Gemma Spake

We're going to take a short break.

See if you can guess it.

We'll be right back.

A huge form of escapism that I think we are all waking up to, and which I know is my coping mechanism for sure, is overworking.

We live in a culture that celebrates hard work, glorifies people who put in extra shifts, who sleep less than they need, who are always really, really busy.

What you don't see is that when somebody is a workaholic or maybe even like a passionaholic, right?

Like maybe they're not working all the time, but they always have like a million hobbies and activities or things that need their attention.

This can be a way of physically cramming your life to be so emotionally full.

There is no space left for the negative feelings to creep in.

And that may, that is not may, it is applauded.

And actually a lot of times people who are workaholics do see great success.

They may do better professionally, but you'd be surprised like their mental life, their social life, their emotional life probably suffers greatly, like deeply.

It's also self-reinforcing.

The more we avoid our feelings through work, the more we are driven to other negative behaviors once working hard loses its allure.

There was a study from 2025 that followed like 1,200 full-time employees aged 25 to 65, and these participants filled out an online survey.

They talked about that

essentially assessed them for work addiction emotional regulation deficits addictive eating physical functioning like all these other coping mechanisms and the study showed that workaholics had a depleted levels of emotional regulation over time because again their only coping mechanism is just to work more but that also led to be them being more likely to have addictive behaviors like

substance use excessive drinking eating as a coping mechanism because it became the self-reinforcing cycle it would like the more you work hard and the more you push the less resources you have to take care of yourself the less resources you have to hold yourself up and so the more you then have to rely on other behaviors to give you dopamine and other behaviors to make you feel whole and

From a neuroscience perspective, which you guys know, we always have to offer a neuroscientific perspective, many of these behaviors are rewarded, particularly through dopamine pathways.

And they're rewarded in the short term, which makes them highly addictive, but stops us from actually resolving the underlying emotional state.