Workaholism corresponds to in his work and a neglect of his extraprofessional life . We see that there is a break in the balance of the person. She will neglect a part of her life, the relationship with others, the relationship with her personal life.

The consequences can be:

• A bad integration in the work team since these people there as they give everything, they will be very demanding with the others. What will create tensions in the teams
• Emergence of professional conflicts
• Development of anxiety disorders ie there may be a fear behind the fact of working too much. The fact of working all the time leads to the perception that the work provided is never enough. This will bring anxiety because the person feels that he is in danger.
• Development of stress which is linked to the impossibility of evacuating tensions. We will have an accumulative stress by the repetition of work activity permanently.
• A risk of evolution towards a syndrome of professional exhaustion: burn-out
• Emergence of family conflicts which leads to the rupture of the precarious balance of the person and therefore even more, perhaps, of retrenchment in the work.

And the person goes into a loop:

"Work gives me pleasure and therefore the only pleasure I have is work."

The more she continues, the less pleasure she will have elsewhere, and the less pleasure she has elsewhere, the more she will continue in the only thing she knows, namely work. The goal is to break this loop.

A survey of 50 employees in the Paris region shows that 54% of them present a medium or high risk of workaholism. The typical profile being a 38-year-old woman living in a couple with child(ren).

The perception that these people have is that work is fair and noble, it gives people gratification, satisfaction, meaning and recognition. The reaction is then a self-delusion that makes work the only possible source of pleasure. This leads the person to use work as an excuse to starve other aspects of their life.

“Work gives meaning to my life, I have my only pleasure in it, and I will give more relief to my work.“ 

We become prisoners and dependent on work and the system: work as the only pleasure as the only factor of meaning! The system and the work eat our life; it becomes like an addiction to alcohol.

A small reframing that a person in charge of human resources or an intervening party could make compared to a person in a relation of dependency at work, it is to put in opposition the level of work, the quantity and the quality. Obviously at the level of the economy we know that the more we increase the quantity, the more we decrease the quality. The goal is to create doubt in the person's head.

"It seems clear, indeed, that the enormous amount of time your work consumes does not correspond to an equivalent quality. Your behavior contradicts one of the most fundamental laws of economics: the greater the quantity of a product increases the more its intrinsic value decreases!" In other words, your way of life is an expression of the sacrifice of resources, time and energy for an uncontrolled amount.

By doing this, the worker creates a doubt in the person's head: if she works so much it is because the quality of her work is not very good. And so what must be done now is to work better, and to work better is to work less; because by working less she will increase the quality of her work. This technique works well with executives, people who do high value-added activities.

How to increase the quality of work?

This is something that is done with product dependencies. With alcoholics, for example, Cristian MORETTO asks them to focus on the quality of the product, to avoid quantity. If the patient likes the wiski then he will have to buy the most expensive wiski.

Do something else to do the same thing

• "You can always be tired of one thing, but you can do something else" Prince Bezhad Behnam
• “Severity alone is death by paralysis; imagination alone is sheer madness” Gregory Bateson
• "How many people regret on their deathbed that they didn't spend more time at work?" Stephen Covey
• "The cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable people" Alphonse Allais

Freeing ourselves from our addiction: to free ourselves from a compulsive pleasure we must add other pleasures...

While remaining loyal to our pleasure, seek new pleasures every day and introduce something small but that can satisfy our senses. Example: music, reading, dancing, sports, shopping, meeting friends, museum, etc.

“Pleasure is to the soul what rest is to the body” Saint Thomas Aquinas

What can you do when you are a Human Resources manager compared to a Workaholic? 

What a speaker can do is oppose the quantity to the quality of the work as mentioned above. But he can also use work against work, that is to say, tell the person that his job is now to find pleasures. The worker could ask him to list all the activities that have given him pleasure in his life. Then make her mentally explore those activities (taking care of children, going to football, going for walks, etc.) that she has abandoned. Then the practitioner must introduce a little pleasure every day, so that the person can gradually open up to the pleasures of everyday life. Obviously we cannot ask the person to change everything, but it is important to make them gradually reopen to the path of varied pleasure, of holy pleasure.