Do Your Mind a Favour and Shield Yourself From the Office Workaholic

How to set boundaries for mental health and happy living

A few years ago, I decided to switch jobs. I was struggling in a toxic work environment so I decided to leave. There were several factors that made that place so challenging for me: abrasive personalities, insane workload, skewed work-life balance, and obstacles to boundary setting. So, I moved on.

When I arrived in the new office, I already felt like I had walked through fire and come out the other side scorched but wiser. In my mind, I had already survived the worst. As a result, I developed defense mechanisms to protect myself, but most importantly I embraced a new mindset. Never again would I let work spill over and contaminate every area of my life. I had to keep it, keep them in check.

While I had my shields up, to use a Start Trek reference, a colleague of mine who also joined around the same time, did not have the same past experiences. One day when we were having a coffee outside working hours, she opened up to me. She told me she was feeling very insecure due to another colleague of ours. Simple to say, this other colleague worked all the time. Ground away evenings and weekends, remained always reachable (even on the incredibly rare day off), and constantly talked about work (within and without office hours). In short, work seemed to be the one thing on this colleague’s mind, at all times.

At first, her question made me smile. Truly, it endeared her to me even more. This is because I saw myself in her question, her insecurity, her self-doubt that she was not doing enough, that she should be trying harder, her mistake of comparing herself to others without knowing the whole truth. All behaviors that I had embodied myself before I finally shook them off.

From my experience, dealing with the pressure of having one or more workaholics in the team presents two challenges that require two different solutions to fully address the issue: an internal and an external one. It is important to note that often workaholics irradiate this pressure towards others without any malevolence. Often (not always), it is just a byproduct of an unbalanced behavior that tips the scale toward work.

1. External Frame of Mind:

The first step, and this may be the most difficult one, is to realize that prioritizing work above all else, above all other aspects of our life, is a choice. Sometimes, we tell ourselves that “we have no choice” but this is not true. There is always a choice. When I stopped working out, stopped shopping for food, stopped taking the time to call my parents, stopped resting, all because I had to work work work, that was a choice.

In the same way, we have to understand that the office workaholic, who makes us feel so inadequate, is also making a choice. And we can’t know the reasons for it. Maybe that colleague is spending so much time at work because they are escaping a difficult situation at home. Maybe they are using work to cope with other traumas, maybe they are overworking to compensate for previous mistakes, or more simply they enjoy their work and take it as a hobby. We can’t know, but the point is that they are them and we are us. Not the same people. Not the same history. Not the same choices.

Once we understand that overwork is a choice like any other, the next step is to understand if the pressure we are feeling to do more, hustle more, achieve more, comes from outside or from within. Is that colleague actually pressuring us to work just as much? Is that colleague dropping hints, making comments, showing us off? If the answer is yes, this needs to be addressed with the supervisor. But if the answer is no, then the pressure, the sense of inadequacy, comes from within. In that case, we need to urgently move to the next stage of solution, the internal one.

Before that, however, one final action we could take, should we wish to do so, is to offer an ear to our overworking colleagues. Give them a chance to open up, talk about their worries if any, and encourage them to take care of themselves. The well-being of all reflects on the sanity of the whole team. If one colleague is suffering, it does impact the well-being of all. You can’t change the behavior of others, but building a personal connection will help both the overworking colleague to know there is a friend in the office, and help us to put everyone’s behavior into context and ease off the pressure.

2. Internal Frame of Mind:

When I was truly unhappy with my own work-life balance, what I was really struggling with was a much deeper question: how much space am I willing to give to my work? At the end of the day, it is a question of priority. The reality was that I was convinced work had to come first. I had worked so hard during my time as a student to get a job I could be proud of, so I thought that it was only fair that I would give it my all.

But the hidden truth was that there was so much more I wanted to accomplish besides work, and spending all my time on office tasks not only depleted me of all my energy but also shrunk my soul to an office badge. I was lying to myself pretending to be a person I was not, pretending to be the office workaholic, when in truth this was not me nor did I want it to be.

If you are like me and you have passions beyond your day-to-day job, you will suffer if you don’t have time and energy to dedicate it. Personally, I am working on a novel, something that is so dear to me that it would kill me not to finish it. And here lies the main morbid question to really find where your passion lies: if you were to die tomorrow, what would be the one thing that you would be most upset not achieving/accomplishing? I bet it is not replying to the hundreds of emails still piling in your inbox.

Maybe it is a side project like mine, maybe it is spending more time with your family, traveling the world, finding a way to actually leave your job. The important thing here is to be honest with who we are and what we want. If we struggle so much with finding a work-life balance, it always means we are not happy with the space work occupies in our lives. The thing is: it is our responsibility to fix it. No one else can or will. It is not the office workaholic’s fault. It is not even the supervisor’s fault (most of the time — sometimes it is and it needs to be addressed directly). Most often, at least it was for me, the fault was mine because I was pretending to be someone whose absolute priority was work, when in truth I want my job to be only a part of a well-rounded life, a part that I am glad is there, but that should occupy a very delimited space.

There are many techniques of course that we can employ to foster a healthy work-life balance. A simple search on Google will give plenty of ideas: from setting the phone on “personal” mode after working hours, to encouraging a team’s policy to “schedule” the emails sent late at night for the morning after, to purchasing a second phone, having constructive talks with the supervisor, or even more difficult, practicing how to say “no”. However, for me, the biggest improvement was when I came to terms with what I wanted and what I didn’t want. I don’t want to be the person who works most in the office. I want to be the person who works well and when the work day is done, goes home, picks up a pen, and starts writing. Who do you want to be?