Notebook of a Psychologist: How You are Drowning for Working Overtime
Working long hours in corporate cultures is foolproof to create stressful, unmanageable and unhealthy working habits not just for workers but also for leaders. Remarkably, the majority of business organizations perceive chronic overwork as a moral practice and often give rewards for it. It is a fact that we simply aren’t able to function beyond our biological blueprint. Yes, humans can do impossible things but once we cross the limit, the level of damage that occurs in our mental and physical health is unimaginable. We have some fundamental constraints that we must adhere to.
The prefrontal cortex of our brain which is often regarded as the CEO of the brain occupies approximately 5% of our brain but demands 25% of the energy. Such kind of effort to put on a daily basis, Cal Newport a famous computer scientist mentioned it as “deep work” that we got only 5-6 hours per day to engage ourselves in working. So in short, we do get 5-6 hours to put the best effort every day.
This clearly means, we as humans are biologically restrained from engaging in active or productive work for 10 or 12 hours/day but sadly the practice has been done in many corporate or production, and the upper management assumes it is a normal thing. Things are even worse for the interns as sometimes they need to engage in different activities for the sake of “learning opportunities” but instead they are leaning toward the bad example as the correct one.
So Western societies have started to acknowledge the importance of employees’ mental health and introduced a lot of initiatives like taking mandated leave, working fewer hours on the last day of the week, offering flexible working hours and allowing workers to work from home for certain days. Even some companies have started to provide 3 days leave to see the productivity of the employees. But the East still sticks to the ancestral philosophy of “work more and earn more” methodology. A recent study conducted by Telus Health (2022) found that 4 out of 5 employees in Asia have moderate to high risk in mental health where 45% of employees said that their mental health is negatively affected in their workplace.
Before things turn into worse, can we stop normalizing, celebrating and promoting overwork? Instead, can we start discussing about the methods supported by research to teach people how to work in harmony rather than making a conflict against their peace? Fruit for thoughts.
Joyonto Dasgupto
Psychologist, wEvolve
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