The Lie That's Keeping You Addicted to Work

Workaholism. What a funny addiction it is. If I just get the billion dollars, if I just get the acclaim that I want, if I just work hard enough, then people will love me. I work hard enough. Will you love me more? You can feel pretty satiated when it comes to the love in your life, but you'll never be satiated with money. There'll never be enough. You know, why do you think that lottery winners have their lives fall apart and they'll blow their fortune and become poor again? Because there's never enough to buy all the stuff that you want. There's not enough stuff in the world. If work has become an actual love relationship for you that's crowding out real relationships, that's an addiction that we have to address. Because if you don't, you're going to wind up lonely. You're going to wind up isolated. You're going to wind up anxious. You might very well suffer from depression. And until now, you might not have known why. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur C. Brooks. This is a show about the science of happiness, about how you can use the best ideas based in science to lift yourself and other people up in bonds of happiness and love, using ideas that are well validated, that academics have designed their careers to actually understand. And now you can as well. My job is to take the best in science and bring it to you in a digestible form. The reason is because I want you to have the best information. That's the beginning of becoming a happier person. That's the beginning of habit change, is having ideas that work and are well-validated. But I also want you to become a teacher with me. I want together to share these ideas with the world. Please do so. One of the ways you can do so is taking these ideas and talking about it with your friends and family and your kids and anybody who will listen. Another way is to actually share the show with other people. So thank you for continuing to spread the word about Office Hours with other people. It's spreading really quickly and well, and, and it's unbelievably gratifying. Please do send this to your friends and your family and anybody else who can use it. You can write to me proposing topics at officehours@arthurbrooks.com, and today is one of those topics that has been proposed to me. In a past episode, I talked about burnout. That was something that people asked about, but in the same messages, most people also asked about workaholism, and that's today's topic. Now, before we get there, I do want to note that if you like this material and you want a little bit more, please do subscribe to my completely free newsletter every Friday morning delivered to your inbox. You'll get 300 to 500 words of actionable interesting stuff that you can use with actual links to peer-reviewed research. If you're really into that, you can get my newsletter at arthurbrooks.com/newsletter and it's peppered with, you know, interesting facts and anecdotes and even some photos of my grandsons because I need to share those because I want to be a happier person as well. You'll also, you can also talk to fellow members of the community here, people who are involved in this work and meet other people who are interested in this journey as well as you. By going to my website and you can learn about community activities that we've got going on, communities you can actually join. And there are even live events that you can come to because we're starting to do more and more retreats around this material. You can find out about the retreats at retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Right now you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore. But it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. Today. Workaholism. What a funny addiction it is. I want to talk about what it is. I want to talk about why it happens. I want to talk about the origins of it, probably in your life if you suffer from it. But most importantly, I want to talk about the steps that you can take to resolve the issue and come back to being fully alive as an individual. Okay. So that's really what the run of show is today. And if I do my job, if this is a problem in your life, I want to put you on the path to recovery because no joke, one of the things that I'm going to be talking about here is that this is a very serious matter. Workaholism is a major source of what we call gray divorce. Gray divorce is classified by social scientists like me as divorce that happens after 25 years or more of marriage. One of the greatest sources of this is that people don't know each other and they grow apart because they're workaholically married to their work. To their jobs. Any holism, any, any, any, any, any addiction is really just a relationship. You know, one of the reasons that alcoholism drives married couples apart is because the alcoholic partner is more in love with the booze than she is with her husband or he is with his wife. You get my point, right? These are really love relationships. And so the problem that I've got here that I got to talk about is the fact that if, if work has become an actual love relationship for you, that's crowding out real relationships, that's an addiction that we have to address because If you don't, you're going to wind up lonely. You're going to wind up isolated. You're going to wind up anxious. You might very well suffer from depression. And until now, you might not have known why. Well, we're going to learn about that. And most importantly, we're going to learn how to fix it. Now, I have a lot of anecdotes and stories about this and personal experiences. And I will first start by confessing that I have very strong workaholic tendencies, which I will talk about. I mean, left to my devices. You know, early on in my family life, when my kids were little and my wife would go to Barcelona to visit her family and she would take the kids, I'd be like, what am I going to do? When the cat's away, the mice will work. I would be like, okay, now I'm going to work 16 hours a day. It was like, oh yeah, fun guy. Right. And yet that's kind of how I thought about things, which might sound virtuous in its own way and sort of the Protestant work ethic, despite the fact that I'm Catholic. It's not virtuous. It's dangerous as a matter of fact. And these are real hurdles that I've had to get over in my personal life. And I'll tell you more about that. I'm not going to, you know, break down weeping or anything like that. I mean, everybody's got their struggles to be sure, but this is something I know a lot about personally. And it's important that you learn and conquer it as well. But I also have seen it in even worse forms in the people that I've worked with, the people that I've interviewed for my books. I was interviewing somebody for a piece of research at one point, an incredibly successful individual, somewhat older than me, made orders of magnitude more money than I will ever be able to dream of. Just incredible, as a matter of fact, how successful this person is. And, and, uh, he came from humble beginnings as an entrepreneur. And I said to him, you know, I, I know, I knew about how he had made it to the top, which is basically working 7 days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day for decades on end, just working obsessively, working. I never saw the guy not working. And he was well past the age where he could have and probably should have retired and still is working, working, working, working and thinking about work all the time. Just absolutely is workaholic, textbook workaholic as you can possibly be. And I'll give you the textbook stuff here in a second. And I asked him, um, just telling me about his life. And when you're a happiness specialist, people treat you like a psychiatrist, which they probably shouldn't. And I said, when you were young and you were on your way up and there was probably some point at which you knew you're going to be extremely successful and wealthy. Said, yep. Said, how old were you? He says, when I was 32, that's when I realized that when I, that at some point I was going to be, I was going to be rich. And I knew I was going to be, I wasn't rich yet, but I knew I was going to be rich. And I said, what did you think was going to be better about your life? What do you think the major difference in your life was going to be when you got rich? And he thought about it and he said, I actually thought that if I got rich, that my wife would love me. And I glanced at his left hand. He wasn't wearing a ring. And I said, and what happened? And he's sort of silent. And then he says, she didn't. Now, this is a point that I want to make. Um, if you have an idol, if your idol is anything, money, power, pleasure, fame, work, if you have an idol, you will tend to endow it with with magical powers to solve your problems, to make all the difficult parts of your life go away. If I just get the billion dollars, if I just get the acclaim that I want, if I just work hard enough, then people will love me. I work hard enough. Will you love me more? It doesn't work. It's not going to work. I know you know that intellectually, but emotionally you might not at the visceral level, fellow strivers. You might not. So let's talk about that as a pathology. Let's talk about it in the same way that we talk about everything else, which is with respect to the scientific data and facts, what actually leads us to be thinking in this wrong way? What leads us into the patterns of behavior that are so destructive? And most importantly, what can we do to get out of it? Now, workaholism is something that's been talked about since about the 1960s. And it's so weird because, you know, I've lived, most of my adult life in two places in the United States and Spain because Esther's from Spain and, and you know, that's where we got married. I lived there through my twenties and, and I've been going back and forth for extended periods of time for the past 35 years. Workaholism is not a thing in Spain. It's a, it's, it's much more of a leisure-based culture. You try to get something done in August, good luck because the country is shut down. You're not working in August unless you're in tourism, which is a major industry in Spain. But also just, there's this expression called el puente, and that means the bridge. But basically it's, if you have a, if you, there's a holiday on a Thursday or a Tuesday, puente means you take the Friday or the Monday off as well. It's just like your constitutional right practically. And on the days when you're not working, you're not working. There's not this workaholic tendency to turn everything into work. They have a much, I guess, healthier understanding of work. It's not very productive in its way, and it can be really frustrating if you're trying to get something done. But people are not suffering from the addiction in the same way that we often are here in the United States. I see it constantly. Look, I teach MBA students at a business school. I talk to business audiences and leaders all over the place, and they work extremely long hours and obsessively so. 13-hour workdays, 7-day workweeks, no vacations. And in point of fact, a lot of them are addicted to their work. They don't know what to do without their work. They're at loose ends. Okay, let me give you the signs of workaholism clinically. So if you're working with a clinical psychologist and you're exhibiting addictive work behavior, they're going to look for 3 signs. And I'm going to add 4 to them that I've actually studied in my own research. The 3 classical signs of workaholism is that number 1, you work during your free time. You're not being compensated for your work. You're not expected to work, but you work nonetheless. You're working during your free time, not just when there's an overload, not just during special periods of swarm, but because you chronically work during your free time, because it's what you want to do as opposed to having free time. Number 2 is that when you're not working, you're thinking about work. It's what you think about all the time. You can see this in other people where you go out to a bar with your friends and you've got that one friend that has no personality outside of work. That's budding workaholism right there. If you're going to sleep thinking about work, you wake up thinking about work. You're thinking about your job when you're in the gym lifting weights. That's all you can talk about when you're out with your friends. That's number 2. Number 3 is you're always going beyond what's required. Now, sometimes you want to do that. You want to go above and beyond because you're excellent at your job, but you're always going beyond what's required is because you're looking for an excuse to get the relief from that. Now, why would you do this? One of the reasons is because workaholism, like all addictions, is a way for you to treat negative affect. You'll remember from an earlier episode of the podcast, I'll link to that podcast here right now, that affect is your, the predominant mood that you feel positive or negative. And people who have a very, very high level of negative affect, meaning that they have persistent and intense negative emotionality, that one of the ways that you treat that is why is through addictive behavior because it distracts you, drugs and alcohol, gambling. These are classic ways to treat high chronic negative affect, but so is workaholism. And it's an unhealthy thing to do, just like treating your bad feelings with booze. Treating your uncomfortable emotions with chronic work is an unhealthy thing to do. And those are the signs that you're actually doing that: working during all your free time, thinking about work all the time, and always going beyond what's required. That's in, in assessments what we do. And I'll put some of those assessments in the show notes. As well as some of the best literature on that. There's a good article, the classic article from 1992, The Stone Age, from the Journal of Personality Assessment. That's, that's just cited all the time on this as well as a chapter on this. Now, let me add 4 more that I've actually— 4 more signs that I've seen in my own research on classic workaholic behavior. Number 1 is hiding and defensive behavior. You know, everybody knows that one of the classic signs of drug and alcohol addiction is that you hide it.. And so if you're hiding how much you drink from your spouse, this is a problem. This is a sign of dependence on alcohol and even addiction to alcohol. Well, if you're hiding your work from your spouse, it means that this is a sign of workaholic behavior as well. If you know your spouse goes to the supermarket on Sunday and when she comes home and walks in the door, you snap shut your laptop and put her under the cushion of the couch so she doesn't see that you were answering email or working on a PowerPoint. It's the same thing. Another is actually that you're, you're feeling lonelier and lonelier because nobody can actually understand the relationship that you have with your job. Again, this is a classic sign of addictive behavior. Another is that your sense of self-worth is really tied up with work. When you think about your worth as a human being, you start to measure it with respect to how well you're doing at your job. And last but not least is starting to deleteriously affect your relationships. So those are the 4 that I would add to the first big 3. Hiding behavior, loneliness, self-worth tied to work, and damage to relationships. Those are, as far as I'm concerned, should be added to the protocol of understanding of workaholic behavior. Okay. Now, what are the origins of this, of compulsive overworking, which is absolutely incompatible with healthy intimate relationships? They take time and energy and effort. They almost always lead to great unhappiness. When we talk about the solutions to this, what I'm not going to recommend is going to a workaholic or saying to yourself, just stop, just work less. Right? That's as stupid and ineffective as going to somebody who drinks too much and saying, I think you should cut down a little. Right? Sorry. That's not the way addiction works. Work addiction is a compulsive behavior that has an escalation effect to it. It tends to be compulsive. It goes beyond your ability to actually control it. If it's workaholism, it means it's actually getting out of control. So giving people advice, or demanding or putting pressure on them to stop that or pressure on yourself to stop, that's unhelpful. So, I'm not going to recommend that. I'm going to recommend actual methods that work, but they require that you understand what's behind the pathology of your over-reliance on work to be the person that you want to be or to get the satisfaction that you want or to mask your negative emotionality or whatever it happens to be for treating yourself. In that particular way. So here's how you need to understand the pathology. And it gets back to a slightly different concept, but you'll see how it's all related in a second. There's a big literature on what's called intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. Okay. And that just sounds like an esoteric way of saying some simple ideas, which in point of fact it is, because that's how we get tenure in my business. But intrinsic motivation is that which is internally generated rewards that are internally generated. Like I just love doing that thing, whether it compensates me or not. That's an intrinsic motivation. That's an intrinsic reward. Love and happiness that you get from something or an intrinsic reward of doing it. You go to a museum, unless you're a curator or something, they don't pay you to do it, but you want to look at beautiful pieces of art that has an intense, that has an intrinsic motivation to it is the way that that works. The reason that people hang out together after work with their friends, generally speaking, is an intrinsic motivation. The highest level of friendship is an intrinsically motivated friendship. It's not motivated by, you know, something good that you can give me materially. It's something, the fact that you're useless to me. I just love you. That's an intrinsic motivation. This is in contrast with extrinsic motivations, which is to say material things that can be procured that come from outside you. Money, benefits, goods, fame, power, glory that come to you because of something that you do from the outside. Those are extrinsic motivations. So your paycheck is an extrinsic motivation. The satisfaction from your job that you get from a job well done is an intrinsic motivation. Most people in most parts of their life have both, and that's really, really good. Okay. Now that's an important distinction that I want to make because a lot of research contrasts the two and asks what's better for mental health. What's actually better for your wellbeing, intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. You probably can predict based on my comments here, what the result of that research actually is. The more that you're extrinsically motivated to do something, the less happiness it will bring you. The more you're intrinsically motivated to do something, the more happiness it will bring you, the more overall well-being that you'll actually get from it. Lots of research shows this. There are research on little kids, for example, where they'll have their favorite toys in, in a playroom and they'll just be blissfully playing with their favorite toys. Then the researchers will offer them something that they want in exchange for playing with those toys and their motivation to play with those toys falls. Why? Because they've tied the worth of the thing to some sort of market that's been created. So for example, if you play with that truck, I'll give you a cookie. You say, well, now that must mean that playing with that truck requires that somebody give me a cookie, which means that it must not be that great. The intrinsic motivation actually falls when the extrinsic motivation rises. You find this with, you know, in college students, when you give them really interesting puzzles to do and they like doing the puzzles, but if you start paying them money to do the puzzles, they like the puzzles less. In sort of all areas of life. This is how we're wired. Extrinsic versus intrinsic, they tend to crowd each other out. One really interesting study out of the University of Rochester, it asked graduates to, to say whether their motivation for work after graduating from college was primarily about extrinsic things, money, position, or intrinsic things. Their motivation for what they were going to do with the next part of their lives was about love and relationships is what it came down to. Those that were more motivated to make decisions in their careers and their lives to get more love and happiness, be near their families, to have closer friends, 2 years after graduation, they were way happier than those who said, I'm going to make my decisions on the basis of my position about my, you know, where I am in the pecking order, how much money that I'm making. Okay. So bottom line is that there are both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for all the things that we do.. But the more it's extrinsic versus intrinsic, the unhappier you're going to wind up. And all of the experimental research shows the same basic pattern. What you want is to do things that have more intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation if you want to have higher well-being. As you know from listening to this show, I've never been a supernaturally happy person. That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to understand human happiness, not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically. And you can too. I don't do research, I do me-search. Well, and you-search. My time in academia has reinforced a lesson I continue to rely on today. Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through deliberate habits and discipline. I take my personal habits seriously. I need to. I have a morning routine. I've talked about it on this show. It involves prayer and exercise and healthy eating and, and a lot of coffee. Well, taken at the right time. But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that routine that helps me take charge of my day. I came across Magic Mind. Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the supplement space and, and most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience. But Magic Mind has ingredients that I like. Adaptogens, nootropics, such as lion's mane, ashwagandha, cognizin, L-theanine. These are clinically backed compounds with real research behind them. Magic Mind is a 2-ounce shot that you take in the morning. You don't get jitters. There's no crash. It's just your brain working the way it's supposed to. Calm, sustained, and focused. If the same cup of coffee every morning has started to feel more like a crutch than a ritual, or if you're just tired of it, it might be worth trying something that actually works with your neurobiology rather than against it. Right now, you can go to www.magicmind.com, that's all one word, and get 50% off your first order plus a 100-day money-back guarantee. So you really have nothing to lose by trying it. You can also find Magic Mind in stores near you using the store locator at magicmind.com. Now, why do I point that out? Because people who are workaholic are primarily extrinsically motivated. Here's the thing. If you're extrinsically motivated, the world will tell you, and your biology will tell you that if you get enough of that thing, that you'll be finally satisfied. But you won't because there's not enough extrinsic motivation in the world to satisfy you. You can feel pretty satiated when it comes to the love in your life, but you'll never be satiated with money. There'll never be enough. You know, why do you think that lottery winners have their lives fall apart and they'll blow their fortune and become poor again? Because there's never enough to buy all the stuff that you want. There's not enough stuff in the world. Why do you think it is that when people start to get famous, that, that, that then they get insecure because they're not as famous as the next movie star, TV actor, or politician. It's like drinking seawater. Extrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards are seawater. The more you drink, the thirstier you get. Tons of studies on fame actually show this. The only thing that will inherently satisfy you is the love in your life is what it comes down to. And that means you need to do the things that give you that intrinsic satisfaction. As opposed to always searching for the things that will bring in the extrinsic rewards. People who are more extrinsically motivated never can have enough. And so they'll escalate their behavior and try to finally get to the point where they scratch so much that the itch stops, but it doesn't. And that leads to workaholism. Now this has such parallels with any addictive substance or behavior, right? It's funny that when you talk to people who are addicted to opiates, for example, They honestly feel at a visceral level that if I take enough heroin, finally I'll have enough. People who are drinking alcoholically, they say, at some point I will have enough alcohol, but I need a little bit more. But you know, there's not enough. That's a bottomless pit. It doesn't finish except in very, very dark and bad places. And the same thing is true if you think that when you finally work enough, that you'll have earned your way, that you will finally be lovable, that you will have finally achieved the version of yourself that you actually want, but that's an external validation. That's an extrinsic motivation. And you can't get there from here. You're drinking seawater. Now, if you want to see the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their relative level of satisfaction and fulfillment that they bring, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say that you can compare two scenarios. In the first one, You're driving to the most expensive restaurant in town in your brand new Ferrari, where you're going to eat alone because you have no friends and family. Okay. Scenario number one. Number two, you're driving to a Denny's in a 1999 Corolla that the muffler just fell off of to hang out with the people who truly love you and that you love. Which one sounds better to you? Now, I'm not asking you which one would you choose? Because we're all imperfect, right? You might choose door number 1 despite the fact that you know perfectly that door number 2 is the door of happiness, the door of fulfillment, the door of contentment, the door of satisfaction. But you still might take door number 1. Why? Because your biology says just a little more, just a little more, just a little bit more extrinsic reward, and you'll finally, you'll finally have enough. I see this all the time in the strivers that I work with. A story that I've told often in speeches is a woman I was interviewing for a book I wrote called From Strength to Strength in 2022 about high achievers and how they struggle in the second half of life often is, this is an icon in the finance industry, a woman who's at the absolute top of her game, who's just my age and rich. Beyond her wildest dreams and who admitted to me that all she ever does is work and she's desperately unhappy. And I said, well, tell me more about this unhappiness that you're talking about. She said, well, you know, my husband and I were roommates. We're just roommates. Um, I have not much more than a cordial relationship with my kids, not for anything bad, but because, you know, I never really pursued it. And the reason I didn't pursue it is because the same reason I don't really have any friends, which is that all I've done every day for decades is work and become more and more and more successful and make more and more and more money. It's hurting my health. I drink too much. I don't get to the gym. I'm getting bad reports back from my doctor. What do I do, Professor? And I said, you know what to do. I mean, take a souvenir from your firm and step away. Get to know your husband, get into AA, get in touch with your faith, get to know your kids. Come on. She says, I know, I know. And I said, well, why didn't you do it? If you know it, why didn't you do it? And then she was, she thought about it for a while and she said, because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy. That's the search for extrinsic rewards that leads to workaholism, that leads to addiction. And that might describe you. Why? Why would you get into such a fix? Why would you mistake the Ferrari for the Corolla? To go to a restaurant alone as opposed to going to a restaurant where people love you and you're hanging out and having a great time. Why? Well, there's basically 3 reasons that we see this actually in the literature. And one of these might describe you, but knowing this is key to being free. Number 1, if you're a workaholic, it might just be that you had workaholic parents. And this is an epigenetic expression. Now, by the way, it might actually be genetic. There might be something in the human genome that, that leads people to be workaholic, that tends to make people work too hard and to be extrinsically motivated. We don't know. There's a lot of parts of the personality that are genetic. Most aspects of personality, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, they're between 40 and 80% genetic. So why wouldn't this be partly genetic as well? It's absolutely possible. But what we do know is that workaholic parents tend to have workaholic kids. I'll put up an interesting article in the show notes from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Understanding Work Addiction in Adult Children: The Effect of Addicted Parents and Work Motivation. You get it. If you grew up seeing adulthood modeled by people who work all hours and are rarely home, that's what being a grownup is going to mean to you. Plus the fact that you actually might have it somehow encoded into you. The reason that you have workaholism in your life is because you had workaholism growing up. It's number one, happens all the time. Number two is the way that your parents parented you can lead to this. Uh, one of the classic patterns that I see in strivers and people who are deeply addicted to work, um, is often that they learned when their brains were highly synaptically plastic, AKA they were little kids, that love is earned. And this is, doesn't mean you had bad parents. It just means that You got attention and energy and affection from your parents when, when you did a great thing, you came home with straight A's on your report card, you got first chair in the orchestra, you made pitcher on the baseball team, whatever. You won an art contest if your parents were cool, whatever it happened to be, but it was something extraordinary. And your little plastic brain concluded that I get love when I do a great thing. Love is earned. Now, this is not the recipe for becoming a human being. It's the path toward becoming a human doing. Because if you believe that love is earned and you, and you, and you process that and you reinforce that over the course of your life, you will try to earn people's love through what you do. And that almost always means you're going to work harder and harder and harder and harder. There are other ways that that pathology can become manifest. If you realize that you earn love by being unbelievably beautiful, you might get into pathological and unhealthy body modification. You might spend, you know, 9 hours a day at the gym or get endless plastic surgeries. That's another way that people actually try to earn love from other people, as a matter of fact. But for strivers, people great at what they do, maybe you, it might just be that you recorded the lesson that love is earned and then you go looking to earn love for the rest of your life. I work a little harder. Will you love me? Well, I got news for you. Love isn't earned. It's a free gift, freely given. Love is a grace. If you're living with somebody or you're hanging around with people that make you earn their love, they don't love you because that's not what love is. But your brain might not quite believe it. Who knows? I've seen couples that are torn apart because one partner is chronically workaholic, thinking that if I finally earn enough, work hard enough, achieve enough, become admirable enough in the outside world, that then finally I'll be worthy of this other person's love. And what they're inadvertently doing is pushing their partner away. And there's nothing sadder. Love can't be earned. Number 3 is a downstream addiction, which is, I should say, an upstream addiction because really it comes before workaholism, which is an addiction to success. Success, winning is unbelievably motivating for people. As a matter of fact, it stimulates the same neurochemistry as many drugs and alcohol. Involve the, the reward and anticipation of reward involves dopamine. The locus coeruleus spritzes a little bit of dopamine into the nucleus accumbens of the brain that says, do more of that, do more of that, do more of that. People who have a lot of victories, who are really good at what they do, they'll often find that life feels gray when they're not winning. But winning gets harder and harder and harder, which means they have to work more and more and more and more. If you're addicted to success, if you're neurochemically addicted to success and winning, which many of you probably are, then you're going to have to work harder and harder to get back less and less and less. That's escalating behavior. And that's just like any other addiction. And that's going to turn into workaholism. We're going to work harder and harder and longer and longer and longer hours to get that feeling that life has some something, some spark in it. You know, oh, I got that feeling of winning again. I got the deal. I sold the company. I, you know, I got the, I got the attention. I got the applause, whatever it happens to be. That's success addiction. And that's your brain malfunctioning with respect to the rewards that you actually need and that you deserve. All right. Now, here's where we get to the main point that I want to get to, which is if this is a problem, now you understand what you, now you understand what it is and you understand where it comes from, but I really want to talk to you about what you do. In the what to do part, I want to give you 3 pieces of advice, 3 steps that you can take to resolve the issue. These are the same things that I would, a version of which I would give you if you told me you're addicted to alcohol or gambling, by the way. Number 1 is look at the origins and face the truth. Look at why this actually happened in your life. Look at the extent to which your parents did hold out love on the basis of your accomplishments, turning into a a being who believes that love is earned or a success-addicted individual. Look at the basis of why this is probably the case in your life and face it with honesty and say, yeah, that actually became a pathology. And don't blame your parents. I mean, I'm sure your parents were really, really good. I know tons of people who, for example, came from families where their parents were penniless immigrants to the United States who gave everything to give their kids a better future. And they thought that they were doing their kids a great favor by holding them to these unimaginably high standards in school and at work. I get that. You just recorded the wrong information on the basis of this. They actually did love you, but they thought that holding back was the way to do it. So, so, so look at the basis of this pathology and face it with actual truth, not with recrimination, not with reproach, but realize that there's a script in your head that says you're not inherently lovable as you are. So you better go win the spelling bee. Or some grown-up version of the spelling bee. Here's the second piece of advice. Start giving the thing that you most want to receive. You want love. How do I know you want love? Because I live and breathe, my friend. I don't need to be a PhD in all this nonsense for me to tell you what is most obvious. Humans exist to love and be loved. This is the fuel of human life, is love. Not everybody's good at it. Not everybody's good at getting it. And even fewer people are good at giving it. But the truth of the matter is that this is, this is really the mother's milk of the essence of life itself. And so if you want it, if you actually want it, don't try to earn it. Stop trying to earn it. Go give it instead. There's a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin. If you would be loved, love and be lovable is what he said. So stop trying to earn love and just start going and giving love. And that's what you'll start to receive. You'll start to get the intrinsic reward that you want in the first place. Don't, you know, try to earn your spouse's love by working harder. Go love your spouse. Go give them true love in the intrinsic currency that satisfies her or his soul as well as yours. And that means giving of yourself, not money and things. Taking a day off from work, turning off your phone and giving the person you love the attention that they crave all day. When's the last time you did that? This works magic. I promise you. And here's number 3. You need to make plans to change. You've got an addiction and that means you're actually going to have to make plans to change, to make a commitment to change. Feeling like you're listening to this podcast, like, yeah, I got to change. Yeah, I got to change. That's not enough. One day is not enough to repair your relationships. And big changes in habits don't take place overnight. They just don't. I've talked about habits on this show. The average habit takes 42 days to break or make. This is probably longer than that. If you were dependent on alcohol, I wouldn't be so naive as to imagine that not drinking for a day would fix your problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It takes a lot of planning and it takes a lot of resolve and it takes a, it takes a strategy. It means in this case, owning up to your workaholism, acknowledging the roots of your problem and working with your loved ones to make a long-term plan to live differently. And that might mean some significant changes. That might mean planning a career or job change in 6 months to a year's time. That might mean deciding to retire even though you're not ready to retire and setting a date, right? It might mean doing that because once you do that, by the way, you're not going to work workaholically right up to your retirement age. Most people don't do that. They actually start confronting the fact that you're going to go to a completely different, different platform in your life. And so they start to deal with the issue that would make them drive right off a cliff in advance. It also might require making a plan to working less strategically. So for example, scheduling weekend trips and tech-free vacations, um, right now, starting to do that, making commitments to your loved ones to do that, even though it's actually hard for you at first. And then it requires asking people who love you to make you accountable to this. If you don't have anybody who would make you accountable, That's a, that's a sign, by the way, that they are codependent in your workaholism, meaning they're probably making you earn their love and they're part of the problem. So if you were addicted to drugs and alcohol, I might recommend that you get new friends. People who are not firing you up in your addiction. If you're a workaholic, you might need new friends who are not making you earn their love in much the same way. All right. Now, what am I trying to do here? At the end of the day, I'm not saying that this quick quick fix, even if this has given you an epiphany or two about your own life, is going to solve the problem. I want to set you on the path to recovery. That's what it comes down to. You might need help on this. You might actually need to seek counseling or therapy or a clergy or close friends or whatever it takes. But the bottom line is this: you need to face the truth. You need to give more love. You need to make a strategic plan to change. And you need to change because the one thing I can assure you is if you don't deal with this in a forthright way, it's not going to make your life better. There isn't enough work in the world. There aren't enough worldly rewards in the world to fill that hollowness in your soul. Trust me, there aren't. And so you need to get after this is the bottom line, because you deserve to be happy. You deserve to be intrinsically happy. You need to get— be satiated with the love that you seek, that you really seek, that can't be earned. And it's not going to start to happen until you start taking on its face the problem that you actually are experiencing. And I have to do the same thing. Good luck. A couple of quick questions and we're out. Chris writes in at Office Hours to the website. After listening to your Office Hours episode on grief, I have the following question. What is the difference or similarity in grief that arises from loss through death versus loss through divorce? I'm curious if there is a different healing timeline, if there are different steps. So in general, um, the literature would suggest that death is more severe with respect to grief than divorce. And this comes from one 1987 study, but there's been very little written about it. And of course your results may differ because the circumstances are everything, right? You might have had such an unbelievably traumatic divorce where you didn't want it. You were deeply in love. You got blindsided, whatever it happened to be. That it might be as bad or worse than a death in the family. One thing that we do know is that for kids, especially for sons, it's actually less traumatic to lose a father to death than to lose a father who abandons the mother and is absent from the family. The second is more traumatic. And so, you know, the results really differ. It's highly individual. Bottom line is you should treat grief the same way no matter what it is that's actually making you grieve and follow the same protocols that we see there. Thanks for that question. That's a really, that's a beautiful question. This is an anonymous question. Once again, written into the website. My question is on the psychology of forgiveness. Tough one. What advice do you have to remedy the physiology, the physical and mental pain of anger and sadness that come from betrayal? This could come from, you know, disloyalty of a spouse, somebody who hurts you, who's very close to you. How does one pursue a meaningful, happy life with or alongside the person that hurt them. This is very classically the case when one spouse is, is unfaithful to the other outside of the bounds of their marriage, but the marriage sort of hangs together, but it sort of is this, this is phantasm over the marriage. And this is really scarring. It's really, really hard. There is a literature out there about, you know, about forgiveness and I'll go into greater depth at some point about actually the protocols for forgiveness because it's like, There's protocols for everything. There's a model actually for forgiving that makes you better and better and better at it if you practice it following a particular progression of thoughts and ideas. And I want to tell you about it. This guy actually comes from the work of the Templeton Foundation, which is a great foundation doing really important work. And it's called the REACH model. Number 1 is there is something that's really, really bothering you with somebody that you're not going to get away from. Maybe you have a schism with your brother. Or sister. These are your kid. These are people that are going to be part of your life forever. I hope, I hope you're not going no contact with a direct family member, or this is somebody who's betrayed you like a spouse. Okay. So this is somebody that you've decided to stay together with. Here's what you do. As you're healing, to escalate the healing, to heal better and faster, it's the REACH model. It's an acronym. R is to recall the hurt. I know you don't want to, but it's very important that you You make it clear not to retraumatize yourself, but just to remember the source of your hurt. Then move on quickly. This is even harder. Empathize with the offender. Say, I empathize, which is not to say that it's all good. That's not to say that you accept it. No, it's just to say, I understand it. I understand it. I feel what that person was feeling. Right. Not that I would have done it, but I can understand actually what it was that they did. So I recall it and I understand it. Then A, is I am going to give them an altruistic gift. I am going to be the kind of person that gives despite the fact that I don't necessarily want to, but because this is the kind of person that I am. That's A. C is committing to forgive. That's your act of altruism. I forgive this person. And H is holding onto the feeling of that forgiveness because that forgiving feeling of forgiveness is a feeling of sort of wiping clean your soul, or as my wife would put it, voluntarily letting go of a bag of garbage. Now it's temporary, especially when the hurt is fresh, which means you need to go through the REACH protocol maybe every day for a while. Maybe this is the meditation, your holy hour, how you start your day, but R-E-A-C-H and going through it. R is to recall the hurt. E is to empathize with the offender. A is a commitment to give an altruistic gift that's not earned to an offender. C is committing to forgiveness, which is the altruistic gift. And H is to hold on to forgiveness. And then you'll feel better and it will reset you. It'll reset your nervous system as a matter of fact, but you're going to have to do this again and again and again and again. This will help. This is well validated actually in the literature that can help you. And I hope it does. We're done. Please let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, please. Helps us an awful lot. And by the way, that way you'll get, you don't have to happen across the podcast anymore. It'll be delivered right to your door, fresh, like a fresh loaf of bread every Monday morning on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, wherever you like your fresh, hot, steaming podcasts. Leave a comment. I'll read it. Even if it's negative, I want it all. I want to hear what's on your mind and give me more ideas for more shows. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, all the other social media platforms. And while you're at it, maybe order The Meaning of Your Life. As a special gift for somebody that you love, my newest book about how you can actually find purpose and significance in your life so that you can live a happier life and bring your happiness to other people in a spirit of love. I hope you've gotten that spirit today. I hope this has been useful to you. I can't wait to see you next week.