Workaholics don’t enjoy working, study finds

To get a better idea of ​​their motivations, an Italian team conducted a scientific experiment involving 139 full-time employees. The researchers asked them to answer a questionnaire assessing their degree of work addiction before analyzing their mood and their perception of their workload using the experience sampling method.

According to the study, employees who are the most addicted to their work are more unhappy than those who manage to take a step back from their career. They constantly maintain a more negative mood throughout the daywithout significant variations attributed to the passage of temps or fluctuations in charge of work.

Addiction often leads to emotional “flattening,” an inability to feel emotions.

This state neutralizes emotions linked to situations which, by their nature, should give rise to them.

For Professor Cristian Balducci, lead author of the study, “it does not seem that people dependent on work derive more pleasure from their professional activity; on the contrary, our observations seem to confirm that as in other forms of substance-related behavioral addictions, the initial euphoria gives way to a negative emotional state that permeates the person even when she is at work“he said in a statement.