Are You a Workaholic?
April 17, 2006 — -- Work hard and get ahead. That's what every American learns growing up, but for millions of them, it's getting harder to tell the difference between working hard and being a workaholic.
"The line happens when you come home one day and your husband isn't there, and you didn't realize he left you a week ago," Stephen Viscusi said. "Or when you're working just so hard that you're totally consumed by your job all the time."
Viscusi is CEO of the Viscusi Group, and radio host and author of "On the Job: How to Make It in the Real World of Work." He estimates about 40 percent of American workers don't take vacations, even though their jobs give them time off -- just one indication of how pervasive workaholism is on American society.
"We're ingrained in work, and it's important to have balance between family and work life," Viscusi said.
Americans are fourth in the world when it comes to annual hours worked per capita, behind South Korea, Japan and Australia. Americans work an average of 205 more hours a year than Italians, 270 more than the French and 473 more than Norwegians.
Workaholics Anonymous -- a "fellowship of individuals who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problems and help others to recover from workaholism" -- lists 20 questions to ask yourself if you think you may be a workaholic, including whether you get more excited about work than anything else and work more than 40 hours per week.
Viscusi said a good indication that you're a workaholic is if you are constantly electronically connected to the office, whether by cell phone, BlackBerry or laptop.
Workaholism's effects on the family can be devastating, Viscusi said, with the consequences eventually manifesting themselves, as they would with any other addiction, in broken marriages and broken homes. Brian Robinson, a professor at the University of North Carolina, told "20/20" in 1999 that children of workaholics developed the same disorders as children of alcoholics, such as depression and anxiety, that crippled them later in life.
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