Many people struggle with setting and enforcing boundaries. It requires knowing their preferences and breaking points. It means being willing to assert their desires and needs. This is hard for many people, either due to their upbringing or personality—or both.
There are many advantages that come with getting good at this. For example, it can help us protect our emotional wellbeing, grow as a person, develop greater self-respect and confidence, protect our time and energy, avoid burnout, earn respect from others, and prevent unnecessary relationship conflicts.
When we set boundaries, we’re helping others interact more effectively with us. Sometimes we’re setting lines for ourselves that we resolve not to cross. We’re getting clear on what we’ll accept or tolerate.
Boundaries help us function effectively. They allow us to enjoy our life and work while also giving us a sense of control over our lives.
When we don’t set and enforce boundaries properly and consistently, we’re more prone to anxiety, frustration, and resentment. We get overcommitted, perhaps falling into overwork, workaholism, exhaustion, or burnout.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
How to Get Better at Setting Boundaries: 14 Proven Practices
Thankfully, there are many things we can do to get better at this. Here are 14 proven practices for setting and enforcing boundaries:
1. Recognize that setting and maintaining boundaries can benefit our lives greatly, including our work and our leadership. Given all the benefits, it’s well worth the effort. Also, it gets easier over time.
2. Realize that setting and enforcing boundaries is not just good for us but for everyone involved. Why? Because it creates clarity and generates mutual respect.
3. Avoid falling into the trap of overestimating the resistance that will come from setting boundaries. Our brains are good at generating fear and anticipating worst-case scenarios. Often, the reality is not nearly as bad as we fear when we get into worrying mode.
4. Stay focused on the higher purpose of setting boundaries instead of the down-side of the temporary awkwardness. When we set boundaries, it’s usually for a good and important reason such as protecting our wellbeing or reserving our time for our top priorities. In this light, it’s well worth a little temporary pain or awkwardness.
5. Evaluate our current boundariesto identify areas that need improvement. In particular, look for situations that often result in discomfort or resentment.
6. Take an inventory of boundary crossings that have happened. Thinking about these instances, focus especially on the people, the situations, and how they make us feel.
7. Determine new boundaries that we want to set and recommit to or update old boundaries. Our core values and current goals and priorities should inform these decisions. If we’re new to setting boundaries or have struggled with it in the past, we’re wise to start small and build out from there.
8. Communicate boundaries clearly. Sometimes, the problem is that we’re expecting people to read our minds and just know our boundaries. It’s a recipe for frustration and failure. Sometimes, we may want to explain our rationale so the person has context (e.g., “I’m fully booked now so I can’t help with that”). In other cases, we can leave it with a declaratory statement (“I can’t take that on”) or even just a simple “No.”
“No is a complete sentence.” -Anne Lamott, writer
9. Be consistent in communicating and enforcing boundaries. This is key. It’s where the rubber meets the road. Without consistency, others are likely to get confused or forget, and that may take us back to square one. Better to do the hard work upfront and in the early stages until things start to take on a life of their own.
10. Develop our assertiveness, including getting better at saying “no” and saying it more often. We can focus on saying no to requests and opportunities that don’t align with our values or advance our priorities. We can avoid spending time with negative people who drag us down with their criticism, complaints, neediness, or narcissism. And we can decline opportunities or requests, so we don’t end up doing all the work ourselves (versus delegating things to others).
“The difference between successful people and really successful people
is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” -Warren Buffett, chair and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
11. Be kind but firm. Ideally, we come across as thoughtful and considerate while still assertive and clear. Sometimes, a little humor helps.
12. Get clear about who we are, what we value, and how we work best. When we’ve done this inner work, it allows us to set and enforce boundaries.
13. Set boundaries on our work time. For example, we can set a maximum number of hours we’ll work each week. We can limit email to certain hours, with rare exceptions only as needed. It helps to plan ahead—and be sure to identify and focus on our most important tasks.
14. Place boundaries around our emotional commitment to others. Boundaries aren’t just about our time. They’re also about the focus of our attention and emotions. It’s a trap to feel responsible for other people’s choices or their happiness or outcomes.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Of course, setting and enforcing boundaries isn’t a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process that requires reflection and course corrections. As we proceed with it, we must keep making judgments about when to be strict and when to make exceptions based on new information.
As we choose our boundaries, we should bear in mind that other people will make different choices about their boundaries. What works for us may not work for others. So, we should respect other people’s boundaries even as we fight for our own.
Also, it’s a mistake to think about boundaries only in the negative—only as things that we and others can’t do. Why? Because when we get good at setting and enforcing boundaries, it sets us up for all the positive things we actually want to do and experience. By setting limits, we gain freedom. We free up our time and energy to live life on our terms.
“Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it.
You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept.”
-Anna Taylor, author
Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.
Setting boundaries is one of the hardest things for many people to do but it’s a powerful and empowering personal development practice. And costly if we don’t do it well. This article addresses why it’s hard, its benefits, and how to do it well.
+++
Boundaries are dividing lines that mark the limits of an area. If we pause to notice, we can see boundaries all around us. The boundary of our body. Our apartment walls or home and property line. State and national borders. The boundaries of sports. In soccer, it’s sidelines, penalty areas, goals, and goal posts. With basketball, it’s sidelines, free-throw lines, three-point lines, and more. In track and field, it’s running lanes. And in many sports, the clock serves as a time boundary, delineating quarters, periods, or halves, and perhaps overtime.
In life, setting boundaries is about identifying ways for others to behave towards us—and also setting lines for ourselves that we resolve not to cross. Our personal boundaries set a limit on what we’ll accept or tolerate.
We need boundaries to function effectively in and enjoy our life and work. They’re there for our protection and wellbeing, and they can give us a sense of control over our lives.
The Problem with Not Having Boundaries
Lack of boundaries can lead to many negative consequences, including:
negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, resentment
overcommitment and a sense of “time poverty” (“the chronic feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them”)
numbing behaviors (escaping from our thoughts and feelings by doing other things like shopping, eating, binge watching, or doom scrolling)
“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated.” -Brené Brown, researcher and author
Boundary Types and Examples
To understand boundaries, it helps to consider their different types and see examples of them in action. There are many different types of boundaries, including:
Physical boundaries (e.g., whether we hug or shake hands with people we meet, what we do with our bodies, who we allow into our personal space and under what conditions)
Emotional boundaries (e.g., whether we take on other people’s emotional burdens or allow their moods to change ours)
Relationship boundaries (e.g., how we let others talk to or treat us, such as whether we tolerate disrespect, dishonesty, wasting our time, belittling, bullying, etc.)
Privacy boundaries (e.g., deciding what personal information we choose to share and with whom, when, and where)
Conversational boundaries (e.g., whether there are topics—like politics and religion—we choose not to discuss with certain people or in certain circumstances because they may be awkward, painful, volatile, or triggering)
Work boundaries (e.g., whether we allow ourselves to get overcommitted, whether we take on the workloads of colleagues who are slacking, whether we work on weekends or check email on vacation)
Self-care boundaries (e.g., whether we have good sleeping, eating, and exercise habits, whether we check our phones first thing in the morning and/or last thing before bed, how much time we spend on our devices)
Ethical boundaries (e.g., whether we harm, deceive, or manipulate others, whether we look the other way or cover for people when they’re doing bad things)
Financial boundaries (e.g., what to purchase, how much to spend, whether we choose to lend people money and, if so, who, when, how, and how much)
Sexual boundaries (e.g., which kinds of intimate behaviors we’re comfortable with or not)
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
For many, it’s not easy to draw the line, say no, and enforce boundaries. It requires knowing our preferences and breaking points as well as being willing to assert our desires and needs.
“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.” -Brené Brown, researcher and author
Why is it hard? Many reasons, including that we may:
find it stressful and draining to have such awkward or difficult conversations, or feel guilty about asking for what we want or need
lack clarity about what we want and where we’re going, thus making it difficult to know where to draw the line to protect those priorities
not be in touch with our emotions and their causes (that is, not connecting the dots between our anxiety and people making us uncomfortable with certain behaviors)
have experienced previous boundary-crossing, betrayal, violence, or trauma, which can damage or destroy our self-esteem and make it harder for us to set boundaries
“People-pleasing is not who we are; we’re living a lie. So, if we don’t say yes authentically, we say it resentfully, fearfully, and avoidantly, and that leads to far more problems than if we’d just said no in the first place. Find your no, find yourself, find your joy.” -Natalie Lue, author, The Joy of Saying No
The Benefits of Boundaries
Getting good at setting and enforcing boundaries can lead to big wins in our life and work, because it can affect so many things. Setting healthy boundaries can help us:
protect our personal space, safety, and energy
feel less anxiety, anger, frustration, and resentment
enhance our mental health and protect our emotional wellbeing
get clear on who we are, what we want, and our core values and belief systems
develop independence
grow as a person
protect our time and energy and thereby avoid burnout
manage our life, work, time, and relationships more effectively and with greater ease
develop and maintain healthy and positive relationships with mutual trust
earn respect from others
prevent relationship conflicts
positively influence others
“Setting emotional boundaries prevents people from manipulating you, using you, and playing with your feelings.” -Remez Sasson, author
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
We know it’s hard for many people to set and enforce boundaries. It’s easier said than done! So, how can we get better at it? Here are some effective approaches:
Recognize that setting and keeping boundaries can add great value to our lives. It’s well worth the effort, and it gets easier over time. Note all the benefits above and consider the personal empowerment and freedom they can bring.
Recognize that setting and keeping boundaries is not just good for us but for all involved because it creates clarity and mutual respect. It’s not an unreasonable or selfish endeavor. Far from it.
Evaluate our current boundaries (if we have any), including whether there are situations that often result in discomfort or resentment.
Take an emotional inventory of potential boundary crossings, including the people we’re spending time with, the situations we’re in, and how they’re making us feel. This requires tapping into or further developing our self-awareness and emotional intelligence to help us gauge our comfort level. A little self-reflection goes a long way here.
Determine new boundaries and recommit to or update old boundaries, ideally informed by our core values and current goals and priorities. If we’re new to setting or enforcing boundaries, it may be wise to start small and build from there. The earlier we start, the better, so we can work through conversations and make adjustments before getting too far down the road.
Communicate boundaries clearly. In some cases, we may want to explain our rationale so the person has context (e.g., “I’m fully booked now so I just can’t help with that,” or “I’m exhausted from a bunch of things lately so I can’t get together this week”). In other cases, we can leave it with a simple statement (“I can’t take that on,” “That doesn’t work for me”) or even just a straightforward “No.”
“No is a complete sentence.” -Anne Lamott, writer
Be as consistent as possible in communicating and enforcing boundaries, lest others get confused or forget.
Work on developing our assertiveness, including self-advocacy and getting better at saying “no”—and saying it more often. For example, we can focus on saying no to:
requests and opportunities that don’t align with our values or further our personal or professional priorities
spending time with negative people who drag us down with their criticism, complaints, or excessive neediness
doing all the work ourselves (versus delegating to others) or overworking, in the process sacrificing our health and important relationships
“The difference between successful people and really successful people
is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” -Warren Buffett, legendary investor
Strike a good balance between being kind but firm. We should work at being thoughtful and understanding while still clear and assertive. Sometimes, a little humor or levity can go a long way in dialing tensions down.
Get as clear as we can about who we are, what we value, and how we work best. Doing that allows us to set and enforce boundaries. Incidentally, if we’re doing a good job of protecting our boundaries, over time we’ll be filling more of our days with productive and enjoyable activities. In essence, we’re crowding out the bad stuff with the good stuff.
Set boundaries around our emotional commitment to others (e.g., avoiding the trap of feeling responsible for their choices or their happiness or outcomes).
Set boundaries on our work time. For example, set a weekly maximum number of hours and limit email to certain hours, with rare exceptions only as needed.* It helps to plan ahead so we can use our time intentionally and effectively. And it helps to remember the “80/20 rule” (a.k.a., “Pareto Principle”), a power law distribution suggesting that about 80% of our results typically come from 20% of our efforts. So, we’re wise to determine and focus on our most productive tasks. (See the Appendix below for tools that support our time boundaries.)
Conclusion
Of course, setting and enforcing boundaries is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done deal. As we do it, we must keep making judgments about when to be strict and rigid and when to make exceptions or changes based on new information or factors.
Also, it’s a mistake to think about boundaries only in the negative—only as things that we and others can’t do. Why? Because when we set and enforce boundaries, it sets us up for all the positive things we can experience within those bounds. It helps facilitate all the things we want to do and will allow, without having to worry about the stresses and resentment of being defensive and fighting back against potential incursions.
Having boundaries frees up our time and energy to live the life we want.
As we work through this process, we’re wise to recognize that, since people are so different, they’re likely to make different choices—and sometimes vastly different choices—about their boundaries. What boundaries work for one person may not work at all for others. So, we need to advocate for our own boundaries while also helping people advocate for their own—and respecting their choices even as we fight for ours.
Reflection Questions
Which boundaries are most important to you, and why?
What boundaries are easier for you to set and enforce?
Which boundaries do you struggle with, and why?
Do those boundary struggles tend to involve certain people and/or certain situations, places, or times?
What more will you do to set and enforce healthy boundaries, starting today?
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
There are many tools that can help us protect our time. Here are several:
Ivy Lee Method: give ourselves no more than six important tasks per day, listed from most important to least important. Then address them in order of priority, only moving to the next task after completing the current one.
Eisenhower Decision Matrix (a.k.a., Urgent-Important Matrix): distinguish between tasks that are urgent (time-sensitive, demanding immediate attention) and important (contributing to our long-term purpose and vision), using a simple matrix.
Warren Buffett’s Two Lists: write down our top 25 goals, then circle our five highest priorities from that longer list. From there, choose only to pursue the top five—“avoiding at all costs,” as Buffett says, working on the other 20.
Postscript: Inspirations on Boundaries
“Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept.” -Anna Taylor, author
“Setting boundaries is a way of caring for myself. It doesn’t make me mean, selfish, or uncaring (just) because I don’t do things your way.” -Christine Morgan, psychotherapist
“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” -Josh Billings, American humorist
“It’s OK to do what is YOURS to do. Say what’s yours to say. Care about what’s yours to care about.” -Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran minister
“Givers need to set limits because takers rarely do.” -Rachel Wolchin, author
* According to a February 2023 Pew Research Center study, workers with postgraduate degrees and higher incomes were most likely to report that they regularly respond to work emails and messages outside of work hours.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
Everything you need to know about workaholism (work addiction): its prevalence, signs, causes, and costs—and how to overcome it.
+++
Many people today struggle with workaholism—being addicted to work and struggling to switch it off or stop thinking about it
Psychologist Wayne Oates coined the term “workaholism” in 1971 in his book, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts About Work Addiction. He defined it as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.” In 2014, researchers C.S. Andreassen, J. Hetland, and S. Pallesen defined work addiction as “being overly concerned about work, to be driven by strong and uncontrollable work motivation, and to spend so much energy and effort into work that it impairs private relationships, spare-time activities, and/or health.”
According to researchers, work addiction has both a behavioral component (working long hours consistently) and a psychological component (being obsessed with work). It’s a serious problem for many.
A Cautionary Tale About Workaholism
Gerald Chertavian grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts with a strong work ethic. After business school, he moved to London to be with his fiancée. Following a frustrating first job experience there, he was approached with an opportunity to buy into a technology company on the verge of bankruptcy. They had precious little to go on, but he decided to go for it.
The challenges were fierce, but Gerald was committed. For years, he pushed and pushed, until one day it was too much. As he told us in an interview for LIFE Entrepreneurs:
“I looked over the side of my desk in London. It was 2 a.m. and I couldn’t see the ground. It was just black. I couldn’t even see the rug below me. It was like looking into the abyss.” -Gerald Chertavian
This talented and vigorous young man early in his career could have worked himself to death. It was a stark wake-up call.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Concerns about workaholism shouldn’t be equated with a critique of hard work. There’s incredible value in hard work (especially in smart hard work), from opportunities for learning and growth to success and wealth creation.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s another problem: sloth. Many people fall into the trap of not working hard enough and later come to regret it.
Aristotle famously wrote about the “golden mean” of virtue between two vices. So, between sloth and overwork, the golden mean is hard work—ideally work with purpose, passion, and impact. But that’s a far cry from work addiction.
Workaholism shouldn’t be conflated with hard work, a strong work ethic, dedication, conscientiousness, loving what we do, or occasionally working extra hard to complete an important task. These are all good. By contrast, workaholism takes us into the territory of preoccupation, compulsion, and addiction, with the associated loss of self-control and continuation of excessive work despite negative consequences.
If we love our work, that doesn’t mean we’re addicted to it. But if we’re a workaholic, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we work so much because we love it or because we need to when we actually don’t.
Workaholism is also not the same as having an overly demanding boss who piles way too much work on our plates—or as the excessive work sometimes demanded by startups, turnarounds, or crises. Work addiction, in short, is not the same as work overload. (That’s a different problem.)
The Prevalence of Workaholism
The prevalence of workaholism is hard to pin down because it’s hard to define precisely and even harder to measure. And even when it gets measured, there are challenges with getting nationally representative data sets.
Nonetheless, psychologists estimate that about 10% of Americans struggle with work addiction. Research from a nationally representative random sample in Norway using the Bergen Work Addiction Scale found that 8.3% of the population there struggles with work addiction.
These may not be huge percentages, but they add up to massive numbers of people. According to Zippia Research, 55% of Americans (55%) didn’t use all of their paid time off in 2022.
Researcher Brene Brown jokes that when they start having support meetings for workaholics, they’ll have to rent out football stadiums.
Signs of Workaholism
How to know if we struggle with workaholism? It comes with a number of telltale signs, including:
feeling preoccupied with work even outside normal working hours (we can’t stop thinking about it)
being the first one in the office and the last to leave
not taking a lunch break and other breaks
working often on weekends*
working more than is needed or expected of them
having a hard time stopping work
feeling physical and emotional distress when we’re not working, much like the withdrawal symptoms from other addictions
lacking margin in our lives and suffer from “time poverty” (an acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time)
sacrificing time with our spouse/partner, children, and friends because we’re so consumed with work
suffering negative consequences from working so much, whether physically, relationally, or otherwise.
The Bergen Work Addiction Scale is a psychometrically validated assessment instrument developed by testing 12,000 Norwegian workers from 25 different industries. See the image below and consider doing a quick check.
According to the research, workaholics tend to be status-conscious, hyper-competitive, and achievement-oriented. They have high standards (e.g., must be the best) and tend to be self-critical. Often, they have a strong need for success and external validation.
Workaholics may also struggle with close relationships, vulnerability, and intimacy due to a fear of disclosing flaws. And they may neglect their inner life given their focus on external achievements.
Edward Hallowell writes in his book, Crazy Busy, that it can become a habit so entrenched that it makes you “a slave to a lifestyle you don’t like but you can’t escape.” According to Clockify, a company that helps organizations track how much time people spend working on tasks, the top ten traits of workaholics are the following:
Workaholism can show up in different ways. For some, it may be a standard compulsion that’s fairly consistent over time. For others, it gets progressively worse. And for others, it involves binge-working in fits and starts.
Some people are good at hiding their workaholism from others, knowing that it brings conflict or disappointment, so they sneak in work when others can’t see it.
According to researchers, workaholics often make things harder for themselves by placing more pressure on themselves, making their work more complicated than necessary, and hesitating to delegate work when possible or to seek social support when they’re struggling. They may also be attracted to high-pressure jobs with intense demands.
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Where does workaholism come from? Researchers have discovered several sources. Here are the main ones:
Childhood causes. Many workaholics grew up with overly demanding or overly protective parents. This can set up long-term behavioral patterns that can be difficult to escape.
In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown notes that some people consider exhaustion a status symbol and view “productivity as self-worth.” Others have an achievement identity. Shirzad Chamine, best-selling author and chairman of the Coaches Training Institute, has identified what he calls a “hyper-achiever” as one of ten “saboteurs” that inhibit our effectiveness and enjoyment:
“The Hyper-Achiever makes you dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. It keeps you focused mainly on external success rather than on internal criteria for happiness. It often leads to unsustainable workaholic tendencies and causes you to fall out of touch with deeper emotional and relationship needs. Its lie is that your self-acceptance should be conditional on performance and external validation.” -Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence
Emotional causes. If we feel guilty or anxious when we’re not working, it’s easy to numb those feelings by working incessantly. Some people suffer from “productivity guilt”—having a constant nagging feeling that we should be doing more.
Personality factors. Many workaholics struggle with perfectionism, neuroticism, or obsessive-compulsive tendencies. They may have a “Type A” personality characterized by ambition, aggressiveness, and intense achievement striving.
Running from pain. At a deeper level, workaholism is sometimes more about running away from something that running toward the glories of work. There may be great emotional pain, discomfort, shame, or trauma driving it.
“…workaholism is a surprisingly effective distraction from emotional and spiritual problems.” -David Brooks, The Second Mountain
There’s an interesting question about the direction of causality here. It’s clear that workaholism can and often does lead to significant distress in our lives. But researchers have discovered that, for many people, workaholism is also a response to distress in their lives, such as emotional disturbance or anxiety. In other words, it’s caused by distress but also adds to distress, a double whammy.
“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough,
the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.” -Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
Fear. Sometimes the compulsion to work and work comes from a place of fear—fear of not being enough or of disappointing people. Seen in this light, work addiction becomes a matter of overdoing things to avoid the things we’re afraid of (but too often doing damage in the process).
Motivational factors. If we’re highly motivated by extrinsic factors like financial or status rewards, we can tell ourselves that working all the time will bring us the satisfaction and happiness we crave. (See “The Most Common Myths About Happiness.”)
Cultural influences. Some organizations and even nations have a culture that lionizes work and achievement over other values. People living in different countries can have widely varying outlooks on the importance of work.
“American culture valorizes overwork, which makes it easy to slip into a mindset that can breed success addiction.”
-Arthur Brooks, From Strength to Strength
The Problem with Workaholism
Workaholism, like all addictions, can come with a high—sometimes devastating—cost. Here are some of the problems it can cause in different areas of our lives:
Workaholism can contribute to physical health problems, including:
cardiovascular disease
higher systolic blood pressure
insomnia
These are all serious problems. Notably, some languages now have words for “death from overwork” (karoshi in Japanese and guolaosi in Chinese).
It can also contribute to mental health problems, including:
higher levels of mental distress and emotional exhaustion
chronic stress
anxiety
depression
Workaholism can lead to relationship problems, including::
less time with family and friends
more work-family conflicts
Workaholism can have negative effects on our work, including:
more job stress
greater chance of burnout
lower job satisfaction
“Findings suggest that workaholism is related to negative outcomes such as increased job stress, work–life conflict, burnout, decreased job and life satisfaction, and poor physical and emotional/mental health…. workaholism was not related to higher levels of performance or job satisfaction; rather, it was related to many negative outcomes such as burnout, job stress, lower job satisfaction, and poorer emotional/mental and physical well-being.” -Malissa Clark et al., “All Work and No Play?”
Researchers note that work addiction doesn’t necessarily lead to better performance. That makes sense because we’re all human and have limits. At some point, there are diminishing marginal returns for the extra work put in.
Workaholics may get a short-lived rush from completing an important project, but they quickly turn their attention to the next item on their to-do list, placing them squarely on the hedonic treadmill.
Workaholism also leads to lower life satisfaction and more life regrets. In her work as a palliative nurse, Bronnie Ware noted the top regrets of people who were in the process of dying. The second most common regret among her patients was this:
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
Her point here isn’t that hard work is bad in and of itself.
The problem is when we let our work crowd out so many other important things such as our health and close relationships with family and friends. By working too much, we’re optimizing for one aspect of our lives (our work) while harming other important aspects.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Unfortunately, the negative effects don’t stop there. There are also secondary effects of work addiction that spill over into other domains.
For starters, workaholism can lead to secondary addictions (e.g., to alcohol, drugs, pornography, etc.).
According to empirical research, work addiction is also related to poor family relationships, family dysfunction, and marital dissatisfaction. Writer John Eldredge likened it to having an affair with his work.
It can lead to neglecting children or missing family events and milestones (e.g., the birth of a child, sports tournaments, dance recitals, graduations). (See my article, “Five Words that Changed Me as a Parent.”)
Work addiction in parents can lead to problems with their children’s mental health. According to a 2022 study of 527 Lithuanian workers, “perceived work addiction of both mother and father was related to higher levels of work addiction of their adult child.”
And what are the opportunity costs of all these extra hours spent working instead of engaging in other worthy endeavors? For example, how can we take care of our aging parents and grandparents or struggling relatives if we’re so consumed with our work?
Also, our communities and nations suffer when many people are addicted to work. How can people find time to build community and participate actively as citizens when they’re working so much?
The physical exhaustion associated with work addiction can also lead to ethical lapses. According to former President Bill Clinton, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”
What’s more, workaholism may be contagious in some workplaces. According to researcher G. Spruell, “Workaholism practiced by even just one member of a work group can suck the spirit right out of the team” and can cause “destructive competitiveness among coworkers.” Overly demanding leaders can create a toxic culture of workaholism in their organization, leading to dissatisfaction, resentment, burnout, absenteeism, high turnover, lower performance, and great personal damage and regret among workers.
What to Do About Workaholism
Addressing the problem is difficult because many workaholics are in denial about their addiction (see “Self-Deception: Why We Do It and How to Stop It”)—and because many workplaces reward people for workaholic behavior.
“…work 16 hours a day, and you’ll probably get a promotion.” -Arthur Brooks, “The Hidden Link between Workaholism and Mental Health”
Thankfully, there are many things we can do to address work addiction:
Track our time. Carefully log how we spend time for several days (or a week). Then go back and review which activities give us energy and a sense of meaning, versus which ones drain us or seem pointless. Consider whether the amount of time we’re spending working versus addressing other important priorities accurately reflects our core values.
Be brutally honest with ourselves. Stop avoiding and pretending. Decide to push past self-denial and face the reality and implications of our choices.
Ask those who know us best. Sometimes, it’s hard for us to see or admit but all too clear to others.
Set boundarieson our work time. Set a weekly maximum number of hours and limit email to certain hours, except under extraordinary circumstances. According to a February 2023 Pew Research Center study, workers with higher incomes and postgraduate degrees were most likely to say they regularly respond to work emails and messages outside of work hours. Though many people are rightly concerned about the exploitation of lower-income workers, it seems that many upper-income workers and managers are exploiting themselves.
Focus on only a few key priorities each day. Avoid the trap of being overly ambitious with expected accomplishments each day. That can set us up for a cycle of stress and overwork. Being realistic about daily and weekly accomplishments can help a lot. (Consider using the Ivy Lee Method: give ourselves no more than six important tasks per day, listed from most important to least important. Then address them in order of priority, and without moving to the next task until the current one is complete.)
Schedule important, non-work priorities. This can help make sure that other important priorities don’t get crowded out of our busy schedules.
Be intentional about time away from work. When we’re used to working hard, it can be easy to become unintentional and passive when we have free time. There’s nothing wrong with chilling out, but if we let it turn into mindless numbing with too much binge-watching or doom-scrolling, it will only make us more anxious and tired. Meanwhile, we’ll have lost important opportunities to connect with family and friends and to do fun things.
“Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing.” -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author
Think about who we’re giving so much of our lives away to—and whether they’re worth it. In her article, “The Wages of Overwork,” writer and journalist Ann Helen Petersen writes, “Leaders are more than happy to exploit workers’ most anxious or engrained inclinations towards overwork.”
Address the underlying issues that cause us to seek refuge in overwork. Do the inner work of discovering what’s causing us to engage in overwork and what we’re running from. These insights can give us clarity about the problem(s) we must address.
Be clear about our purpose and values. This helps us focus on what’s most important in our lives.
Develop good habits of recovery, renewal, and self-care such as:
Sanctuary (places or practices of peace and self-reflection)
Shift our focus from ego and personal achievement to connection with and service to others. Work addiction is often a selfish and lonely way of life. When we stay focused on connection and service, we can avoid getting trapped by our ego.
Remember our mortality. We will all die, and we don’t know when. Remembering this can help us determine what’s important in our lives right now.
Regularly review how we’re doing in all the important areas of our lives. (See my Quality of Life Assessment—which you can set up for regular reminders.) By reviewing each area (e.g., family, health, friends, education, work, service, activities, finance), we can see which ones are neglected and problematic—and then take appropriate action.
“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls… work, family, health, friends, and spirit. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will never be the same.”
-Brian Dyson, former CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Remember Gerald starting into the abyss at 2 a.m. in his London office after years of overwork? Here’s what happened next:
“Right there, I realized that I wasn’t doing what I needed to do with my life. Then I went home and gave myself grades as a father, husband, friend, community member, and businessperson, and I only got one A—and the A was as a businessperson. I said that’s the last time in my life I’m going to look in the mirror and give myself those grades, period.” -Gerald Chertavian**
Reflection Questions
Are you suffering from or at risk of work addiction?
How is it affecting your health, relationships, and quality of life?
“If you think your busyness is some kind of prestige symbol, think again.” -Chris Brogan
“Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.” -Christine Carter
“You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
“Overwork sucks us into a negative spiral, causing our brains to slow down and compromising our emotional intelligence.” -Annie McKee, author and advisor to top leaders
“Everyone knows that if a child’s parent dies, the child will suffer with sadness, loss, and possibly depression. No one thinks about this being the case when a child loses a parent to success.” -Jonice Webb with Christine Musello, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect
“No matter how much value we produce today—whether it’s measured in dollars or sales or goods or widgets—it’s never enough. We run faster, stretch out our arms further, and stay at work longer and later. We’re so busy trying to keep up that we stop noticing we’re in a Sisyphean race we can never win.” -Tony Schwartz, journalist, author, founder, The Energy Project
“My worry was that I would become addicted to success. It’s a delicate and dangerous zone—the interface between success and significance—to get as much success as you can without getting captured by it, becoming its prisoner.” -Bob Buford, Half Time
“Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. That is why… there is so much unhappiness, so much pain… They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
“Human beings have always employed an enormous amount of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people, and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.” -John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal
Sources:
Andreassen, C. S., Hetland, J., & Pallesen, S. (2014). Psychometric assessment of workaholism measures. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 29(1), 7–24.
Morkeviciute M., Endriulaitiene A. Understanding Work Addiction in Adult Children: The Effect of Addicted Parents and Work Motivation. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Sep 8;19(18):11279.
Spruell, G. 1987. Work fever. Training and Development Journal, 41: 41-45.
* We should note that in today’s economy, many people choose to work nontraditional hours, as opposed to the standard Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Of course, choosing to do so isn’t in and of itself a sign of work addiction.
** Gerald Chertavian and his team built that company, Conduit Communications, into one of Britain’s fastest growing companies, eventually having more than 130 workers in several countries and earning more than $18 million in annual revenues. Six years later they sold it for a significant return and made millionaires out of many of their colleagues in the process. He later founded YearUp, a national 501(c)3 workforce development organization committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for all young adults—no matter their background, income, or ZIP code.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
We all have wants and needs, but most of us don’t think of ourselves as needy. That may be true, but in many cases we’re more needy than we think.
For many people these days, and especially high-achievers, neediness shows up as excessive attachment to recognition, praise, or success–or to saving others–for self-acceptance. It comes with an excessive desire for reassurance or affirmation from others. This is easy to miss because we’re probably reluctant to admit it when we feel it.
Such achievement-based approval is baked into Western culture and our society’s views about what’s expected in life—and what comprises a good life. At work here is the mistaken assumption that success and prestige in the eyes of others will bring us happiness and fulfillment. (They won’t.)
Neediness can hit us hard when we encounter hard times in our career, such as a layoff, and when we go through big transitions in life, such as graduation, career change, or retirement.
It has pros and cons. On the one hand, neediness can motivate us to work hard, achieve at high levels, and contribute to others. On the other hand, it can detract from our quality of life and harm our relationships.
In his book, Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine describes the profile of what we calls a “hyper-achiever:” someone who is “dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation.” (This is one of ten “saboteurs”—automatic and habitual mind patterns—he’s identified that work against us and our work teams.)
“Some people become insecure overachievers. They seek to win by accomplishing the love, admiration, and attachment they can’t get any other way, but of course no amount of achievement ever gives them the love they crave.”
-David Brooks, The Second Mountain
White Knight Syndrome
One version of neediness comes in the form of what psychologists call “white knight syndrome” (or “hero syndrome”). It’s a need to rescue or save people via helping, such as with advising or coaching them or sharing ideas with them, as a way to boost our sense of self-importance.
Often, it leads us to give unsolicited advice often, in all sorts of settings, with the justification that we’re just trying to help. It can also come with feelings of anxiety or aimlessness when we’re not helping others and annoyance or hurt when people don’t come to us for advice or follow the advice we gave—and sometimes with fishing for praise after we give advice to get acknowledgement about how much we helped.
We base our self-worth on our ability to “fix” people, and it’s a core part of our identity in relationships or work as we’re overly keen on offering help and advice
We have a strong need to be viewed as important
We have a tendency to engage in controlling behavior under the guise of helping people
We’re quite self-critical
We gravitate toward those who are needy
We fear emotional distance and seek to entangle people back into a position of needing our help when that fear arises
According to Dr. Lamia and other psychologists, it can come from many sources, including: a lack of healthy and affectionate bonds during childhood, authoritarian parents, being deeply affected by the suffering of a caregiver, a history of neglect or unhealed abandonment wounds, or having to take on a parent role due to a parent with addiction or health issues.
Though there’s a desire to help that’s part of this, there are also selfish and controlling dynamics at work. People can sense that, so they may begin to resent the help and pull away. Many people can feel put down when others step in with unsolicited advice or unrequested help.
They may also sense that the advice that comes from another, while valid in its original context, often misses the mark in the new context with different people, personalities, and dynamics at work. It can take a high toll on both parties and lead to misunderstanding and mutual resentment, as well as codependency and the undermining of the recipient’s ability to address their own issues.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
There are degrees of neediness. We’re probably all needy to some degree in certain areas, while some people are very needy in several areas of their life and work.
With neediness, we tend to do at least a few of the following fairly often:
have a frequent urge to be noticed
go out of our way to impress others
feel attacked when receiving criticism—or obsess over it
be hyper-competitive
have a strong desire to be the one who comes up with the answer or solves the problem
play status or power games or want to control the people or things around us
be prone to adapting our personality to impress others
pay people excessive compliments as a way to earn their favor
experience discomfort with self-disclosure, emotional vulnerability, or intimacy
pull away when close relationships are beginning to form
be skilled at hiding insecurities
only feel good when we’re successful and held in high esteem
have a hard time feeling lasting peace and contentment due to a recurring itch for the next win
be image- and status-conscious and spend a lot of time on social media (e.g., tracking follower counts and likes)
(Note, also, that many of these can be blind spots for us. We can go long periods without being aware that we’re doing some of these things, then get surprised with forthright feedback from a trusted friend or mentor.)
“When everybody loves me, I’m gonna be just about as happy as I can be.”
-The Counting Crows in their song, “Mr. Jones”
Where Neediness Comes From
Psychologists note that neediness often comes from not having our needs adequately met as children (e.g., feeling neglected, dismissed, invalidated, or rejected). When we’re children, even minor incidents involving these feelings tend to get blown up.
Many children learn early on that they can gain acceptance, praise, affection, or love by proving themselves with obedience or achievement, setting up a conditional view of self-regard that can become problematic later on if not balanced with a healthy sense of self-worth.
Even with well-intentioned, caring parents, we can get the sense that we’re only worthy and loved when we do things as our parents expect—i.e., that we’re only worthy of conditional love.
Neediness can also come from mistaken beliefs about ourselves (e.g., we’re not worthyor good enough) that we’ve never examined critically, as well as from insecurity, trauma, or abuse.
Part of the challenge here is that we’re battling our own neural wiring. Our brains and bodies seek the chemical rewards, via neuro-transmitting hormones, of achievement leading to praise (and the avoidance of mistakes leading to disapproval). It’s a stimulus-response feedback loop that begins early in life and becomes etched deep into the neural pathways of our brains.
Leadership Derailers Assessment
Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.
Though neediness can come with certain benefits, such as intense effort that can lead to achievement, it also has many drawbacks. For example, neediness can:
make us overly intense, controlling, or demanding
make us dependent on or excessively vulnerable to other’s judgments and opinions
make us feel bad, ashamed, or distraught when others don’t like what we did
make us feel as if we’re never enough
lead to dysfunctional behaviors, such as people-pleasing
bring anxiety, stress, burnout, disappointment, or loneliness into our lives
be a heavy burden to bear—always carrying the pressure of living up to imagined and exaggerated demands and expectations
lead to compulsive overwork or workaholism, creating an obsessive relationship with work in which we can’t switch it off and in which we feel guilty when not working
lead to underinvestment in other priorities like our health and close relationships
make us vulnerable to manipulation and control by others since we’re so focused on their approval
cause us to compromise our integrity and make poor decisions as we downplay our personal values to continue a positive appearance among others whose moral fiber may be compromised
make it hard for us to make decisions without input from the ones we seek approval from
further the illusion that the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our circumstances (e.g., where we live, what we drive), as opposed to deeper and more lasting things (e.g., our character and contributions)
take us away from ourselves (from who we really are and what we value), as we seek to remain the good graces of others with different values and priorities
induce us to play the comparison game as we obsess over our standing among others
cause us to obsess over what we don’t have
inhibit the level of authenticity, connection, vulnerability, and intimacy in our relationships
push our partner, friends, or colleagues away because it’s not an attractive quality and can feel clingy and smothering
make us waste a lot of time seeking feedback and assurances from others instead of doing what’s needed to get things done
make us reluctant to accept help from others
cause us to become addicted to approval and external validation
lead to selfishness or being perceived as self-centered and overly image-conscious
haunt us throughout our lives with fears of disapproval, rejection, or abandonment
inhibit our spiritual life or development as our need for external validation crowds out ultimate matters
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
It’s clear that neediness has many drawbacks. So, what to do about it?
There are many things we can do to address neediness, including:
Develop more awareness and understanding of this behavior pattern. Ask ourselves these questions: When does it show up? Where does it come from? How does it affect me?
Cultivate self-acceptance and self-compassion—and shut down our inner critic.
Celebrate our successes (even when others don’t).
Spend more time alone, in the process building our comfort level with solitude and working to overcome the cultural bias against it. As we do this, we see more and more that we can fulfill many of our own needs with the right disposition and mindset.
Change our focus from working for approval to working for some other higher aspiration. Examples: contributing to others, supporting our family, expressing our true nature, just doing the work for its own sake, or feeling satisfied when we’ve worked hard and done our best.
Focus on being an equal partner to those we’re with, not a savior, and on letting them figure out their own path, perhaps guided by gentle questions or things for them to think about instead of advice
Stop equating ourselves with our results or our titles.
Reflect on whether our goals are mostly concerned with how others view us or with our deeper intrinsic motivations (such as earning a degree or certification because it interests us).
Avoid overthinking and ruminating—as well as jumping to conclusions about what others are thinking and why.
Recall that true self-worth comes from inside ourselves and not others.
Don’t assume that someone’s feeling or opinion about us makes it accurate. They may be missing important aspects of the story or have some other confounding influence or bias.
Maintain perspective: even if someone disapproves of something we did, how much does it really matter? How much will it matter a few months from now?
Focus less on ourselves and more on others—and serving them. Oddly enough, the more we focus on ourselves, the more miserable we tend to be.
Focus on replacing ego and fear with acceptance and love.
Realize that relying on the opinion of others for happiness, love, or peace is bound to disappoint. Consider looking instead to something more transcendent and lasting such as fidelity to a community or worthy cause, creative inspiration, reverence for nature, religious worship, or spiritual liberation.
Conclusion
If we struggle with neediness, it’s worth addressing because on the other side of it lies real power, freedom, and contentment. Without such neediness, we can experience more ease, appreciation, and joy. We can let go of things that won’t hold up over time so we can dive into and savor the things that will.
Reflection Questions
To what extent are you attached to recognition, praise, success, or saving others for self-acceptance?
How is it impacting your quality and your relationships with others and with work?
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
One facet of neediness for some can be a strong desire for fame. According to social psychologist Orville G. Brim, about 30 percent of survey participants in Beijing and Germany and over half in the U.S. report daydreaming about fame. Recent studies have shown that the biggest goal in life for U.S. children aged 10 to 12 is fame. A survey of British children found that the most coveted career choice was “YouTuber.”
Mathematician Samuel Arbesman devised a crude but clever method for estimating the percent of the population that is famous, taking Wikipedia’s “Living People” category and dividing it by the world’s population. The result? About .0086% of the world’s population is famous, using that method. A tiny number indeed.
Meanwhile, how many of those people are pleased with the baggage that comes with fame and how it changes their experience of life? With all its appeal, fame can be one of the trickiest human experiences to manage. A problem of privilege, no doubt, but still a tough problem for many.
“I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.”
-Jim Carrey
Postscript: Inspirations on Neediness
“Being dependent on approval—so dependent that we barter away all our time, energy, and personal preferences to get it—ruins lives.” -Martha Beck, writer
“Too much self-centered thinking is the source of suffering. A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness.” -Dalai Lama
“As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
“The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what people think.” -C. Joybell C., writer
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, entrepreneur and author
“Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy.” -Alex Dias Ribeiro, former Formula One race-car driver
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important… They do not mean to do harm…. They are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” -T.S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”
“We are not devastated by failing to obtain a goal. We’re only devastated when our sense of self-esteem and self-worth are dependent upon achievement of that goal.” -William James
“The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world….” -Frederic Laloux
“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” -Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
“The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.” -Albert Einstein
“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.” -Norman Vincent Peale
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
Many of us are always “on” these days, running from task to task. Never-ending demands. Frenetic pace. We fill every available moment with activity or scrolling through our digital feeds. The problem: We don’t have enough margin in our lives.
Young hustlers making it happen. Working parents managing the household. Climbing the corporate ladder or growing our small business or nonprofit. Perpetual busyness.
It feels heavy always going at this pace. We get exhausted.
It’s not common to talk and think in terms of margin in our lives. But it’s needed now more than ever. A margin is the border between things, like the margin on a page. Filling every page up to the max just gets overwhelming.
The Consequences of Not Having Margin in Life
The consequences of not having margin are severe: lower quality of life, less happiness and fulfillment, and lower performance at work over time.
“If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the Information Age, it’s a lack of reflection. Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting. We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than just reacting to problems as they arise.”
-General James Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and four-star Marine Corps General
It can damage to our health and relationships—and our soul. Not having enough margin in life can lead to burnout and a sense of emptiness. It takes time away from the things we enjoy, such as hobbies or time with friends. And it prevents us from exercising enough. Notably, it also induces us to stress-eat, binge-watch, or skimp on sleep.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Having margin gives us room to breathe, to reflect and renew. To “sharpen the saw,” as author Stephen R. Covey wrote. With margin we can rise up and view things with perspective. We can reactivate our creativity and wisdom.
When we have breathing room, we can start to see where we’re going wrong—where we’re shooting ourselves in the foot with dysfunctional behaviors. We begin to see the possibilities for change.
Without margin, we keep our heads down and keep ploughing forward, stuck in the same traps and not even admitting it to ourselves. Sometimes we’re too busy and distracted to notice.
What to do with the margin we carve out in our lives? With it, we can:
reflect on what’s important
assess how things are going
see if there’s a gap between the life we have and the life we want
consider new ideas for closing that gap
experience mindful living in the present, without fretting about the past or worrying about the future
Why Is Having Margin in Life So Hard?
It sounds simple enough, but it’s not an easy feat in today’s world of dizzying distractions and cunning algorithms designed to hijack our attention with chemical manipulations in our brains. At bottom, they’re not giving us a better life but an escape from it.
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop. Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
-Sean Parker, first president of Facebook and co-founder of Napster
The evidence is alarming. Average daily digital content consumption (including time spent on social media, news sites, and streaming) is now just under seven hours (six hours and 59 minutes), according to a recent Forbes report.
This can lead to what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “psychic entropy,” a condition of inner disorder in the mind, often including a chaotic mental review of things that impairs our effectiveness. He writes that it “involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish.”
It’s especially difficult if we’re trying to please everyone and not learning to set boundaries and say no—a big challenge for some people. In turn, this leads to us becoming overcommitted and falling into a death spiral of too much anxiety without the mental and emotional fortitude to deal with it and too much work volume without enough deep work to handle it.
“Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference.
Being busy is a form of mental laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”
–Tim Ferriss, author and podcaster
For some, a compulsion to achieve, win, or achieve recognition or status prevents us from carving out enough margin in our lives. This can lead to workaholism, a state of addiction to work in which we can’t switch it off or stop thinking about it. Another factor is being overly optimistic about what can get done by when—wearing “rose-colored glasses,” as they say.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
So, how to get more margin in our life? It helps to acknowledge the problem first, perhaps flowing from an assessment of how we’re spending our time and determining the areas in which it’s not time well spent. (Yes, there are apps for that.)
Perhaps most importantly, we must get clear on what’s important to us, starting with our values (what we value most in life—and the behaviors that manifest those things), purpose (our reason for being, or what infuses our life with meaning and significance), and aspirations for our life and work. Modern movements like essentialism and minimalism can help us avoid the trappings of overconsumption and overscheduling while distilling things to the essential few that enrich our lives.
It’s essential to establish clear and challenging criteria for what to say “yes” to and to get better at saying “no” to many things that come across the transom in our lives. As author Greg McKeown advises, “If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.”
Next, we need to build renewal into our days, giving us a sense of serenity instead of that precarious state of anxiety from the cumulative effects of overwork, stress, poor sleep, and not taking caring of ourselves or connecting enough with others. There are limits to our energy. We need good habits of rest and renewal.
“In life itself, there is a time to seek inner peace, a time to rid oneself of tension and anxiety. The moment comes when the striving must let up, when wisdom says, ‘Be quiet.’ You’ll be surprised how the world keeps on revolving without your pushing it. And you’ll be surprised how much stronger you are the next time you decide to push.” -John W. Gardner
Even better if we can find “sanctuary” in our lives—places and practices of peace that restore our hearts. Places of quiet and tranquility. Beyond the striving, beyond the chase, beyond the willfulness, there’s an acceptance, a yielding, a comfort with the present moment and a willingness to see things for what they are and ride with the flow of life. It’s the serenity beyond the stress and struggle.
It helps to schedule margin into our lives: put it on our calendar and protect it. We must regain control of all the things that eat into margin, such as email or Slack, meetings, smartphones, interruptions, and messy workspaces. Also, we need to get better at anticipating and preventing distractions, thereby creating the conditions for focus, flow, and deep work.
We should also look for smaller things we can do—quick and easy hacks that help us preserve margin. In his book, Indistractable, Nir Eyal, recommends the “ten-minute rule”: waiting ten minutes before giving in to an urge to check our phone as a pacification device.
Reflection Questions
Do you have enough margin in your life?
How is lack of margin harming your wellbeing, relationships, or work?
What steps will you take, starting today, to reclaim your life and the margin it requires?
Tools for You
Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Postscript: Inspirations to Help You Build More Margin in Life
“I love a broad margin to my life.” -Henry David Thoreau
Margin is “time to make room for change.” -Jeff Sapadafora, author and coach
“What do we want more of in life?… It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough. More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth. More stillness.” -Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is the Key
“Human beings have always employed an enormous amount of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.” -John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal
“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.” -Ovid
“All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence…. Silence is the general consecreation of the universe.” -Herman Melville
“We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.” -Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Books that Will Help Change Your Life with More Margin
One of the silver linings of the covid-19 pandemic was what it reminded us about our longing for relationship, for connection, for human touch. What was suddenly stolen was dearly missed and now cherished. We see the problem of going it alone.
One is a culture of excessive individualism and egocentric living, a sense that life is all about us. It’s the trap of being self-absorbed and caught up in our own stuff, without focusing on something larger than ourselves. If we’re fortunate enough to live a comfortable life with our needs met, one danger is that we can “cocoon” into our big homes with big yards with more stuff than we need and wall ourselves off into social isolation.
Here we encounter the emptiness of egocentric living. By contrast, we can pursue the meaningfulness of relational commitment, of being there for others and letting them be there for us.
“…there is much more to life than your career…. In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work–and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families–starving one of the most important parts of our life.”
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
There’s a mountain of research demonstrating the importance of relationships, belonging, and social connectedness to our happiness. Take the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a massive longitudinal study of hundreds of people for about 80 years now. Writing about the study in The Atlantic, Joshua Wolf Shenk reported, “The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history,” including interviews, questionnaires, medical exams, and psychological tests.
The subjects continue to be studied to this day. They’re evaluated at least every two years by questionnaires, information from their doctors, and interviews. Researchers gathered information about their mental and physical health, career enjoyment, retirement experience, and marital quality.
When asked what he’s learned from the study, psychiatrist and professor George Vaillant (a psychiatrist who led the study for decades) wrote: “Warmth of relationships throughout life have the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’… (We now have) “70 years of evidence that our relationships with other people… matter more than anything else in the world…. Happiness is love. Full stop.”
“All you need is love.”
-The Beatles
Sources of Happiness
In another study, researchers sought to identify the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent of people among us. What did they find? Wealth? Beauty? Fame? Fitness? No, the main distinguishing characteristic of the happiest 10 percent: the strength of their social relationships.
According to summary findings on happiness from Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky and other researchers she’s studied (from her book, The How of Happiness), the happiest people:
Devote a great amount of time to their family and friends, nurturing and enjoying those relationships
(Note how many of those activities involve relationships.)
According to researchers who evaluated data from the World Values Survey, which surveyed people in more than 150 countries about their life satisfaction, the top factors that account for about three-fourths of reported well-being are:
social support
generosity
trust
freedom
income per capita
healthy life expectancy
(Note how many of these factors are social. The link between life satisfaction and social connection has held up very well across time and place, according to the World Happiness Report 2015.)
“Here’s the most fundamental finding of happiness economics: the factors that most determine our happiness are social, not material…. social connectedness is the most important of all the variables which contribute to a sense of wellbeing in life. And that is true at any age…. We are each other’s safety nets.”
-Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve
Isolation and Going It Alone
Alas, the flip side is also true. Isolation can become a downward spiral, fostering discontent and shame, leading to further isolation. It turns out that going it alone through hard times and transitions, though an instinct for many, is a recipe for more hardship.
“Isolation is fatal…. The burden of going it alone is heavy and limiting—and potentially dangerous…. In fact, social isolation can take up to seven years off of your life. Isolation contributes to heart disease and depression; it influences your immune system and leads to faster aging and advanced health problems.”
-Richard Leider and Alan Webber, Life Reimagined
Truth be told, staying connected to others can be hard at times. It doesn’t help that we have so much political division and distrust, with so many people dismissing or dehumanizing others who have different views. Our age of political contempt, partisan warfare, and take-no-prisoners tribalism is surely not helping.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Many of us also struggle with vulnerability, with asking for help. We fear feeling uncomfortable and a potential loss of social status if we admit that our lives are not Instagram-perfect. So we resort to superficial conversations that feel safer, neglecting the deeper territory of openness and self-disclosure through meaningful dialogue.
“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.”
-Brene Brown, researcher, speaker, and author
What’s needed, though, is more of what design thinkers call “radical collaboration,” which can be thought of as collaborating much more than you normally would—proactively seeking mentors, coaches, friends, peer groups, and people to learn from and ask questions.
The problem of going it alone in times of trouble or transition is that it doesn’t work very well. A better approach: reach out and connect. Share. Listen. Help, and accept help. You and your family, friends, and colleagues will be glad you did.
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Postscript: Quotes on Relationships and Not Going It Alone
“In everyone’s life, at some time, an inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” -Stephen R. Covey, author, executive, and speaker
“Belonging begins with safety…. this is a place and a relationship where you feel safe enough to be the real you.” -Jonathan Fields, How to Live a Good Life
“Going it alone in times of hardship is never a good idea.” -Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve
“Being in a state of in between means being in some state of loneliness. Being neither here nor there often feels like being nowhere. Which is why connecting with others is so central to getting through one of these times. Human beings like to share.” -Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions
“I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.” -Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
“Well, what are you? What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself: your kidneys, your liver, your blood vessels? No. However far you go in your memory it is always some external manifestation of yourself where you came across your identity: in the work of your hands, your family, in other people. And now, listen carefully. You in others—this is what you are, this is what your consciousness has breathed, and lived on, and enjoyed throughout your life, your soul, your immortality—your life in others.” -Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist (Doctor Zhivago)
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
These days it’s easy to fall into the trap of playing the short game. Our culture is geared toward it. With our devices, we’re developing the attention span of a gnat. We swipe and scroll. We get fidgety with a few seconds of down-time.
The power of the long game is astonishing, but the short game is alluring. We see it in many realms.
We see it in business.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen noted, “If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.”
We see it in startups.
Entrepreneur and educator Steve Blank notes that many startups incur what he calls “organizational debt”: “all the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup.” Common examples: a lack of good onboarding and training, missing job descriptions, chaotic compensation, puny HR budgets, and more. While these compromises can help keep the cash burn rate down, they “can turn a growing company into a chaotic nightmare.”
We see it in our climate.
We’re making a harrowing gamble with our children’s future as we fail to address the gathering dangers of climate change.
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Caught up in our careers, we lose touch with family and friends—something we’re likely to regret. Australian nurse Bronnie Ware, working in palliative care, found that two of the top regrets of people as they approached their death were: wishing they hadn’t worked so hard, and wishing they had stayed in touch with their friends.
When we’re young and in school, we face pressures about what we’re going to do next, with expectations from parents and peers, and without much basis for making big decisions. Too often we make big decisions based on the pressures of the moment in ways that don’t stand the test of time. We follow the herd into that high-status profession. Or we choose solely based on the paycheck.
We see it in life.
One day there will be a reckoning for the choices we’ve made. Did we fall into the following short-game traps?
Thousands of years ago, Aristotle advised, “Plan with your whole life in mind.”
Now more than ever we need to reorient our life and work to the long game.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
There I was, a new father, my wife and I blessed with a beautiful young daughter, before our second daughter came along.
I had been awed at her birth, feeling the world move. Growing up, I had always hoped to have a family and be a father. I knew it would be a tremendous responsibility to be in charge of someone’s care.
I knew it conceptually and thought I understood it but really had no idea whatsoever—no clue—until I became a father and experienced how magical, and sometimes how trying, it could be.
I recall one day home alone with her, around age two, and we were both out of sorts. I was trying to get things done and felt so much pressure about all she needed and all I needed to get done. I was trying to juggle, but she was not having it. I was overwhelmed. I felt an unbearable pressure.
How is it possible to do all this? How do others do it? What’s wrong with me?
I was at my wit’s end, and it just kept getting worse. She resisted everything with her signature strength. I reached a breaking point. Out of ideas, I sensed that my only option was to give myself over to her. Completely. There would be nothing else:
I am here for you, only you, all for you, totally you.
When I did that, she saw that something in me had shifted, and she stopped resisting. Just like that. A total reversal. Everything was okay, and perhaps would be, as long as we remembered that silent, secret pact.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Some time later, I was talking to a friend about being a father and raising children and he–further along the parenting journey with older children–shared something that stopped me in my tracks:
They are only young once.
With five words, he engraved something on my heart. I suppose it hit me because it was something deep down that I worried about, as someone deeply committed to being a good and present father and also deeply committed to working hard and doing good work in the world and–like so many of us–sometimes feeling caught in between.
Those five words often come back to visit me. I’ve shared them with many friends who are parents.
“Once” is of course a slippery concept. “Once” is the mystical sequence of days that, for us, God willing, can last a couple decades in raising our daughters as they discover their way in the world. And “once” is also the blink of an eye. An eternity, and a millisecond, just the same.
“Young” is also a slippery notion. There’s the miracle of youth, with all its hope, promise, energy, enthusiasms, heartbreaks, insecurities, and triumphs. And there’s also a state of mind, and of being, that can last long after those early years.
In the end, I know he’s right: they are only young once.
We will only have what we have now for a time. We will, I trust and pray, stay deeply connected in the years beyond, but it will be different, as it must be.
Looking back, I want to stand behind these times we had together, as a family, together, connected and committed to a bond like none other in all the world.
So I try to live up to that charge. Some days are better than others, some a complete disaster. But the words keep calling to me and reminding me of this amazing gift before me. Today, like all days, is a good day to treasure it.
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
“The fingerprints on the wall get higher and higher and then they disappear.” -unknown
“If your children look up to you, you’ve made a success of life’s biggest job.” -unknown
“The question isn’t so much, Are you parenting the right way? as it is: Are you the adult you want your child to grow up to be?” -Brené Brown, researcher and author
“Everyone knows that if a child’s parent dies, the child will suffer with sadness, loss, and possibly depression. No one thinks about this being the case when a child loses a parent to success.” -Jonice Webb with Christine Musello, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect
“Parenthood is the most important leadership responsibility in life and will provide the greatest levels of happiness and joy. And when true leadership–i.e., vision, discipline, passion, and conscience—is not manifested in parenthood, it will provide the greatest source of sorrow and disappointment.” -Stephen R. Covey, author, executive, and teacher
“If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.” -Dorothy Day, journalist and social activist
“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls… work, family, health, friends, and spirit. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will never be the same.” -Brian Dyson, former CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
“Every home is a university and the parents are the teachers.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
“I’ve had a wonderful and successful career. But next to my family, it really hasn’t mattered at all.” -Lee Iacocca
“The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist to support the ultimate career.” -C.S. Lewis, British scholar, writer, and lay theologian
“Family is a way of holding hands with forever.” -Noah benShea, author, poet, philosopher
“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Wherever our children go and whatever they go through, our hearts are with them, rising and falling with each victory or defeat.” -Elizabeth Stone
“Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating… too often fathers neglect it because they get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life.” -John Wooden, basketball player and coach, one of the most revered coaches in the history of sports
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
