What happens when your addiction governs your professional life? What’s the effect of drug and alcohol addiction on your career, marriage, and social status? In today’s economy, it’s easier than ever to become addicted to substances and behaviors. Read more about how does addiction affect your career?
Make no mistake: Addiction can limit your potential in every aspect of your life. To resist this fate, you’ll need help from those who have already walked this path.
Unfortunately, a person’s chase of that initial high they felt slowly but surely, develops into a vicious cycle of substance abuse.
Addiction affects millions of people each year, and the effects can be detrimental to the careers of the most successful people. The individual who is doing illicit drugs daily will not have the drive necessary to excel at their job.
Forming positive relationships with coworkers can be challenging if you have an alcohol use disorder. It can also be challenging to hold onto your job if you abuse alcohol or drugs and have poor performance at work. The uncertainty of addiction may lead to unemployment and erode the confidence you need to manage your career effectively.
How Does Addiction Affect Your Career?
Addiction is a severe and chronic disease with far-reaching consequences for you and your personal and professional relationships. The effects of alcohol addiction are grave and far-reaching. Addiction can be devastating for the individual’s overall health and well-being, including mental health, physical health, and social health.
Addiction interferes and disrupts, your career which can be an incredibly negative experience. Drugs, alcohol, and efficient job performance cannot coexist. Workplace substance use issues do not discriminate. People in all professions, education levels, income levels, and demographic groups are affected—including managers, first-line supervisors, mid-level supervisors, senior executives, directors, professionals, clerical staff, technical staff, salespeople, and service workers.
Unfortunately, drug abuse quickly robs you of your best. In the workplace environment, substance use problems will disrupt the normal functioning of the institution through a multitude of mechanisms. These include absenteeism, tardiness, reduced morale and productivity, increased healthcare costs, impaired decision-making, poor judgment, and higher cost of insurance.
Also, people with substance use disorders often feel a sense of hopelessness in the face of their addictions. They may lose their temper quickly or suffer from mood swings.
This process is often accelerated by an ineffective or non-existent corporate policy for dealing with substance use problems. Here’s a list of some of the ways how does addiction affect your career:
- You become absentminded and forgetful: When you have addictions, your mental and physical state starts degrading. You become absentminded and start lacking attention to detail. As this happens, you’ll start forgetting things or overlooking details that you would never have allowed yourself to forget in the past.
- Feelings of depression and irritability: Addiction can create feelings of depression and irritability, which will hurt how you interact with your coworkers, while heavy drinking and addiction are the leading causes of workplace conflicts.
- Lack of focus: Anyone with an addiction knows that it can make it challenging. Juggling complex job responsibilities with a regular drug or alcohol habit is impossible. As your substance abuse deepens, you’ll make critical mistakes or begin leaving work altogether.
- Chronic fatigue: Perhaps one of the most troubling consequences of addiction is that it inevitably leads to chronic fatigue. If you’re using drugs or alcohol, your healthy appetite may rapidly dissipate, leaving you feeling drained and craving unhealthy foods—both of which can leave you short on energy.
- Hampers your creativity: Sure, drug use might help you think outside the box for that one project, but if you allow your addictions to run your life, you won’t be able to sustain that level of creativity over time.
- Creates family, money, and other personal problems: The connection between addiction and the workplace is obvious—it makes personal issues that can adversely affect your business.
- Causes deterioration of your physical health: A person with any addiction, including substance use disorders, can suffer physical health consequences due to their disorder. Sometimes this happens without them even realizing it – they might make excuses for not coming to work on time or leaving early because they had a rough night the night before due to withdrawal and couldn’t sleep very well. They might develop a reputation for being unreliable at work.
Get Help to Minimize the Consequences
You may be able to avoid losing your job altogether or at least minimize the consequences by seeking help for long-term recovery. Finding a job after rehab is easier than maintaining a job while actively abusing drugs.
Silicon Valley Recovery has staff who have experience and qualifications in addiction care. We can help you or your loved one on the road to recovery. Our addiction treatment program specializes in treating opiate, alcohol, methamphetamine, and other forms of alcohol and drug addiction.
If you or a loved one needs a compassionate reminder of why the sober life is good, Silicon Valley Recovery can help. Call 408-547-4089, and we can provide long-term support through residential and extended care programs that help our clients break their negative behaviors and learn new skills to support healthier lives.
