When we are dealing with addiction, it is surprisingly easy to focus on the personal impact. Most of the time, addiction hurts us most seriously in our personal lives. We can find ourselves trying to deal with broken relationships, painful memories, and the feeling that we have let down those we love.
However, we do not often focus on the impact of addiction on employment. Given the personal impact it can have, it can be easy to focus only on the personal damage being done. It is only once you find yourself in a performance review or a disciplinary meeting in your workplace that you might find the professional impact. For the self-employed, too, you might only notice the effect when you start receiving rejections of your work or requests for revisions.
Make no mistake, though: the impact of addiction on employment can be significant. Let us take a look at the impact and how it can begin to damage your ability to get things done in the workplace. Hopefully, this can help jolt you into action so that you can overcome the severity of the issues you face and find peace again.
The Impact Of Addiction On Employment: What Is At Stake?
Your Current Employment
If you are an addict, it is only a matter of time before your lifestyle begins to impact your job. You might find that your current employment is threatened because you cannot do the job to the same standard. Addiction can have serious impacts on our physical and mental well-being.
From a lack of sleep to poor diet through to the sheer loss of focus addiction brings, problems will mount up. You might start noticing that you receive a lot of rejections of your work. Or that your colleagues have to correct your mistakes. Over time, this runs the risk of losing your current employment because you can no longer do the job to the standard that your employer expects of their staff.
Your Future Employment
By the same token, though, you also run the risk of losing future employment. Being let go from your job because you cannot do the role will mean that you receive a negative reference from that employer. This could harm your future career prospects beyond the job you currently have.
Your Timekeeping
A big part of being a professional is punctuality and dealing with things on-time. If your life is chaotic and you are dealing with addiction, you will find that you start to lose your grip on time. Our ability to be consistently punctual is often the first thing to go when dealing with addiction.
As such, you might find that your timekeeping begins to become less consistent. Or, worse, it starts to become consistently late. This runs the risk of bleeding into professional performance, leading to disciplinary action and the potential for termination of employment.
Your Stress Levels
Another key part of working as an addict is that you arrive at work already stressed. So, when something goes wrong and/or a client/colleague asks for something to be adjusted, your stress builds. We all know that we have our levels of stress that we can cope with, and then the levels of stress that we reach that we cannot really overcome.
Being addicted reduces the level of stress that you can handle by a pretty significant margin. You can soon find yourself being more stressed out at work, which can lead to…
Your Attitude
The more stressed we are, the more snappy we become. The more snappy we become, the easier it is to offend or insult someone like a colleague, a client or our superiors. As an addict, though, your mind can be so focused on receiving your addiction that you find it hard to focus on anything else. Anyone interrupting your addiction thinking can become the focus of abuse and anger.
Naturally, such a negative attitude is likely to draw the ire of those you work with and those you serve. Being addicted and stressed makes it easier to act in a way you might regret.
Your Relationships
It is natural that if you are addicted, you will become more drawn in and selfish. This can make it hard to build and maintain relationships with those you work with. Over time, this will likely lead to issues such as breakdowns with colleagues and clients. This can make it harder for you to build the relationships you need to maintain work, receive promotions, and build a happier professional future.
Addiction drives us to become more self-focused, which negatively impacts our relationship-building.
Recovery Can Transform Your Professional Prospects
The main thing to focus on, then, is the benefit of engaging with recovery. If you participate in meaningful recovery programs, you can work towards recovery. This is likely to help you return to the person that you were – the person who enjoyed their profession and had a good relationship with colleagues and clients.
Recovery will be critical to helping you overcome these issues and start working towards a better future. It will not be easy, and it will be time-consuming. Mistakes will be made. But, in time, you can begin to avoid the problems listed above and make it easier to sustain a long-term career in your profession.
Without beginning on the road to recovery, though, you run the risk of having all of the above come true. Addiction will drastically impact your employment prospects, given time. Recovering gives you the best chance of avoiding such a negative episode.
Recovering from addiction can significantly affect the quality of life you lead moving forward. Your personal and professional life will improve markedly. To get started, Akasha Recovery is here to provide you with the support you require. Please reach out to us today to talk about your recovery options. Together, we can make a big change to your personal and professional life.