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A follow up to last week’s post further examining the cultural phenomenon of busyness.
Specifically, this post delves into why you may succumb to busyness and the detrimental impacts of being overly busy.
Cutting to the Chase
Last week, I introduced the topic of busyness.
As a reminder, busyness is simply filling up all of your time with activities and tasks, regardless of their importance.
I ended last week’s post by stating that the true cost of busyness is our ability, or inability rather, to be present.
When busyness dictates your life, you rarely or never have the time to spend with others. And, more importantly, even when you do spend time with others, you never have the time to be fully present with them.
You’re always focused on what else you could be doing—i.e., the incomplete tasks on your to-do list.
Your to-do list is a constant distraction even if you’re unaware of it. So you end up putting out one fire only to jump to the next, and never operating in your zone of genius or doing “deep work” as author Cal Newport calls it.
How often do you truly feel like this…when it’s not addressing something urgent?
As you may recall from my post on the Eisenhower Matrix, you don’t want to spend all of your time in the “Do” quadrant where everything is important and urgent.
But if you’re hopping from fire to fire, then you’re leaving things until they move to the top of your list (and thus become the next fire). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of neglecting something until it becomes urgent and demands your immediate attention to get done ASAP.
It’s easy to see why a life subscribed to busyness is a life that always feels behind and never caught up.
Generating Evidence Against Yourself
When you can’t get to all the tasks at hand, you start constructing and adding to an insidious narrative that you can’t get stuff done. The subtext becomes that you’re unreliable to yourself, that you’re a failure.
You can read more about that here.
When you recognize this thought pattern you’ll also see how you constantly generate evidence against yourself. Every little task mishap becomes a generalized statement such as:
- “I always do this.”
- “I can never get anything done.”
- “Why am I so bad at this?”
Or some similar flavor thereof. Your brain has latched onto a pattern and now not only cannot unsee said pattern, but also forever looks for ongoing evidence to confirm it.
(cough) Confirmation bias (cough).
It’s sort of similar to how people can get sucked down into conspiracy theories, grasping at the tiniest of things to corroborate what they want to believe.
Brain Drain
So if your brain is doing this multiple times throughout the day (because, let’s be honest, how many times do you lament your to-do list daily?), then what is it not doing?
It’s not being present. How can it?
It’s too preoccupied worrying about the future and ruminating on the past.
That’s bandwidth that’s being sucked away preventing you from being aware and mindful of what is happening in those rare moments you’re not in disaster mitigation mode!
This is the brain drain to which this section’s header refers—i.e., I’m not talking about the emigration of highly skilled professionals from a low income to a high income country and the negative impact that has on the low income country.
All in Service of the Prime Directive
I’ve made the case before that our time and attention are the most important things we can offer anyone about anything. But if you’re trapped in an endless cycle of busyness, you struggle to offer those things in a meaningful, sincere way.
This begs the question: why do we do this? Why do our brains operate in this way?
Well, our brains are driven by a collection of instincts called the motivational triad. The prime directive for our brains is to keep us alive, and the motivational triad does so by driving us…
- To seek out pleasure, desires, and comforts (i.e., rewards)
- To avoid pain
- To do #s 1 & 2 most efficiently to conserve energy
Now you might look at that list and still be scratching your head, so let’s dig a little deeper.
In last week’s post, I pointed out that in many cultures, one’s worth is derived from one’s contributions and productivity. If one conflates productivity with more tasks, then they believe that being busy is how to be productive.
Thus, working on things (busyness) is an attempt to demonstrate one’s value and worth to oneself as well as others. To many, busyness confers status—”I’m a big deal that’s why I don’t have time for anything else.”
In doing so, we are seeking validation (reward) as being worthy and trying to remain with the herd (to avoid pain).
For others, busyness is a means of buffering, or avoiding negative emotions by doing things that give us an immediate (albeit short-lived) dopamine boost while leaving the original issue to fester.
Your brain craves the status quo even if it’s painful because a known danger trumps an unknown danger. Therefore, we avoid having to dig deep to find our self-worth because of the (potential) discomfort involved.
If you don’t want to address the issues in your life, then you can busy yourself to the point that you don’t have time to do so or that you have “more important” tasks to do instead.
Who knows what difficult introspection you’d have to do if you sat still with yourself for even 30 minutes. Oh, the horror!
The True Cost
We allow busyness to take over our lives for the reasons detailed above. Unfortunately, the cost is our inability to have time for that which is most important and our inability to be present for those moments.
Pandemic aside, just in the past year, how many important relationships fizzled? How many passion projects got buried? What priorities did you not make headway on due to busyness?
If we can’t be present when we need or want to be, then we’re really just going through the motions of life without actually living.
Thus, busyness keeps us spinning on hamster wheels unable to achieve our innermost-held goals: actualizing our self worth, and from that place of strength living intentionally in line with our values and priorities. Said differently, we are not being true to ourselves.
We often state a set of values that are supposed to be our guiding stars, but the actions we take reflect a completely different set of values. For example, we may say that family, friends, and faith are most important to us, but then spend all of our time on work and various forms of buffering (social media, streaming services, etc.).
I think this is a major source of discontent. Heck, it’s probably the cause of many a mid-life crisis—the realization that what you’ve been doing and thought you were supposed to be doing doesn’t line up with what you want to be doing.
Inflection Point
This is the point when you finally have to examine your life and your worthiness. Instead of shying away, dive headfirst into the thoughts that keep you from feeling worthy.
Remember, you get to operate from the belief that you’re 100% innately worthy as is, regardless of your achievements or productive output. That is an unalienable truth; you just have to believe it.
You can both acknowledge the role busyness has played in your life and its role in your success AND see that it also holds you back in so many ways. You can honor your past with it AND move forward on a path of intentionality.
What is busyness keeping you from achieving? Let me know in the comments section below.
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