Healing Space | Long working hours are emotionally unhygienic

The research is clear: long working hours are detrimental to productivity. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

You put your head up after you close a document and no one else in your cubicle seems to have left for home yet, so you grab a coffee and start on tomorrow’s work today. Your office has a work culture of the bosses sitting in their cabins late, sending emails, getting on calls, and demanding responses late into the night. You’re on maternity leave but are checking into work every day before your leave ends. These have become symbols of ‘hard work’ or ‘sincerity’ in a turbo-charged economy but really, they are just signs of inefficient workplace practices, a lack of regard for physical and mental health, and low self-esteem.

Research shows that working late hours contributes to burn out, low cardiovascular health, high blood pressure, and poor eating habits, increased alcohol consumption and heightened depression or incidence of diabetes. Studies in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, where the phenomenon of “working to death” has been recorded, also record chronic exposure to computer radiation. It also affects social indices such as loneliness, due to a lack of time to develop companionship or relationships outside the workplace, or worsens health when people postpone required health check-ups.

Truth is, many people pretend to work long hours, few actually do. The causes behind this range from ambition to insecurity and ingrained beliefs about what work is, and what one’s identity should be. For some it is growing up with parents who taught us that if you’re not looking like you are working, you’re goofing off. Think back to your school days? Did you open a book and sit with it even if you were daydreaming about a cricket match or movie? That’s pretty much what you’re doing when you open a document and pretend to work on it. The critical parent’s voice is stuck in your head, and at work, you are still the errant school child. The framework of the parent-child relationship has simply transferred to the boss-employee relationship. The output has nothing to do with productive hours worked. It has everything to do with emotional approval from the parental figure. And changing this requires working on the internal self-talk of the child who is stuck in 20 years ago.

We all need belonging and validation. Everyone likes to be given healthy feedback for their work or receive praise, awards, and most importantly, raises in the next round of appraisals. However, when an unaware work culture perpetuates a stuck emotional loop, it is in fact not based on output, productivity, creativity, efficiency, or the other stated parameters of the workplace. It is based on management feeling paternal and employees feeling like approval-seeking children. These are the environments in which people who offer the most praise to the supervisor, or who make the most noise, throw the most tantrums, need the most appeasing, and where hierarchies of age and rank, where women have to cut the cakes on birthdays, and other familial indices get promoted over pure merit. The need being served here is to preserve the ‘family’ and thus the same patriarchal measures that feed this cause get transferred.

Freeing oneself from needing that validation requires a considerable shift in self-esteem and self-identity. Evolving to adulthood requires firstly a secure self-determination. A healthy adult is a self-starter, self-motivated, is able to set their own goals, to question their automatic thoughts, self-beliefs and challenge themselves. They also do not transfer unresolved needs from one schema to the other.

If anything, the research is clear that long working hours are detrimental to productivity. So why do workplaces, and start-up CEOs keep perpetuating the need for them? You could put it down to a transference, projection, or displacement of unmet needs from the personal space into the professional one. Because long working hours consume your ability to have a healthy personal life, physical fitness, mental health, resolve your loneliness with entertainment, sports, time with family, build healthy relationships, you now need the workplace to fulfil your needs for you. This is a form of organsational gaslighting where the opportunity to meet these needs is taken away from you, and then met through the workplace in ‘team activity’. This may benefit some workplaces that also choose to show hours in lieu of actual quality of output, but the canny employer who recognizes true value on paper also recognizes it in people. And value is not measured in time, but in intensity of presence and application.

An emotionally clean workplace does not require or demand emotional investment from its employees.