Overachievers on Brink of Burnout Are Seeing the Light, Lightening Up

He may not have known it, but Justus Bauschinger had a brush with what the Japanese call karoshi-- death from overwork.

During his 20-year career in the garment-manufacturing business in San Francisco, Bauschinger designed factories, machinery and fabric. He made and spent huge sums of money. He lost his business and started another that was fraught with personal problems and stress.

By the time he was 45, he had had three minor heart attacks, a drinking problem and three failed marriages.

Portrait of the classic overachiever.

“I thought this was sort of normal,” Bauschinger said. “I thought I was a victim of life because I never stopped to think.”

But now he has stopped his frenetic, workaholic behavior.

He runs a toy store and pays close attention to his health.

He has joined a growing number of American workers who gave at the office everything they had to the exclusion of family, friends, intellectual pursuits and simple relaxation.

“I think there is a problem with burnout,” said Kenneth R. Pelletier, a clinical psychologist at the University of California School of Medicine. “When work is the major value driving a person’s life, it does result in some major problems.”

Employers, to an extent, pay the price. In California alone, there was a 434% increase in stress-related disability claims by state employees from 1982 to 1986, Pelletier said.

In short, employees are linking work to their health problems, blaming everything from symptoms of “debilitating anxiety” to coronary heart disease on workplace pressures.

Experts trace the rise in so-called work-related illnesses to a variety of interrelated factors. Many workers are pressured to work harder by employers who feel competitors, particularly the Japanese, breathing down their necks. Other companies are putting their work forces through massive layoffs as takeovers sweep the country.

Add to that the changing nature of work itself--new jobs that often demand sophisticated technical or interpersonal skills.

And the solace that many an American “salary man” might have found at home in years past disappeared when the dual-career couple became the norm.

The result has been longer hours for many employees.

A survey of middle managers by Priority Management Systems Inc. showed that 85% worked 45 hours a week or more and many also worked through lunch, took work home or worked weekends.

Priority Management, a training program that teaches business people how to set priorities, offers courses in how to achieve balance among six key areas: career, intellectual pursuits, family, social and community relationships, and physical and spiritual well-being.

Most people come to the program strong in two areas--careers and physical well-being. “They exercise so they don’t drop dead on the job,” said Daniel Stamp, president of Priority Management.

Carol Orsborn, president of the Orsborn Group, a public-relations firm in San Francisco, noticed the same self-destructive behavior among colleagues and clients.

She formed Overachievers Anonymous and began publishing “EGADS,” a quarterly newsletter whose purpose is to “Expose the Glorification of our Anxiety-Driven Society.”

The group, which promotes “downward mobility,” expects nothing of “recovering overachievers” and holds no meetings. It exists, as does the newsletter that Orsborn sends without charge to 200 chief executive officers in major corporations, as a reminder that the business environment and the advertising that mirrors it have “sunk to glorifying self-destruction as a life style.”

She points to advertisements that celebrate disheveled executives in states of zombie-like exhaustion.

Orsborn, who wrote a book called “Enough Is Enough,” speaks from experience. Until she decided that her business existed to support her life rather than vice versa, she was working 60 to 70 hours a week and expecting the same of her employees.

She cut her hours, put her employees on a 40-hour workweek and encouraged them to take vacations and paid mental-health breaks--walks, coffee breaks and afternoons at the movies. With half as many employees she used to have, she has increased profits by 20% and cut turnover to almost zero.

“I never expected to boom as we did,” Orsborn said. “This is the key to revitalizing our economy.”

Experts in workplace behavior predict that the wisdom of age and the increasing family responsibilities that baby boomers are beginning to shoulder will create a workplace where hours will count for less and the work accomplished for more.

Levi Strauss & Co., for example, monitors its managers to ensure that they aren’t making long hours a rite of passage for employees.

Jeffrey Edwards, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, whose specialty is stress and coping in organizations, predicts that the “me” generation will speak again: “People feel they have a right to be happy and satisfied in their jobs and lives in general. A company can’t ignore that and still expect to survive.”