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As the founder of runaway success haircare chain Drybar, Alli Webb has been featured in magazines and websites (including this one) as an icon of entrepreneurial achievement. And after selling the brand for $255 million in 2019, Webb is certainly deserving of her reputation as a business golden child. But as Webb writes in her new memoir, The Messy Truth, behind the scenes, her home life was, at times, much less golden.
Talking to Fortune's The Broadsheet newsletter, Webb reveals that as her business exploded she faced a series of personal struggles, including the failure of her marriage, her mother's death from cancer, and her eldest son's struggles with mental health and addiction. How did Webb cope with all this loss and pain? By working all the time.
"Drybar was all the rage, and it was intoxicating," she says. Long hours immersed in the business was a way for Webb to hide away from the challenges at home. This wasn't a healthy strategy. "It's a little bit of a drug ... it's like an addiction," she says of her workaholic lifestyle.
Webb, happily, has since entered therapy, helped her son find his footing, and learned to strike a healthier balance in her life. Three cheers for her. But while Webb might have emerged from workaholism with a new perspective, plenty of other entrepreneurs are still out there numbing themselves with endless work while their personal lives fall apart.
New research shows that may be because Webb is right. Workaholism really is like a drug, functioning in much the same destructive way as any other unhealthy addiction.
The connection between workaholism and addiction is right there in the name, but is this just an expression? Or is a compulsion to constantly work really an addiction like any other? To find out, a trio of Italian researchers recently followed 139 office workers, not only measuring how obsessed they were with their work, but also using an app to monitor their moods throughout the day.
You might think that workaholics work a lot because they like work. But that's not what the results, recently published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, found.
"The collected data show that the most workaholic workers have on average a worse mood than the others," one of the study authors, Cristian Balducci of the University of Bologna, explains. "So, it does not appear to be true that people who are addicted to work derive more pleasure from their work activity."
In fact, it's the opposite, the data shows. Like any other addiction, work addiction might be thrilling at first. But for most people, it quickly gives way to a compulsion to continue the activity even though it objectively makes you quite miserable. Or, in other words, Webb is right. Work really can actually be a drug for some people, with all the lack of control and negative consequences to the worker and their loved ones that addiction entails.
What should we take away from all this? The optimistic end to Webb's struggle with overwork absolutely shows that it is possible to wrestle yourself free from an unhealthy obsession with work. But the first step to doing that is definitely to realize that you do in fact have an unhealthy obsession with work, rather than just an admirable amount of hustle.
Hopefully, Webb's testimony and this new research will nudge some entrepreneurs who find themselves working all the time but miserable while doing it to consider whether they're really in control of their relationship to work, or whether they might be using their long hours to hide from troubles in other areas of their lives.
If a bit of soul searching forces you to see yourself in Webb's story, then it might be time to follow her example and have a rethink of how you approach work.
A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta
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The Drybar Founder Says Workaholism Is Like Drug Addiction. New Research Says She's Right
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07.12.2023
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As the founder of runaway success haircare chain Drybar, Alli Webb has been featured in magazines and websites (including this one) as an icon of entrepreneurial achievement. And after selling the brand for $255 million in 2019, Webb is certainly deserving of her reputation as a business golden child. But as Webb writes in her new memoir, The Messy Truth, behind the scenes, her home life was, at times, much less golden.
Talking to Fortune's The Broadsheet newsletter, Webb reveals that as her........
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