Are you addicted to being busy?
We hear a lot these days about the relentless busyness of American life.
Work. Kids and their activities. Volunteering. Trying to exercise and take care of ourselves somehow.
Trying to fit in coffee or happy hour with a friend every now and then. (Isn’t it weird that it sometimes feels like meeting with someone we genuinely care about is like checking just another item off a list?) The everyday slow grind of the tasks that accumulate in a week, like bill paying and errand running and house cleaning.
It can all equal days and weeks that fly by in a blur of schedules, obligations, and missed opportunities. Our relationships — with our partners, our kids, our loved ones, ourselves — often suffer as a result of our frenzied running and exhausted disconnection.
Danielle LaPorte reminds readers that being busy if often just a choice, just a collection of things we’ve decided to say “yes” to. She’s never one to shrink from sharing her opinion, and you can get a taste for how she feels about it all in her Daily Love article titled, “We Know You’re Busy, Now Shut Up About It.”
Tim Kreider wrote a beautiful, borderline-heartbreaking New York Times op-ed piece in 2012 called “The Busy Trap.” It was one of the NYT’s most-viewed op-eds; it obviously struck a chord with people, as it reflected both the deep longing people have for more “down time,” but also the insidious way that busyness can become addicting in a couple of big ways: we keep busy (and talk about it a lot) as almost a form of bragging, because being busy makes us feel needed and important; and we keep busy to avoid thinking too much about the things in our lives that would profoundly trouble us if we faced them. Essentially, we overbook our lives as a way to avoid experiencing them fully.
In addition to the havoc this wreaks on our personal lives, there is another serious downside to relentlessly pursuing busyness: our brains desperately need rest in order to function. Kreider writes:
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
The stress of having a life jam-packed with things we don’t really love and that wear us out sends our Lower Brain into overdrive. We need relaxation, rest, and peace in order to ignite the passion and wisdom of the Higher Brain — to grow and heal, innovate and risk, take on big things, imagine big things, create big things.
We often mistake being busy with making progress. Maybe it’s time to try moving forward by just being still for a moment.
Join us at our next presentation to find out how Higher Brain Living® can help you find this stillness. Click on the box below to view the schedule of our upcoming events.
Cheers to Evolution of Humanity,
Sunny Nason