I talked about workaholism in my first TV appearance, decades ago. Several years off from qualifying as a psychologist, I had no expertise other than lived experience. I was young, and my equally fresh-faced husband was trying to get ahead in life; when he wasn’t at the office, he spent all his time in the study, bathed in the glow of the screen. In the mid-90s, spending most of your free time on a computer wasn’t typical behaviour unless you were a bit of a geek, which I suppose he was. Frustrated with his inattentions, I sulked in the next room, reading a book called Chained to the Desk. I felt it described our situation so perfectly that I emailed the author to thank him for his insights and to share my own tale of woe.
To my surprise, this author wrote back immediately. He was shortly appearing on a live-broadcast national talk show on cable TV, and the producers were frustrated: all the workaholics were too busy to fly to Orlando, or else they didn’t identify with the label. Might I be willing to appear on the show alongside him, as a representative of the collateral damage caused by work addiction?
They flew me to Florida and chauffeured me through a sun-blasted landscape of amusement parks, strips of big-box retail stores, and production studios. Somewhere in a cupboard I have a VHS tape with the show on it, and one day I might get it digitised. I’m partly narcissistically curious, because it’s a bit of a lost era for any video of me - I’d left home, so my dad wasn’t getting me in the home videos anymore, and it was before smartphones. I expect I’d be shocked at my youth - in terms of both appearance and naïveté. God knows what I said.
Looking back, who knows whether my then-husband was a workaholic? I suspect that he was just avoiding the relationship. Perhaps it wasn’t personal, perhaps the situation just wasn’t his thing; I don’t think he ever married again, after we split. I bear some culpability too, I guess. Accepting a 3 am marriage proposal in an International House of Pancakes after a night out isn’t the smartest idea, especially when you’ve only known the person a couple of weeks. We got the ring from Service Merchandise, a defunct retailer that began life as a five-and-dime store, probably another sign that we weren’t really in the best position to get hitched.
Anyway, anyone who knows me now probably finds it hilariously hypocritical that I ever appeared on TV to complain about living with a workaholic.
I’ve been stressed for long periods of time in my working life: weeks, months, perhaps even years where my body was constantly awash in cortisol and adrenaline. The worst point was probably when I was working for a university, promoted quickly over time to a position of too much responsibility. I added activities to my professional portfolio but never subtracted. I said ‘yes and’ to everything. I had no time to look after myself, to go to the gym or prepare healthy food. I ate on the run, and often I was literally running, jogging through the canteen to buy a protein bar and a Diet Coke on the way to the next thing.
Sprinting through the streets from my day job to my evening clinic was the only form of exercise I took, other than nervously jiggling my foot during committee meetings, and I gave myself 15 minutes to get from job A to job B, lacing on my trainers while I finished the last bit of my afternoon lectures. There was a Pret a Manger on the corner by my clinic, which sold little plastic packets of nuts, dried fruits, and chocolate. One of those combined with a hazelnut cappuccino contained enough calories and caffeine to get me through my evening and disrupt my sleep thereafter.
During this period - when I was often in the position of helping my clients with their own self care - I told myself a ridiculous lie: that although I was undeniably as or more overworked as anyone I knew, my body was miraculously immune to the negative effects. I thrive on stress, I often said. This belief was patently absurd.
There’s a diagram I often share with my clients, a grid with high vs low energy along one axis, negative vs positive energy along the other. The quadrants form four zones: Performance, Survival, Burnout, and Recovery.
I think I was able to lie to myself about how affected by stress I was because I still spent so much time in the Performance Zone, especially when actively engaged in the activities I loved. The words that appeared most often in my evaluations from students were ‘passionate’ and ‘enthusiastic.’ I could still summon optimism, even in the most unlikely of circumstances. But there were plenty of signs that I was spending too much time in survival mode - the frustrated, annoyed, paranoid, angry zone. I knew it, and knowing it, I should have bolstered myself through less work, more recovery, more self care. But I refused. I didn’t have the time.
I think of my body at that time as though it were a separate entity with my best interests at heart, sending me every warning signal it could think of to get me to listen: skin breakouts, gastro-intestinal distress, nightly crying jags, insomnia, deep feelings of fatigue and exhaustion. But I ignored them all. So, in desperation, it brought out the big guns. I imagine the various systems of my body conspiring with my brain, whispering desperately amongst themselves.
She’s not listening. She’s insane. What’s the matter with this woman? What else have we got? What haven’t we tried?
And then, the revelation, the eureka moment. Who knows which part of the body thought of it? I’ve got it! What’s absolutely necessary for everything she does - the leading, the public speaking, the lecturing, the psychotherapy?
And then, simultaneously, it dawns on everybody else.
She has to be able to talk.
Broca’s area, located in the left frontal lobe of the brain and responsible for producing and articulating speech, received its mission and chose to accept it.
When I woke up that morning, it was just there, this phenomenon. I opened my mouth to form my first words of the day, and they wouldn’t come. I could initiate the sounds, the first syllables, and then I’d get stuck, derailed, like I’d forgotten where I was headed, and I’d just repeat the sound until I could get going again.
I’d never experienced anything like this in my life. I’d always been fluent to the point of excess, verbally exuberant, a chatterbox. Now the front of my throat ached from the strain of trying to force out words that wouldn’t come.
I was scheduled for a full day of lectures, a lunchtime meeting, and an evening full of clients, but working that day clearly wasn’t an option. Instead, I went to the doctor. I can’t remember whether I started at A&E or with my GP - I only know that I was evaluated for a stroke, which hadn’t happened, and was asked about head injury and history of developmental stuttering, neither of which I’d had. They performed some other tests, lost in the haze of memory now, and then they told me what was wrong.
I had developed a psychogenic stutter.
Adult-onset psychogenic stuttering is rare - even as a psychologist, I’d never encountered it - and it’s usually associated with emotional trauma or extreme stress, especially when it happens to someone who didn’t stutter as a child. It usually takes the form I had - repeating the initial syllable of words, over and over.
I thought it would go away quickly, after a bit of rest, but it didn’t. In the end, I was off work for six weeks, and had a lingering stutter for a few weeks beyond that.
The episode started a chain of events that led directly to my taking a sabbatical, writing a book, and overhauling the whole of my life.
You’d think a person would learn their lesson forever, after something like that, but that hasn’t exactly been the case for me. Like I said I add, but I don’t subtract. I’ve added so many strings to my bow that by now I’ve got a harp, and I don’t always play it well. I’m a psychologist, a coach, a lecturer, a professor, a writer, a storyteller, a supervisor, a speaker, a consultant, a parent. By any measure, this is insanity.
Just recently, while finishing my book, I was working 16 hour days. When I arose from my bed at 5 am to travel several hours out of London for a full day of lecturing, I promptly fell to the floor. I chose to ignore this, weaving drunkenly down the road towards the train station clutching at lamp-posts and bollards to stay upright, and navigating Euston station with the grace of a wino after their second bottle of the morning.
By midday, I was excusing myself from lectures every hour to be sick but refused to stop. By afternoon, I was vomiting on a train platform, making use of a Ziplock bag my colleague had bought for me on the way there. He stood nearby, averting his eyes as I crouched in a corner next to a vending machine. The trip home was as nightmarish a journey as I can ever remember taking.
I had become so exhausted from overwork and anxiety that my immune system tanked, leading to an acute episode of vestibular neuritis, an inner ear condition that causes horrific vertigo, dizziness, and nausea. I was ill for days, setting back my book’s editing schedule by a week. Apparently I could have avoided the worst of these symptoms had I gone straight back to bed that morning, but I’d told myself it was necessary to push on.
The book submitted, I told everyone I was looking forward to a fortnight’s break - this being something between a half and a quarter truth. Having spent 50 years with myself, I knew that the reality would go something like this.
I would turn relaxation into a job in itself, booking tickets to exhibitions, plays, and dinners. I would attack a stack of books purchased not started over the course of the last year. I would return to doing this newsletter and podcast, after a short hiatus forced by running the final furlong of my writing project.
And, last but not least, I would open a very special file on my computer, containing an 80,000-word novel I wrote at the start of the pandemic. I would tell people that editing this novel was no hardship at all, just the delectable pudding course after the sensible meal of my nonfiction book. Even as I persuaded myself into this narrative too, I would look on — as though from outside my mind — as the soft organicity of doing this work became encased in a rigid exoskeleton of ‘have to’s, schedules, and deadlines.
All this has come to pass.
I don’t think it’s the work that I’m addicted to, or the stress that I crave, although that’s possible — I’ve certainly become maladaptively acclimatised to its presence over the years. Perhaps an increasing sense of my own finitude is whipping me along the road, sending me careening dementedly along like a MarioKart driver, leaping and swerving to catch all the coins I can before the race ends. Nearly ever writer I know writes because they can’t not write, but if writing were the only thing I felt compelled to do, I’d live a life of far greater leisure.
I try to be sensible, I do, but perhaps there are limits to how much I can change my nature. I can curb but not eliminate these instincts. The leopard can’t completely shed her spots. And you know, I’d love to record this as a podcast, but yesterday I started feeling rubbish again, and it turns out that I’m a Covid virgin no longer. And through the fever and aches and fatigue, I carried on working.