Workaholic

A workaholic is a person addicted to work. This addiction may be pleasurable to the victim or it may be burdensome and troubling.

Workaholism is believed by some to be a disease, akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. The problem is that workaholics believe that if they don't work, their world will collapse. Workaholics do not necessarily love their work or try to excel in their work. If a person thinks he or she is the only person capable of performing their work, he/she is most likely a workaholic. Although most workaholism is associated with a paying job, it can also be associated with people who excessively practice sports, music, art, blogging.

The term is often used inaccurately to describe an energetic person who devotes a lot of time to work despite having good relations with co-workers, taking pleasure in other non-remunerative activities, being well rested, and attending properly to family and social life.

The condition is more accurately described when it becomes recognized by the victim or by others to be detrimental to family life or social relations within or outside of work. This may be due to the victim's fatigue, poor relationships with non-addicted co-workers, or lack of time and energy devoted to family life, friends, hobbies, and other activities. Like alcoholism, it can have a detrimental effect on the spouse and children of the workaholic, even resulting in child abuse in severe cases.

The word itself is a play on "alcoholism," created via back-formation. The term was first coined in 1971 by Wayne Oates in his book, Confessions of a Workaholic. It gained more widespread use in the 1990s, as the result of a wave of the self-help movement that centered around addiction, analogizing harmful social behaviors such as overwork to drug addiction, including addiction to alcohol.

Japan is often portrayed as having a workaholic culture. Several Japanese workers die each year from overwork. The Japanese term for death by overwork is karoshi. In cases where it can be proven that the cause of death was overwork, the family can seek compensation from the employer for its failure to intervene in the employee's self-destructive behavior.