Even when unthinkable things were happening to me, my first instinct was to work. Am I addicted?

Have you ever heard a word that jolts you to attention? That word, for me, was “workaholism” – and when I heard it through my headphones earlier this year, listening to an audiobook on the tube, I felt a pang of something between recognition and panic. It transported me back to the worst time in my life. In May 2016, when I was nearly five months pregnant, I travelled to rural Norway to make a short documentary for the Guardian. The Norwegian government was making asylum seekers – from mostly Muslim countries – take cultural education classes about women’s rights. I’d been invited to a class in Moi, a town by a lake framed with pine trees, 100km south of Stavanger. My pregnancy hadn’t been easy. I’d bled heavily at nine weeks, after coming off set on Sky News. It was the early hours of Good Friday, and I had to wait four agonising days to be scanned and ultimately told everything looked fine. Then the routine 12-week screening gave my baby a one in two chance of being born with Down’s syndrome. A 20cm needle was inserted into my belly to check his chromosomes; while I waited for the results, I buried myself in work, recording something for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It turned out my baby didn’t have Down’s, or any other chromosomal abnormality, but I was told I should go to Great Ormond Street hospital to have his heart checked. By 19 weeks, my pregnancy was officially declared normal. I bought some maternity T-shirts to cover my now unavoidable bump, and got on the plane to Norway. On the morning of the class, I woke up far too early. The moment I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong. My throat was tight and salty; I was about to throw up, but it didn’t feel like morning sickness. A searing pain was radiating from my right side, so sharp it left me breathless, but it wasn’t the dull ache of cramps that would make me worry for my baby. Maybe last night’s dinner didn’t agree with me? I took a paracetamol and tried to get back to sleep. I hadn’t told any of my editors how complicated my pregnancy had been. As a freelancer, I had an ingrained sense of always having to appear hyper-employable and, as a woman, I didn’t want anyone to think pregnancy might affect my ability to do my job. At least, that’s what I told myself. The truth was, I didn’t want anyone to tell me I shouldn’t be working so hard. But now I couldn’t get out of bed. I rang Tom, the kind and brilliant video journalist working with me, to tell him I wasn’t going to join him for breakfast. He was worried. He got me an emergency appointment with the local doctor who said, “I think you have appendicitis” after I buckled in agony when she pressed on my side. She said my appendix might rupture and I should go to hospital. Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. What were the chances of me having that now, after so many weeks of bad luck? And what would some rural GP know anyway? Appendicitis is supposed to be agony. This was bearable. The class was due to start in an hour. The paracetamol seemed to be doing its job. Let’s start filming, I said to Tom, and if I feel bad again, I’ll go to a hospital and get everything checked out. He was reluctant, but I insisted. We filmed for eight hours that day, and for three hours the following morning before our flight home. The 11-minute documentary we made is still on the Guardian website. I can’t bring myself to watch it. On the plane home, with my forehead pressed on the cool plastic of the tray table to detract from the pain in my side, I realised this was serious. I got a cab from Heathrow direct to A&E at my local hospital, which sent me upstairs to the maternity ward. Obstetricians, surgeons, midwives and nurses appeared at my bedside with concerned faces. It might well be appendicitis, they said, but the CT scan that could confirm a diagnosis was out of the question because I was pregnant and the radiation would harm my baby. I was put on antibiotics and more paracetamol, and kept in under close watch for a week. I spent my days sitting up in bed with my laptop, answering emails and working on an article. Then, at 5am one morning, while my husband was at home with our three-year-old son, I went into labour. My baby was wrapped up and given to me to hold and behold, but he had died while I was giving birth to him. Apart from me and the midwife, no one else ever saw his tiny, perfect face. By 10am that same morning, I was back on my phone, going through my work emails. I’d been invited to chair a judging panel on some documentary awards. I said yes. While I was being wheeled in to have the scan I was allowed to have now I was no longer pregnant, I lay on my back and emailed my editor to say the feature I was writing might arrive a few days later than promised. I left hospital the next day, filled with stronger antibiotics. Two days later, I was back on Sky News, doing my regular live slot. A few weeks after that, I had my appendix taken out. And when I had another miscarriage a few months later, it was the same drill: I was doing live television within days of losing the baby. I went on to have a daughter, now eight, four years younger than her brother – but I didn’t believe she was real until I held her in my arms. My pregnancy was one of constant surveillance and painful interventions; losing a baby at 20 weeks had done permanent damage to my cervix, and I was at risk of going into early labour again. For nine months, every time I went to the toilet, I expected to see blood. I buried myself in busyness, presenting a Panorama for BBC One, writing a book proposal and – once I was signed off as safe to travel – flying to Los Angeles to film a report for Vice News on HBO when I was 32 weeks pregnant. None of this was work that had to be done, or couldn’t be cancelled, or even work that mattered. But I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. When unthinkable things were happening to me, my first instinct – a stark, profound, unavoidable urge – was to work. I’d feel bad if I hadn’t done 12 hours and rarely took a break. I wouldn’t go to the bathroom, or eat, or make a coffee, if I hadn’t done X task Nine years on, I am haunted by how I chose to work through the most terrible time in my life. I have never lived through anything as dark as that again, but as far as my attitude to my work goes, I’m not sure how much has changed. I worked seven days a week for two years during the pandemic, writing from Monday to Thursday and then getting up at 3.30am every Friday, Saturday and Sunday to present a live breakfast radio show from 6-10am (before coming home to try to be “fun mum” to my young kids). Today, I still work every Saturday morning, several evenings a week, during family holidays and through bouts of Covid and tonsillitis. All this is enabled by my very understanding husband and kids, who know that I am happiest when I’m working. I work from home, so I’m still present for them. Or so I tell myself. The video I made in Norway has been doing the rounds on social media (migrants, and their attitude to women, turns out to be an evergreen subject, especially since the protests outside the migrant hotel in Epping in July). That means I’ve been regularly confronted with the worst thing that ever happened to me. But I’ve begun to look at my immediate response to it through fresh eyes. It was when I was listening to Ed Zwick’s memoir about his life as a Hollywood movie director, and heard him sombrely and repeatedly use the word “workaholism”, that I was stopped in my tracks. Like so many other people, I Googled it (searches on the topic have surged since lockdown), and found there are now hundreds of chapters of Workaholics Anonymous all over the world, including 14 different meetings across the UK, from Scotland to Bognor Regis to Liverpool. Had I been reaching for work in the same way that an alcoholic reaches for the bottle? Was I using it to numb pain and escape reality like a heroin addict? Could I really be addicted to work? * * * “Many of us, when we first heard of workaholism as an addiction, thought that it was some kind of joke,” reads the Workaholics Anonymous Book of Recovery. “Isn’t hard work how one succeeds?” The word “workaholic” has been around since the 1940s, and it’s used casually – often positively – in capitalist societies such as ours, where job titles, salaries and other markers of professional success can be seen as a score in the game of life. Workaholism has yet to be extensively studied or formally recognised by any international body, but most behavioural addiction specialists now agree it’s possible to become addicted to working in the same way as to other activities, such as gambling and gaming, that fire up our brains’ reward systems. A team at the University of Bergen wrote in 2023 that the “generally agreed upon” definition of workaholism is “a compulsive and extreme need to work, characterised by an unrelenting drive to work hours on end, take on more work responsibility and prioritise work over different areas of life”. Around 10% of Americans are thought to be work addicts. The consequences can be serious: workaholics are more likely to be anxious or depressed, to rely on stimulant drugs from caffeine to cocaine and methamphetamine, and to be at risk of sleep disorders and heart disease. Unlike gambling, gaming or sex addictions, there’s no helpline to call for those who believe they are addicted to work. Workaholics Anonymous (WA) is pretty much the only resource, and its website is the place where people like me begin if they think they might have a problem. Founded in the US in 1983, WA applies the 12-step approach pioneered in Alcoholics Anonymous. “Workaholism involves both a substance addiction (adrenaline and other stress hormones) and a process addiction (compulsive doing or not doing) and is not limited to our paid work life,” the Book of Recovery continues. “Workaholism is not strictly about the amount of work we do but rather about our emotional and spiritual relationship to work and activity and how it can negatively affect us and those around us.” There’s a page on the WA website entitled “Am I a Workaholic?” I cast my eye down the list of 20 questions, nodding in recognition at many of them (“Do you immerse yourself in activities to change how you feel or avoid grief, anxiety, and shame?”; “Do you take work with you to bed? On weekends? On vacation?”) and shaking my head at others (“Do you pull all-nighters?”; “Do you resent your work or the people at your workplace for imposing so many pressures on you?”). I’m relieved that I can only confidently say yes to about 12 of them. Then I get to the bottom of the page. “If you answered ‘yes’ to three or more of these questions,” it reads, “you may be a workaholic.” * * * The in-person WA chapters I approach don’t want me to come to a meeting if I’m going to write about it, but several people who attend regularly agree to tell me their stories. Jen helped set up the City of London WA meeting a couple of years ago. “It’s in the church behind my office,” she says. “As a very focused workaholic, I knew I wouldn’t go if I had to take the tube.” We meet in a cafe in south London on a day when she’s on annual leave from her job in investment banking. Jen has arrived early. There’s a neat pyramid of WA books arranged on the table in front of her. “I came prepared, like a good workaholic,” she says, drily. It didn’t occur to Jen that she might have a problematic relationship with her work until she went to rehab for substance abuse in December 2021. She’d been having regular three-day drug and alcohol binges, and her boss had begun to notice. He supported her trip to rehab for what she thought would be a four-week stay. Jen arrived determined to address her issues as successfully and efficiently as possible. “I explained that I understood that this was a 12-step programme rehab, so I could tackle three steps per week within the four weeks. How could they help me in achieving that?” She soon realised that recovery was not a task that could be checked off a to-do list. Jen ended up spending three months in rehab, during which she had to disengage from her job entirely. Giving up work was much harder than giving up drugs and alcohol, she says. “I hadn’t ever stopped like that before. I was incapable of being in the present.” Work, she discovered, was her “primary addiction”. Before the pandemic, Jen’s typical day in the office would begin at 7.45am. “I’d feel bad if I hadn’t done 12 hours and rarely took a lunch break. I’d play games with myself: I wouldn’t let myself go to the bathroom, or eat, or make myself a cup of coffee, if I hadn’t done X task.” With her global role, Jen could always be useful – working with Asian markets in the morning, Europe during the day and the US in the evening. It wasn’t a question of wanting to be seen to be working hard, she assures me; she was determined to make it look easy. “That was the brand: give it to Jen and it will get done.” When lockdown came and Jen was working from home, things got even more intense. She would work until 10 at night, falling asleep with her email. In April 2021 she was made managing director – a position she’d been aiming for her entire professional life – but instead of being able to exhale, she felt she had to work even harder. “No one person in the organisation knew everything I was doing.” Hoarding work and doing it without anyone knowing sounds like alcoholics stashing bottles to drink in secret, I say. “It was exactly like that.” Jen describes her workaholism as a physical addiction. “It’s the internal drugstore – adrenaline, cortisol, I’m sure there are many others – but it’s essentially creating this stressful, fight or flight state of being.” I can relate to this – it was the adrenaline of being live on television that I craved only days after losing my babies. It made me feel alive and invincible. But a dependence on stress hormones can be dangerous, Jen says. “You don’t have to eat or sleep, because you are in survival mode.” Jen could switch off only by drowning herself in alcohol and drugs. “I wanted to slice my head off and take my brain out and put it in a bowl of water to cool down.” She’s traced the roots of this behaviour to her childhood. After her parents separated when she was two, Jen, her mother and her younger sister ended up homeless, living in a hostel before eventually moving to council housing. Her mother studied for a PhD, and instilled in Jen the idea that success meant academic achievement. Meanwhile, her father remarried and had three more children; he lived in big houses and drove fast cars. “He had this very flashy life I also wanted. How could I succeed in both of those ways, and how could I financially support my mum and sister?” It’s human to want to escape from something painful. The extent to which what you are using to escape then controls you is what needs looking at Amid all this, Jen endured years of sexual abuse. “I spoke out about it when I was 11 or 12, and then we had a court case to go through. Unfortunately, he wasn’t convicted. I’d almost say the justice process was more traumatic than the abuse itself.” Then her mother got cancer. Jen coped, she tells me, by dissociating with schoolwork. She would complete in a single evening maths books that were supposed to last her an entire term. She won a scholarship to a private school, secured the lead in the school play, a spot in the orchestra, the choir, the sports teams, a place at Cambridge University, and then her highly competitive job. After leaving rehab for substance abuse, Jen had a phased return to work, but she still found herself looking for tasks to hoard. If her work emails had been attended to, she would think about writing her will, putting reminders in her diary for when her MOT was due, “life goals, friendships you need to build, aspirations. You might have achieved things at work, but you haven’t got a kid, you haven’t got a home.” She raced through the 12 steps for her drug addiction in nine months, and then found herself volunteering to chair meetings, taking on every role and responsibility going with the fellowship. She was exhausted, but unable to stop herself. “That’s when I started looking into Workaholics Anonymous.” * * * “I’ve had four miscarriages and I was doing emails in the hospital each time,” Sarah tells me in a video call. “I’ve had family members experience sudden, severe illness, and I’d be popping out to the loo so I could look at my emails while I was with them in hospital.” She shrugs. “It’s a way of avoiding emotion.” Sarah isn’t her real name – she wants to be even more anonymous than the first-name basis of WA, because she doesn’t want her work colleagues to recognise her. She’s happy for me to say that she’s in her 50s, works in consulting, has two school-aged kids and separated from their father three years ago. “I didn’t even recognise the behaviour, let alone the word, until my relationship broke down,” she tells me. Her ex accused her of being workaholic; the word jolted her, like it did me, but Sarah didn’t dispute it. Then, last year, she heard the playwright James Graham talking about going to WA meetings on an episode of Desert Island Discs. Graham had been getting up at 5am to work, and lying to friends and family about his working hours; he would go for entire days without eating because he couldn’t stop working. “I thought, goodness, I’ve got quite a lot in common with that.” In the height of summer, Sarah would find herself pouring with sweat in her home office, not crossing the room to turn on the fan or going to fetch herself a drink of water, because it would take her away from her desk. “I am frightened of having nothing to do,” Sarah says. If a space in her schedule appears for any reason, her mind “turns in on itself” and she feels hopeless. “I do take leave, because I’ve got children, so I have to,” she says, bluntly. On holiday, Sarah blocks out time to devote to her kids, deliberately scheduling activities such as swimming that demand she leave her phone behind. “But that feels scary,” she tells me. Sarah’s role as a consultant means her time is recorded so it can be billed to clients in units of six minutes. This gamifies her job: each working day comes with a score, which can be bettered tomorrow. “It’s exciting to get to the target, to see it go green,” she says, with sparkling eyes. “That’s a big part of where my self-esteem comes from. But then it resets every day, week, month.” This sounds like a dystopian capitalist nightmare to me, and nothing like the way I work. I love what I do, and I do it out of passion, not to fulfil time targets. But Sarah insists she loves her job, too. The problem isn’t the work itself, she says, it’s how she has come to rely on it for her basic functioning. “I literally don’t know what I would do with my day if I didn’t work.” * * * Sarah’s first WA meeting, in February, felt like “a big relief”, she says. “People come to it for different reasons, but have one common purpose: to try to stop working obsessively. With alcohol, the goal is to stop drinking – but most people can’t give up working, so you have to find a way of doing it without being so obsessive about it.” What does sobriety look like for a workaholic? “It’s a very similar approach in Overeaters Anonymous, in the sense that you can’t abstain from food,” Jen explains. “In WA we talk about top and bottom lines – thresholds of positive and negative behaviours. Your bottom line could be not working a 70-hour week. For some people it’s not the hours worked – it could be the amount of joy you’ve experienced.” Jen has been attending meetings since March 2023. She goes once a week. “It is like the films,” she says, with a knowing smile. “My name’s Jen and I’m a workaholic.” My work brings me incredible joy as well as adrenaline. I don’t want to find out I need to change my attitude to it Once Jen began listening to the other people in the meetings, she saw a future where it was possible both to work and to be present and peaceful. Jen no longer works at the weekend, or on holiday. After thinking about all the things that matter to her beyond her job, she found a sperm donor and had embryos created and frozen. “I was able to do all of that because I’d freed up this space.” I tell her how uneasy I feel about the fact that I have worked through the worst times in my life. “It’s very human to want to escape from something really painful. The extent to which whatever you are using to escape is then more powerful and controls you – I think that’s probably what needs looking at,” Jen replies. “The best way to find out is to go to a meeting.” But I don’t want to go to a meeting, I say, because I am frightened of what I might find out. My work brings me incredible joy as well as adrenaline. I don’t want to find out I need to change my attitude to it, even though I recognise that I have used it in a pathological way. Jen looks me in the eyes. “I think if you’re frightened of going to a meeting, that’s more reason to go to one.” * * * Mark Griffiths is one of the few academic researchers to have written extensively on work addiction. He is an emeritus professor at Nottingham Trent University, having specialised in behavioural addictions for 38 years before retiring this summer. I write him an email (on a Saturday, scheduling it to arrive during working hours) and to my surprise he replies within minutes of my message landing in his inbox, even though he’s not supposed to be working any more. “I’ve been a workaholic most of my adult life. Even now, in my retirement, I’m still working way too many hours a week, because I just love it,” he tells me, almost immediately. While everyone else I’ve spoken to seems to use the words “workaholism” and “work addiction” interchangeably, Griffiths draws a distinction between them. “I’ve written a few papers trying to disaggregate the two. Healthy enthusiasms add to life, and addictions take away from it. There is no conflict in my life as a result of the fact that I work and have worked very hard for decades. So I am not addicted to work.” Conflict is the key component of any addiction, Griffiths argues, be it to gambling, sex, exercise, work, alcohol or drugs. The amount of time you spend doing something doesn’t in itself make you an addict. “For me, a work addict is somebody for whom work has completely taken over their life. They do it to the neglect of everything else, including their partner, their children, other hobbies, friendships. Very few people are genuinely addicted to work.” Griffiths finished his PhD and became a lecturer at 23; back then he would work 12 hours a day, almost every day. “I got promoted very quickly and travelled the world. Everything was just great.” When he had children, he cut his working hours down, but he and his partner would both get their laptops out once their kids were in bed to carry on working. He worked as much as he could, but it didn’t have a detrimental effect on his life. This is workaholism, rather than work addiction, according to the distinction Griffiths draws, but there isn’t really an official name for this kind of behaviour; the critical thing is, work makes him feel fulfilled without causing harm or conflict in his life. Related: ‘It’s still very hard to just be’: how workaholism can leave lifelong scars Mood modification (doing something in order to achieve a buzz or high, or numbing and escape) and salience (when that thing becomes the most important activity in a person’s life) are two other key components of addiction, Griffiths continues, but these elements in themselves don’t make you an addict. “I’ve got major health problems and work, for me, is the best analgesic in the world. I’m in absolutely no pain when I’m working. Mood modification in and of itself is not negative.” When I hear this, I am flooded with relief. I tell him my personal reasons for wanting to understand work addiction, and how I have been wrestling with the idea, because I don’t want to change. And then Griffiths tells me his story. Five years ago, he had major spinal surgery. “It left me permanently unable to walk. I am in a wheelchair now,” he says; I hadn’t been able to tell this from the way his camera was set up on our call. Griffiths spent four days in intensive care and three months in hospital in total; it was during the height of Covid lockdown, and for the first 42 days he had no visitors. “As soon as I went on to the general ward, my partner dropped off my laptop with me, and I spent the next two and a half months solidly working. I really enjoyed it. I was giving lectures to my students from my hospital bed. I was like you, Jenny: I used work as a way to block out the fact that I was in a really crap situation.” As with my husband and children, Griffiths says his partner and grown-up kids have always known the great benefits he gets from his work. Both of us have probably taken things further than most when it comes to relying on work to modify our moods. Arguably, we have both abused work. But just as one episode of binge drinking doesn’t make you an alcoholic, abuse does not necessarily mean addiction, Griffiths says. “For a short time, you might actually be neglecting your family and friends. But it’s episodic,” he says gently. “For you, the behaviour was functional. It was a coping mechanism. It got you through a difficult time in your life. That’s not work addiction.” We might use the word “addiction” too casually today, Griffiths says, but work addiction is real, if poorly understood, compared with gambling and gaming disorder, which are recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and now appear in the American Psychological Association’s diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM-5). The WHO does recognise burnout. That’s what people go to their GPs with, along with stress and heart problems, if they are addicted to work. “It’s the consequences of work addiction that they’ll seek help for, the long-term symptoms that have come to a head.” Still, Griffiths says, if you think you have a problem, your should go to your GP. Jen and Sarah described their work as if it were an obsession, a harmful, pathological compulsion. Griffiths described his as a life-affirming passion. I hope I will be able to find a way of keeping the rewards of my work without experiencing the harm that would make me an addict. I think that’s what I’ve managed to do, so far. The times I have felt compelled to work are when I have wanted to disappear into a simpler world of inputs and outputs, of known quantities and straightforward rewards. I have abused work when I wanted to escape reality – through the pandemic, as well as the loss of my babies – but I could have done that in far more harmful ways. And today, with my family complete, I’m very comfortable in the present. I don’t know if I will ever be able to watch the documentary I made in Norway. But I am no longer horrified at myself for making it.