Is Being Addicted to Work a Real Addiction?

Norwegian researchers set out to measure work addiction with the same rigour used for other addictions, building a scale around seven features long used to define addictive behaviour: preoccupation, mood swings tied to the behaviour, needing more of it over time, distress when stopping, conflict with other parts of life, relapse into old patterns, and real problems it causes. Testing this on over 12,000 employees, they found the pattern held together as a single, measurable trait, distinguishing people who work compulsively from those who simply work hard. This is a scale-development study, so it shows the pattern can be reliably measured, not that it works the same way in the brain as a drug does, and later reviews have noted that the specific biology behind work addiction is still largely untested. What it offers is a way to name something many high-achieving women recognise in themselves: not ambition, but an inability to stop, where rest itself starts to feel uncomfortable.