There are dozens of words that reflect 21st-century work dynamics — freelance, engagement, networking…. There are also many ways to express the ills associated with them: someone is a workaholic when they work too much, a person experiences burnout because of the accumulated stress and fatigue from years of working life. But there wasn’t a term to describe the obsession with doing everything right at work that stems from ambition, self-imposed demands and perfectionism. But it is a dangerous tendency that can have serious consequences for both mental and physical health. That is why José Manuel Vicente, chair of the expert evaluative medicine department at the Catholic University San Antonio of Murcia (UCAM; Spain), coined the term sisyphemia in 2022.
The condition’s name is inspired by the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill and repeat the task over and over again. “It is a health disorder resulting from the psychological and physical exhaustion of employees who are forced to pursue unattainable goals, whether they are set by their company’s management or because they set such goals for themselves. They have excessive workloads that they strive to meet but never manage to complete, despite their best efforts,” Vicente explains.
The doctor, who is also the director of the INSS Disability Assessment Team’s Medical Unit in Gipuzkoa, Spain, observed that increasingly more patients with similar personal and work-related characteristics were suffering from an ailment for which he did not have a name: “We saw people who were emotionally devastated, who ended up dying and wound up developing other symptoms. Sometimes we could refer to a situation of discouragement or constant anxiety, but there wasn’t a specific name,” says the physician.
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