Are You a Workaholic?

From Brad

Do you work 50 hours a week or more? Are you constantly staying busy? Do you have difficulty relaxing and having fun? Are you a perfectionist? Are you unable to delegate work to others? Are you so preoccupied with “to do” lists that you have trouble being emotionally available to others? Does your partner, spouse or children complain about how much you work? Do you forget conversations or events because you are so preoccupied with planning and work? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you might be a workaholic.

Workaholism is often a family disease passed down from parent to child. Workaholics use work to cope with feelings of emotional pain and inadequacy. They get adrenaline highs from work binges and then crash from exhaustion, leading to feelings of irritability, low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. To cope with these feelings, workaholics then begin another cycle of excessive devotion to work. Workaholics are so immersed in work they have little time to invest in family life and child-rearing. What time they do spend with their children they spend passing down their unrealistic and unattainable perfectionistic standards. “A ‘B’ is okay, but you really should be getting ‘A’s.”  As a result, their children feel like failures. They grow-up convinced they are inadequate, and may attempt to compensate for these feelings by losing themselves in work or some other type of addictive substance or behavior.

Workaholism is one of the few addictions that society values and people are quick to claim. “You think you work a lot, I spent 12 hours at the office yesterday!”  While your boss may love your workaholic ways, in the end, your boss might be the only one around to love you. Understandably, children of workaholics become resentful of their parent’s emotional and physical unavailability. Promises are broken and important activities like teacher conferences, sporting events, and music recitals are missed. The workaholic’s primary relationship also suffers. Research shows that husbands and wives of workaholics report less positive feelings towards their spouse and a greater sense of marital estrangement. In the end, workaholics experience more marital discord, anxiety, depression, job stress, job dissatisfaction, and health problems than non-workaholics.

A common drive behind workaholics’ obsession with work is the belief that more money is going to make them and their family happier. This belief sets someone on an endless treadmill of working harder and harder to make more and more money to achieve happiness. However, this is a fool’s errand. Decades of social science research has demonstrated beyond a doubt that for most of us, this is just not the case. Above household incomes of $50,000 a year, there is absolutely no correlation between money and happiness. So, those families who make $5,000,000 a year are no happier than those who make $50,000 a year. However, if you sacrifice your relationships, your emotional well-being, and your health by working obsessively, you will not achieve happiness but might succeed in becoming lonely and miserable.

If you are a workaholic, consider the following suggestions for achieving a healthy work-life balance:

1. Take the rocking chair test. Picture yourself at retirement age sitting on your front porch rocking in your chair. Looking back on your life, where do you wish you had spent more time?
2. Challenge your automatic thinking around work. The fact is, as important as we think our work is, when we are dead and gone the world will keep rotating around the sun. When you are feeling anxious about a “to do” list, take some time to root out and correct some errors in thinking. What would be the worst thing that would happen if you gave yourself a day off of work? Could you live with that? Would the world survive?
3. Check in with others regarding your work-life balance. Ask your friends and family if they think you work too much. Workaholics are often unaware of how immersed they are in work and are not necessarily conscious of the negative emotional and physical consequences of workaholism. Opening our hearts and minds to the feedback of those around us is an important step in getting honest with ourselves.
4. Examine your family history around work. When I heard my 100 hour a week working father talk about how lazy he felt compared to his father, my feelings of guilt for only putting in a 70 hour work week suddenly made a heck of a lot of sense. Seeing this family pattern around work and becoming conscious of the emotional consequences opened my eyes and helped me change my relationship with work.

In his popular 1970’s folk song, Cat’s in the Cradle, Harry Chapin sang about a conversation between a workaholic father and son: “When you comin’ home dad?” “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son, you know we’ll have a good time then.” If you are a workaholic, turn off the computer and the Blackberry this weekend, leave the office, and spend some quality time with those you love. It might be difficult at first to disengage from work, but it will get easier with practice. When you are rocking on the porch and looking back on your life someday, you won’t regret you did.

Dad, What Do You Think?

From Ted

A couple of years ago, my son and his fiancée joined my wife and me for a money workshop in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  (For those of you who have been there and spent any amount of time, you would know why that area is one of our favorites.  For those of you who have never been there, I consider it one of the country’s best kept secrets). 

After the workshop we took some time to take in some of the wonders of the Hills. One of the very special experiences in the Black Hills is Bear Butte.  It is, and has for hundreds of years, been a spiritual gathering place for people who visit the area.  People go there seeking visions, connection, and to celebrate the wonder and mystery of life.

One day we decided to hike to the top of the Butte.  As we slowly climbed the trail, we were touched by the sights, sounds, silence, smells, and sense of connection with all things that we felt there.  Trees filled with colored ribbon prayer flags of the Native Peoples blazed the trail to the summit.  The views from the top were, as usual, incredible.  Thunderheads were building to the South West.  Cattle appeared as mere specks off to the East.  To the North we could see into Montana.  In my experience, as one views the wonder of those external sights, there is something about the place that invites and makes it easy for one to take a look inward also, without the usual self-consciousness.

While at the top, the four of us had one of those “So what do you think the meaning of life is all about?” conversations as we were chowing down on the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches we had packed for the hike.

As we began returning to our car, I intentionally stayed back and used the opportunity of the descent to practice my walking meditation.  In that practice, I pay as much attention as I can to experiencing rolling on the ball of my foot, my toes coming off the ground,  notice my balance shift from one hip to the other, then experience the heel of my other foot touching the ground, and repeating that for each step.  I am focused on the sensations of the hundreds of minute movements my body makes to help me stay upright and make progress down the hill.  I notice the sounds I make with my feet, the blast of head off rocks that face the trail, the whiff of the pines that comes and goes.

I was lost in this reverie when I suddenly realized that my son had dropped back from his hike down and was waiting for me on the trail.  He asked me what I was doing and I, with some embarrassment, told him I was doing my walking meditation.  We talked about that for a few minutes and then he simply said, “Dad tell me what you think of my life.” 

Wow, what a challenge.  I realized that he had dropped back so that we might have that conversation.  Gratefully, it was very, very easy for me to answer.  I told him that I was very proud of the choices he has made in his life.  I was astounded by his depth of character.  I told him that he seemed to have found that place of comfort and acceptance of self that it took me many years of living to find.  I told him I loved the people he chose to be a part of his life. 

It was one of those lifetime memory moments.  What made this most astounding was that our relationship for one period of time, not so many years before was so fractured that he didn’t speak to me for half a dozen years.  All I could think of was how grateful I was, that he and I had done the work we needed to do (lots of therapy) to provide us both with the opportunity to have the talk that I would guess all fathers and sons would like to have.  I was grateful that we had established enough of a relationship where he would feel safe enough to ask me what I thought.  I was grateful that I could say, without reservation, how proud I was to be his dad.

Bear Butte is a place where people go to leave their prayers.  I remember now that 10 years before I had climbed Bear Butte and left a prayer request there.  I received an answer to my prayer that day, when my son said, “Dad what do you think……”

Returning Soldiers Needing Mental Health Services

Another generation armed services trauma survivors is one of the unintended results of the war in Iraq. Researcher Karen Seal of the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center has found that nearly 25% of the troops coming back from Iraqi receive a diagnosis of at least one mental disorder. Her study found that another 7% didn’t qualify for a particular mental disorder but still required treatment. Not surprisingly, 50% of those affected were diagnosed with PTSD, (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). Those most at- risk were younger soldiers at lower ranks. Source: Archives of Internal Medicine; March 12, 2007

Olivet Nazarene University - Spotlight

Brad was spotlighted in this month's Olivet Nazarene Univeristy online newsletter.  When asked how he first became interested in Psychology he states: "I used psychology to heal and figure out things from my own childhood and I just knew this was the area for me."

Ted featured in July 2007 Issue of Investment Advisor Magazine

Therapeutic Finance: Once, finance was finance and therapy was therapy. That’s different now- to the benefit of many advisors and their clients

by Olivia Mellan

From the July 2007 Issue of Investment Advisor Magazine

Pronoia

From Ted

Pronoia. I recently ran across the term in a journal I was reading. It is a play on the word paranoia. As I read about pronoia’s premise, it made about as much sense to me as the premise of paranoia.

Paranoia is based on the belief that there are elements of the universe (people, institutions, corporations) that somehow conspire to make my life difficult. Pronoia, on the other hand, is based on the notion that forces in the universe are aligned to allow me a life of great comfort and meaning.

The concept of pronoia vs. paranoia suggests that it is simply my perception of what is happening that determines whether or not I come to the conclusion that the world is conspiring against me or for me. For example:

The rude, unfriendly, humorless airport security guard? Paranoia says “Why did he pick me out to do a further screen?” Pronoia says “Wow, the universe cares about my well-being so much that it has put this person into my life to protect me and allow me to travel safely so that I can continue to be a blessing to my friends and family.”

The loud mouth at the next table? Paranoia asks “What gives that jerk the right to spoil my dinner?” Pronoia says “This man was put before me at this moment in time by the universe to remind me of how it feels to others when I am acting that way.”

The 35 MPH driver in a 50 MPH speed zone? Paranoia says “Why does this always happen to me?” Pronoia says “The universe put this person in front of me so that I can avoid an accident that would happen if I were going faster.”

In his popular book, The Four Agreements, Jose Luis Ruiz suggests that we “take nothing personally.” That is good advice when I can do it. When I can’t help but take something personally, I try to practice pronoia.