Workaholics Anonymous, a US-based organisation, which has more than half of its meetings online, has a small but increasing number of Indian members
Workaholism or work addiction is not recognised as a formal disorder—meaning, doctors cannot clinically diagnose it.
Illustration: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur
Rahul* had forgotten what it felt like to wake up because he rarely, if ever, truly slept.
When the Bengaluru-based executive coach turned 40 in 2019, he set an unrealistic goal for himself: To become glitteringly successful. To that end, he became an independent consultant and began chasing and closing multiple deals. “I kept pushing myself,” says Rahul, who is a member of Workaholics Anonymous (WA).
The first sign that things were going downhill was the lack of sleep. After about five hours of sleep, he would rise at 4 am and make a beeline for his desk, even before washing away the deep signs of sleeplessness from his face. He would remain stationed there, working in a kind of frenzy with very short breaks, until it was time to return to bed for yet another restless night. Rinse, repeat.
In a desperate attempt to control the situation, he even resorted to taking anxiety and sleep medication but things continued to spiral out of control. Work addiction has a catastrophic effect on families, and Rahul’s family bore the full brunt of it. He constantly argued with his wife who worried that he was stressed. “But I justified the imbalance by thinking that my goal was to become successful.”
Isolated, he barely spoke to her, his friends, mother, brothers and—it visibly hurts him to say this—his daughter. “Once, when we celebrated my wife’s promotion at work, my daughter was in tears. When I asked her what happened, she replied, ‘Now, mom will be busy too’. That hit me hard.”