Nowadays, people are addicted to their work. Everything comes after work commitments and that’s all because of the organizational culture making sure that their workers give them the desired output, at every cost.
Overworking can be perfectly defined as indulging in work activities beyond your capacity and even more than the required working hours.
Overworking can happen due to many reasons, either we have a workload that is supposed to be submitted before a deadline or the worker just wants to let the company know that they are forever present for any kind of work the organization throws at them.
In this article, we will let tell you about the following:
- What are the social aspects and the symptoms of overworking?
- How it impacts the lives of the workers and the business?
- Useful tips and tricks that can help you reduce the amount of stress and anxiety spread by overworking
Symptoms of Overworking
If you want to be successful in an organization that requires you to give it your all, you can not hesitate for even a second. And when you are trying to get the promotion or just striving for excellence in the eyes of your manager, you’ll have to work hard.
Unfortunately, when you do that and you spare no time for yourself, you are bound to get a serious illness inflicted on you by the stress of it all which can often lead to death.
It’s very important to note that this article is not to discourage you from overworking because from time to time you do need to overwork. After all, your project submission or your job might be on the line.
But you need to make sure that you don’t make a habit out of it otherwise you can develop a condition called overworking. Let’s look at the symptoms that lead to this condition.
1. Lack of Energy After Work
When you work for hours and hours over your required working times, you will always leave work exhausted and spent when you get home. This is the lack of energy caused by overworking. Let’s look at some of the tips to deal with this situation.
- The first step that you need to take is to separate your work and personal life
- The next step is to organize all of your tasks and priorities daily so that you can cover all of the important stuff that you have to do on a day-to-day basis.
- If you want to take things further and analyze the time it takes you to perform your tasks, you can do so by using work hours tracker that can make life easier for you.
- Last but not least, you need to make sure that you make your days off, truly off of work. That means no work calls or answering any work-related emails.
2. Insomnia
The next symptom on our list is insomnia which is the absence of sleep even when you are finished from your day and completely tired, but you still can’t fall asleep because of tensions and stress caused by work.
To get rid of that you should,
- Try doing some cardio exercises or some form of yoga which will make you tired and put your body at ease so you can fall asleep without thinking so much about work.
- Another thing you can do is to drink a warm cup of tea. Choose whichever flavor you like and bring ease to your body and mind.
3. Ignoring the Fact that You are Sleep Deprived
Overworking can make your body tired and most people that are true workaholics, tend to ignore sleep as much as they can to finish the last ounce of work left to do. To do that, they drink coffee after coffee so that they can keep awake, and that habit is fatal in the long run.
The human body needs an ample amount of sleep so that the brain can function properly and take on the tasks of the day. To deal with sleep deprivation, you need to:
- Consider going to bed a bit early than usual and you need to remember that the assignment can be finished tomorrow but if you stay up and don’t rest your brain, nothing is going to be done.
4. Feeling Distracted
Overworking on a project can often lead to you feeling distracted from everything else that is happening all around you. This gets so amplified that there comes a time where you won’t even remember the smallest of details like names or dates.
This happens when you have a lot going on all around you that your mind struggles to process information as it used to and as a result, you can’t focus on anything. To solve this issue, you should:
- This first one is the gold standard, which is a good night’s sleep.
- Secondly, you need to write down all of the important things that you need to do or might be useful to you that day. This can be your meeting schedule or a grocery list, etc.
Social Aspects of Overworking
One of the worst problems that we have as a human society is overworking nowadays. Everyone is busy working well after their designated working hours just to earn more money or make their company happy otherwise they will not last long in the company.
This need to make more money can even be traced back to humans as a community wanting to show off to each other by finding out who makes the most money or who has the most expensive car and whatnot.
It’s things like this that have made us more aggressively attracted towards and money and not towards the joys of everything else in our lives.
But it was not like this just a century back. It was much worse because now we have only 40 working hours per week but in the last century, we had even more than that but people still managed to develop human relations and worked for happiness rather than money.
The Effects of Overworking on Your Health
“This stress from work caused several serious health issues for me, including high blood pressure, migraines, mild insomnia, and ulcers. I was so focused on my work and getting ahead in my career that I made no effort to manage my stress or discuss the situation with my boss – I just powered through. I would deal with these stress symptoms on an ad hoc basis as they arose and never addressed the underlying causes until it all became too much and I quit to pursue my new career and website.”– The words of Lynell Ross, Founder of Zivadream.
Heath is one of the most important aspects of our lives that is affected by our overworking antics. We as a general rule should all learn from our mistakes and we need to keep reminding ourselves that the most important thing is our health and then we can focus on our career, not vice versa.
To make you aware of the fact that your overworking habits are damaging your life, here are some typical health problems caused by overworking. Let’s take a look.
1. Sleep Deprivation
According to different studies on sleep deprivation, the lack of sleep caused by overworking or from any other cause for that matter influences a lot of different variations of work type performances.
For example, sleep deprivation decreases a person’s ability to focus and concentrate on their work and even delays their reaction times when they are performing even the simplest of tasks.
Different studies on sleep patterns and professional burnouts made comparisons between 54 different specimens that had burnout and 86 other participants that had healthy control. One of the bases that they were both tested on was the quality of deep sleep that they got.
When the results came out, it was obvious that people who had burnout were more likely to develop insomnia (about 76% of them) and the healthy participants had only 13% of the total people who were likely to experience sleep deprivation.
2. Heart Diseases
Relation of long working hours with heart disease. (Source: NCBI)
Researchers around the world have conclusively proven over and over again that overworking is causing adverse effects on the coronary health of people. How?
Well, when you are overworking, your body is going through so much stress and fatigue that your blood circulation is tampered with, and thus, in the long run, you are prone to suffer from a lot of horrible coronary diseases.
The results of one of the researches done on overworking as a cause of coronary diseases proved that the people who even worked just 3 to 4 hours overtime rather than pulling all-nighters at the office, were at a 60% higher risk of getting heart-related problems rather than the people who didn’t overwork at all.
How to Get Rid of Stress and Burnout Induced by Overworking
In this article, we have comprehensively proven that overworking is positive in very small doses and it’s fatal if done in abundance. Stress and Burnout are the two major products of overworking that further cause many other problems in a person’s life health-wise.
Here are a few ways that you can reduce the amount of burnout and stress in your life.
1. Stick to a Precise and Rigid Schedule
One of the best ways to get rid of burnout and make your to-do list, for the day, more productive is to make a precise schedule. In this procedure, every working day should start with a list of every task and activity that is to be performed on that day.
One way that you can sort these activities is to prioritize the activities from more to less important. One other thing that you need to note is the amount of time it takes for you to complete these activities. When you have done these things, you are ready to make your list.
Learn how to prioritize your work:
What Is the Eisenhower Matrix? How to Use It to Be More Productive?
Let’s consider some scenarios.
- Let’s say that the task that you needed to perform was to finish the last section of your project proposal, or having a meeting with your team or having a meeting with your client. These assignments are the ones that you can consider being important.
- One the other hand, if you have a task in front of you like delegating some new tasks to the team members working on the project development, or reviewing the initial draft of the design proposal or just replying to emails, they are less important and you can always finish them another day.
2. Exercising
Second, on our list of stress-relieving techniques, we have exercise. Studies have always shown us that exercise makes a person more resilient to stress. Why? Because when a person works out and does any type of exercise, their body releases endorphins.
That is required by the body to be less stressful. Also, exercise impacts dopamine and serotonin in our brains that are the components responsible for a human being to feel happiness.
3. Invest in more “Me Time”
One of the more looked over human experiences in our lifetime is our “Me time” that we constantly choose to ignore in our lives. This is the time that humans need to sit back and relax while thinking about nothing and everything, bringing their minds at ease.
We should invest more in this than any other technique we have discussed in this article to reduce stress. There is no specific activity that you need to perform at this time.
Everyone has their version of it but you need to make sure that whatever you choose, it should bring peace and relaxation to your mind, body, and soul.
According to an intuitive nutrition therapy coach by the name of Joanna K Chodorowska, we should do the following if we are feeling overwhelmed:
“Self-care is the solution for the body, the mind, and soul. We have to eat better, move better, and sleep better so we can feel better. We have to think about ourselves as worthy of self-care as we do need to put our oxygen mask on. Self-care is not selfish, it is a necessity which is usually mandated by these health crises from stress, overwhelm, and over-tired.”
Conclusion
Nowadays, the world is working at a much faster pace than at any other point in human history.
If you want to make your mark in the millions and millions of people flooding the professional market every year, you need to stand out and the most honorable way to do that is to showcase your work abilities.
But we also need to understand that our physical and mental health is also necessary to make sure that we get to work as much as we can and for as long as we can and for that, we need to minimize out overworking antics and figure out a way to work more productively while providing our body with the rest and happiness it deserves.
