Hooked

Chapter 16

In the office

British workers spend an average of 42.7 hours a week at work.¹ Excluding weekends and holidays (although many of us spend most of those working as well), that means we spend a third of our adult lives working – that’s over half of our waking adult lives.

It’s little wonder, then, that the workplace has a significant, causal impact on our happiness² and wellbeing;³ clearly there is a lot of value to doing well in the workplace.

Unsurprisingly, psychological factors have a significant effect on workplace success. To give just one example as an illustration, one study of public-­company CEOs found that a 22.1Hz decrease in voice pitch was associated with an increase in the size of the firm managed to the tune of $440 million, ...