New Delhi, Feb. 11 -- A 37-year-old tells me, "I love my work; there are days when I can work 17 or 18 hours a day. Everything, whether its family, friends or intimate relationships, exists in the background. But I don't know how to relax and there are days where I feel so exhausted and burnt out and yet can't stop working."

What the client is referring to is workaholism. In some areas of psychological literature, another term that that is used to describe these patterns is ergomania, which especially focusses on the compulsive nature of work and the maladaptive reliance on it. While the concept of workaholism has been around for a long time, there is absence of one clear definition of it. The term is attributed to psychologist Wayne E. ...