 study looking at what researchers call 'psychological climate for overwork', meaning a workplace culture where overwork is expected, found it predicts a pattern the researchers term 'cognitive workaholism', alongside something they call work-recovery guilt. Together, these impair a person's ability to properly detach and recover, even away from work altogether.

That's the trap. The job might change. The pressure might lift. The habit remains, running quietly in the background, long after the reason for it has gone.

Until somebody notices it's there.

What actually helps

Coaching doesn't fix reward structures, technology, or job insecurity. Nobody's programme changes the system a leader operates inside, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

What it can do is address the part that's actually within someone's control: noticing the pattern, understanding why it took hold, and rebuilding the capacity to choose differently, even while the system around them stays exactly the same.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. It's the leader who starts noticing the guilt of a quiet afternoon as a habit rather than a truth, and lets it pass instead of reaching for the laptop. It's the ability to recognise if judgement and expectation in this particular moment is real or perceived. It's rediscovering that a good decision, made with a clear head, beats three hours of exhausted effort every time. None of that requires the system to change first. It starts with personal agency.

What’s next?

So, are we a nation of workaholics? Perhaps. But the label matters less than what's actually happening underneath it. Structural issues catalyse the problem. Habit perpetuates it.

Noticing the pattern that’s running, and choosing differently anyway, is the only part of this that's ever been in your power.

You didn't choose the conditions that built this pattern. You can still choose what happens next.

One place to start.

The Pressure Audit takes a few minutes and gives you an honest, specific read on where you actually stand right now, not another twenty-question checklist built for addiction recovery, but one built for exactly the pattern this piece has been describing.

Take the Pressure Audit