Workaholism and its devastating effects

By Hildegard Gmeiner
Copyright © 2006 Hildegard Gmeiner



During the early nineteen nineties I faced one of the most difficult challenges of my life. I was a stay-at-home mother with three little children, yet didn’t have the energy to look after them. In fact, while visiting my parents in Germany in spring of 1992, I collapsed on a department store escalator. As it turned out, this was the beginning of an every increasing cycle of fainting spells, the cause of which could not be determined by the medical professionals.
I clearly remember one doctor telling me that the next time I would collapse it could potentially be due to a heart attack and that unfortunately, in some cases the first heart attack could be fatal.
Once I realized that the problem I was dealing with was beyond the current paradigm of allopathic medicine, I decided to do what ever it takes to figure out what made me tick and what caused me to faint all the time.
In the process of my self-explorations I discovered, I was raised in a workaholic home, was married to a workaholic, and last but not least I was a workaholic, too. The most challenging part in this process of becoming honest with self about my situation, was the fact that my way of going about my daily life, was considered to be normal by the world around me. Workaholism is unlike any other addictions, because of its very strong deniability factor.
Looking from the outside in, I was living the perfect life. I was married to the successful businessman with the six-digit income. We had three healthy young children, a house in the suburbs of Toronto, had two cars in the driveway, and we were able to travel once or twice a year. However, while on the outside all was ever so perfect, on the inside I was living a life of quiet desperation.
I was losing weight faster then I was able to regain it. I barely got any sleep, due to the demands of the three little ones, and my husbands frequent out of town travels. Most importantly, however, the emotional connection my spouse and I once had, appeared to be disappearing with every day passing.
My husband’s executive job demanded a great deal of his attention. At the time he didn’t know how to balance the demands of his work with the responsibilities of a husband and father of three young children. His understanding of being a good father was to provide well for his family financially and the rest would take care of itself.
I clearly remember the frustrating discussion we had about his lack of involvement in the boys daily life. While my spouse genuinely had good intention, it seemed as if his work was a place where he could get his fix. While an alcoholic reaches for the bottle, a workaholic get’s busy to numb an unconscious or in some cases even conscious pain of the past.
While trying to find ways to have my spouse recognise that he indeed was a workaholic and needed help, I had to admit to myself, that I was very much in denial about my very own issues about work. I had become a human ‘doing’ and had all but forgotten what it meant to “BE”.
At some point a book on workahlism had fallen of a shelf in a bookstore, right in front of my feet. I bought the book, read it, and work through my issues with the author of the book. It was during that time, when I suddenly realised that I was a workaholic and hence it was only natural behaviour for me to have married a workaholic as well.
I consider it to be the most devastating addiction, because society is currently still ignoring it and fails to recognise the impact it has on our society as a whole. I venture to say that the values and beliefs we are holding in western societies support and even encourage workaholic behaviour, which is creating great dysfunction in all facets of daily life.
After researching and studying this addiction for over fifteen years now, I believe my body was addicted to biochemical changes, which occur in the brain during the fight and flight response, the body’s self-defence mechanism. The innate survival process, is designed to provide us with large amounts of energy, while we are in life threatening situation. Once the brain is switched to the fight and flight, all regularly bodily function are temporarily suspended, until the threat is over. During the emergency many physiological changes occur. However, most importantly stored sugar deposits called Glycogen, are liquefied and rushed to the big muscles of the legs and the arms, enabling the person to physically defend self or to flee from the aggressor.
Besides that the parts of the brain, which allow us to feel empathy, compassion, and take in the big picture of life become inaccessible to us. Certain hormonal changes speed up the blood clogging mechanism, as to prevent us from excessive blood loss, when injured. One of the most profound symptoms, which led me to believe that my body was literally suck in the fight and flight biochemistry, were my continuously enlarged pupils.
At age eighteen eye clinic of the University of Heidelberg in Germany established that I had what they called an “Aidis Pupil” in my right eye. Apparently nerve, responsible for the dilation and contraction of the pupil had died, causing the pupil to be permanently dialated. After the birth of my first son in 1986, the second pupil stayed permanently enlarged. I was so very sensitive to light that I needed to wear self tinting glasses all the time.
While I wasn’t very satisfied the explanation I was given in Heidelberg, my eye doctor here in Canada, equally accepted the fact that there is nothing he could to but prescription for self tinting glasses.
Today I very much believe that my stuck pupils were very much a message, my body was sending me to become aware of the much bigger problem – workaholism.