Are you exhausted from working long hours? Feeling burned out from it? Well, it might not be worth it. 

If you are working now, you would have surely encountered the social value of working harder and longer to make more money and advance your career.

After all, today’s age is the pursuit of materialism and achievements. However, that has increasingly come at a cost to your finance and quality of life.

From being burned out to depression, there are a myriad of reasons why working harder or longer might be hurting your life in the short and long term.

#1: Increased Health Risk & Medical Bills

You look at the clock, it’s only 7 pm and you have finished your work. However, you are chasing that promotion that you have been eyeing for and you only worked until 10pm yesterday. You still have the energy to spend to work harder on the work and make it even more complete. After all, your last health check-up came up clean, you are young, so you think doing this wouldn’t hurt.

The problem is that health risks from working harder and longer manifest themselves later on in life. Research has shown that long working hours that exceed 55 hours a week have caused largely attributable burdens of heart disease and stroke, and this was based on WHO and ILO estimates. This has also lead to higher number of premature deaths.

In the Malaysian context, the AIA Vitality 2019 survey showed that half of Malaysians are indeed overworked. The lack of sleep from the stress has contributed to a loss of 73.3 days per employee due to absence and being unwell at work and 32 percent of employees having one or more chronic conditions.

This situation might have worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic even with work-from-home arrangements. Some bosses expect their workers to be within Whatsapp reach at all hours of the day. The Ipsos survey here found that 63 percent of workers have difficulties finding work-life balance.

These health risks inevitably affects your finances as you might be forced to take leave to take care of your health, and might risk losing your job and income. The health costs that come with it also will be detrimental to your finances and life. It isn’t difficult to find friends or relatives who can tell you exactly how expensive healthcare gets when one needs medical help, even with insurance.

#2: Higher Cost for Childcare

Let’s face it, the more you work, the less time that you will spend with your children. If both of you and your spouse allot more time for working, you would have to spend more on your children’s childcare.

If your children are young, you would spend more on hiring babysitters for longer periods of time. Most often, they will charge a higher rate for extra hours taking care of your children as it means that they are also sacrificing their personal and family time to look after yours.

If your children are already in school, you would probably have to spend more on their after-school tuition classes to occupy their time. By the time you and your spouse are back, both of you will be too exhausted and will probably order food for them to save the hassle and time. Preparing and cooking meals at home will always be cheaper than ordering or eating out.

This cost however pales in comparison to the one that you and your spouse incur for the time and opportunities lost from forming meaningful relationships and connections with other people and most importantly your children.

#3: Less Time to Build Meaningful Relationships

Working longer and harder inevitably means less time to form relationships and connections with others. That time that you spent working on that project that might or might not matter until 1am, only satisfied your manager. It might have played a role in securing your financial future and your family’s, but it certainly meant that you would have missed out on other things in your personal life that cannot you won’t get a second chance with.

In a TED talk by Rober Waldinger on the longest study on happiness that spanned over 75 years, there is only one thing that keeps us happy – good relationships. Loneliness kills, and social connections keep us healthy. Satisfaction with relationships predicts people’s life expectancy better than other things.

Take a good look at yourself and your situation today. Take stock of all your achievements in your career and compare their worth to where or what you want to be when you retire. Seek within yourself for deeper understanding of how your relationships look like right now.

  • Have you been an involved and present father/mother/daughter/son/sibling?
  • How many real friends do you have?
  • Who among your family and friends know that they can count on you if they need any kind of support?
  • How often have you been having meaningful conversations with the important people in your life, where you listened more than spoke?

Relationships matter and the more time you spend working past working hours, the more you forgo creating and building meaningful ones.

#4: Higher Likelihood of Developing Mental Health Issues

Similar to point #1, you don’t just incur physical health risks but also mental health issues working harder and longer. While admittedly not everyone will develop mental health issues the more they work as we are all different, there is growing evidence of the link between overworking and the increasing incidences of mental health these days.

This is particularly concerning as Kuala Lumpur was ranked as the 4th most overworked city among 50 cities in the Kisi survey. Kuala Lumpur actually had a high prevalence of the mental disorder, where 40% of the population fulfilled the criteria for mental disorders.

For most of you, working harder and longer is a no-brainer considering the financial constraints that you have. In the short term, it is better to put food on the table and risk developing mental health issues than starving. However, the fact that you have to choose between putting food on the table and mental health already describes how dire the situation is for most of you.

This stems from having to pay a majority of your income on housing, food, and transportation where a high cost of living is forcing most to work harder and longer just to make ends meet. It is a fine line to walk between both financial stability and mental health but take a bigger view of the risks that you are taking. You are not only affecting yourself but also the people around you who worries and stresses and they in turn might develop those issues also.

#5: Decrease in Productivity and Efficiency

You heard that right. Working longer and harder actually makes you less productive and efficient. Take Japan as an example, the workers have one of the longest working hours in the world but one of the lowest productivity among the G-7 nations.

The evidence is clear. Marion and Sauermann found that as working time increases for call centre agents, output per hour decreases. Harvard Business Review found that you are more likely to make mistakes when you are tired, and that mandatory time off on nights and weekends made consultants more productive.

In Malaysia, workers were found to have one of the highest percentages of productivity loss even though they work 15 hours more on average more than their contracted hours each week. You would have surely experienced fatigue and burn out when you work longer, and noticed that the quality of your work deteriorates. Even though you are doing more, you are doing them worse.

Sometimes, it’s best to just take a break and switch off for the night and do it tomorrow. Your mind needs a break if anything and when your mind is tired, your body will be too.

#6: Increased Cost of Living

While this is not obvious, you need to take into account that the longer and harder you work, the more expenses you will incur to do so.

Firstly, you would need to pay more for parking and potentially more for fuel if you meet clients on a regular basis. Parking has become more expensive these days where you need to spend at least RM300 to RM800 depending on your office location.

Working late also means you have less time to do chores and errands that would cut down your living expenses. For example, eating out because you didn’t have time to cook or buy groceries.

There is some indirect costs of your living also, and it has to do with the impact on your physical and mental health. As you work longer, you will need more healthcare services to deal with the illnesses that you are more vulnerable of. You would also need to spend on mental health services like therapy and medication.

Hence, the cost of living whether direct or indirect will definitely increase if you work more.

Conclusion

Working harder or longer is increasingly not worth it for most people. After all, you run the risk of worse physical and mental health. From there, you incur a higher cost of childcare and living and leaves you less time to form meaningful relationships. Lastly, you actually get less productive and efficient the more you work. Take care of yourself first, before it’s too late.

 

Have you been feeling overworked lately? Let us know in the comments below!

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