Diligent as a Pole

Every year, nearly 10 thousand people die from being overworked in Japan, yet Poles work even more than the Japanese! The statistician Kowalski had merely one day off from work last year, not Saturdays and Sundays. In the European Union, this is a record! It would appear that we work nonstop. According the data, the statistician Kowalski worked a total of 1918 hours last year. Only the Mexicans work harder (2227 hrs./yr.) and the people of Chile (2000 hrs./yr.). Russians spend a week more per year at work than Polish people. The Japanese are left far behind. However, the furthest behind in this ranking are the French (1489 hrs./yr.) and Germans (1388 hrs./yr.). This means that Poles work considerably more than the citizenry of many wealthier nations of our world.

If we are to take into account the statistical  data provided by Sedlak & Sedlak (2015 hrs./yr.),  we work more than 600 more hours per year  than the Germans!

More and more often, when beginning their professional careers, people of the younger generation seem to fixate all of their attention on their work. Diligence over time becomes an obsession, which slowly destroys the body. Anyone of us can become a workaholic. It is caused by fear of losing a job, uncertainty about the future, an unhealthy level of personal ambition, social pressure, as well as the will to dominate. There are as many causes as there are manifestations of them. Regardless of this, work-a-holism is a very big problem, especially due to the fact that this is indeed an addiction, which is not only socially accepted, but even rewarded in many organizations … This term used to be one, which mainly brought Japan to mind – a nation where working from dawn till dusk is seen as perfectly normal. In Japan, there have been numerous reported cases of deaths due to overworking, giving rise to the term used to describe this phenomenon: karoshi. This socio-medical term is used to describe deaths or serious damage to a person’s health, which are caused by circulatory and heart illnesses (such as heart-attack and stroke). The causes of these are hypertension and atherosclerosis combined with an extreme overload of work. This term came into being in 1969 when such a case was first reported in Japan. It is an ailment that touches healthy and active people who are full of vitality and work much. Analyzing all the reported cases of karōshi in Japan from 1974 to 1990, it has become apparent that death came to those individuals who worked more than sixty hours a week, having more than fifty overtime hours per month and using less than half of their vacation time per year.

According to the International Statistical Classification  of Diseases and Related Health Problems ICD-10, the symptoms of work addiction are as follows:

•  An increase in the quantity and quality of an individual’s involvement in work, made apparent by an increased amount of time allotted to working, as well as taking on more projects and/or assignments.
•  Concentrating all thoughts, goals and dreams on work; meanwhile losing interest in activities,  which do not concern work and treating other activities as if the individual were working.
•  A loss of control over one’s own behavior, manifesting itself in the inability to judge how much time is spent working or how many projects there are to be completed.
•  The inability to abstain from working, or stopping working and living life without thinking about work, which is made noticeable by the subjective inability to cease work-related activities; forced or deliberate cessation of work results in fear or agitation, leading to the appearance of somatic symptoms.
• A decreased sense of satisfaction from the work being completed with a simultaneous increase in the commitment to the job; recurring bouts of addiction, health issues and disfunctionality in society.

Treatment on your own or with the help of a specialist is, above all else, based on the concept of changing the way the sick individual thinks. Simply going on vacation is not enough if the individual in question is going to spend that time constantly worrying about work-related problems. After coming to terms with this problem, it is just as important to take a moment for contemplating the thing that caused the addicted individual to enter such dangerous waters.  And regardless of anything else, why someone, maybe even you yourself, became a workaholic…