Are you addicted to busy?
Image: Linh Nyguen
More and more, people tell me they’re busy. Busy is taking over their life.
I’m not just talking about toxic hustle culture.
It is not just normal, run-of-the-mill life busy-ness either, but the kind of frantic running from one task and obligation to the next, never-catch-up kind of adrenaline routine that leaves them feeling depleted.
These are the people who are using their phones to answer work email in bed late at night or first thing in the morning. The people who are scheduling phone calls to coincide with bathtime or distractedly driving and talking their ways through their commute. Veteran multitaskers who are always connected, always running late, always trying to squeeze one more thing onto that fully packed calendar.
Functioning at their best? Not hardly. Enjoying life? Not usually.
They’re exhausted. They’re not showing up anywhere at their best. And they’re definitely not managing their energy in ways that will ultimately help their performance, wellbeing or larger goals. (I have a “carve out this time for coaching” rule for my clients because we can’t get the coaching results we want in a distracted state either.)
I’ve been this person at stages of my life. And it’s no fun.
If this sounds like you right now, I’ve got a few simple questions. They’ll take a few minutes to answer, and I urge you to take those few minutes right now, especially if you’re thinking you don’t have time to think about this.
What’s keeping you so busy? How much of that is truly necessary?
Has busy become so ingrained that you automatically answer So busy! when asked how you are, before you've even considered the question?
Western culture encourages these bad habits. In some cases, so do our relationships and our workplace cultures (although there is more consciousness around this since I first wrote about this topic in the early 2010s). But in the end, we are in charge of how busy our days are, and whether that busy-ness is feeding us or tearing us down piece by piece.
(That is not to say that making those adjustments is always going to be easy or without conflict. These things can be true at the same time.)
We all need to slow down once in a while. More than once in a while. Our brains, our bodies, our wellbeing, our ability to effectively manage our personal energy and our experience of life all demand that we do this. As humans, this is how we are built.
Often, though, when I suggest slowing down, I’m met with one of two reactions:
Slow down? I can’t slow down. I have responsibilities. My boss/partner/family/kids/project/goals wouldn’t allow that.
That sounds perfect. I really need to just get away, even for a few hours. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a vacation, a moment to myself, five minutes to think, etc.
This is the kind of busy that tears us down. It doesn’t feel good when we’re burning at both ends. Yet a lot of us are addicted or conditioned to living that way, or can’t see the other options on the table.
And so, I ask: what do you want to do about that?
Once in a while, someone instead will tell me that they are just busy enough and feeling balanced or well integrated. That’s how I feel most of the time, and if this is you, too, then you know how nourishing that can feel.
Of course, there are times in our lives where busy becomes a fact of life. Where the juggling act we’re undertaking would earn us top circus billing and we are getting the results we want. Sometimes that level of busy may be necessary in the short-term, but it’s never sustainable. Juggling is a trick. As a way of life, it can cause serious imbalance in your life, career and wellbeing. It will not produce your best thinking or your best life.
Many of us hesitate to talk about this because it’s so easy to use busy as an excuse for something else.
You can’t fail to reach your goal if you’re too busy to start working on it.
You can’t break that bad habit if that habit is what allows you to stay so busy.
You won’t have to face that tough conversation or decision if you’re too busy to think about it.
You won’t have to learn to set boundaries if you say yes to taking on all the things.
You must be a pretty important person if you’re that busy.
See what’s going on there? Busy can be a mask that we use to get some other need met. It can be a way to manage what we’re afraid of. It can be a means of avoiding actions that might feel challenging. It can be insidious.
If non-essential busy has become a way of life for you, I invite you to reconsider the impact that it's having on your life. How is that choice feeling in your body? Does a quiet mind feel like a pipe dream to you? What’s all this busy-busy doing to the quality of your work? What about the quality of your life and your relationships? When was the last time you checked in with your bigger picture vision?
There’s not just another way— there are many. Creating more space and more balance, more flow and more integration, is entirely possible.
Want to try? Here are 4 little experiments to play with:
Look at next week’s calendar. Eliminate or reschedule everything that is not essential – just for this one week.
Carve out 10 minutes at the start and end of each day to do nothing. Nothing at all. Not even meditating.
Start a delegation habit. Pick one task and automate or hand it off. Do this weekly.
Plan a mini-vacation. It can be a week or an hour, whatever fits your real-life schedule right now but would still require you to stretch. Use that time for something you really want to do.
And breathe.
If you need help creating a plan to integrate some serious self care into your busy life, check out Nourish. It’s the book I wrote to help you do just that.
