‘Busyness’ As Usual? — How To Find Peace In Your Mind

Have you ever felt like you could use some time off?

That you could just wake up in the morning without feeling that constantly nagging sense of unease that wonders if you’ll be able to work through the enormous pile of stuff you need to do in the few hours you have today?

Does it seem as though life is getting more hectic by the day, and that you can hardly keep up with its ever-increasing pace?

Well, here’s some cold comfort:

• You’re not the only one.
• And the feeling is accurate.

But there’s a simple way out of this craziness.

This article explains why we’re actually inclined to remain so busy, rushed and overwhelmed… and how we can easily shift things around to make space for what’s truly important to us, while also realizing more of the outcomes we really want.

So let’s dig in…

Are You ‘Stuck In A Rush?’

Many of us feel like Brigid Schulte describes in her book Overwhelmed: [1]

And she’s certainly not an isolated case. From all over the world scientists have taken cognizance of pretty much the same phenomenon: [2,3]

• Most of us do way too many things at the same time, in an attempt to meet all the demands imposed on us in our personal and professional lives.
• In general, our day-to-day life experience feels scattered, fragmented and exhausting – like our lives pass by at a pace we can’t keep up with, without sufficient opportunities to catch some breath and recover.

But let’s ask ourselves:

• What if we discovered that in truth we’re really squandering our time… frittering away all those precious moments… and to a large extent wasting our one and only life?
• What if we really do have time and plenty of opportunity to slow down, relax and focus on what’s really important… but are just too stressed out, disorganized and neurotic to even notice?

Because when we step back from the turmoil and take a more disengaged look at our situation, it turns out that we unknowingly and inadvertently keep ourselves ‘stuck in a rush.’

Generally speaking, two things lie at the root of this:

• The pain of ‘nothing-ness’…
• The pleasure of ‘busy-ness’…

So to help us get a grip on these causes, let’s explore both phenomena in more detail…

The Pain of ‘Nothing-ness’

While we don’t like feeling rushed, we usually do enjoy having something to do.

Of course, from a state of permanent busyness, rush and exhaustion, our perspective is colored:

We can hardly imagine an experience more pleasurable than having all our ducks in a row, without a thing to do or a worry on our mind…

But appearances can be deceptive:

Because when the reality of having nothing to do actually kicks in, it turns out that for most of us it’s far from as pleasing as we thought it would be: [4]

So here’s what this study suggests:

Apparently, for most of us it feels so uncomfortable to be alone with our own thoughts for a mere 6-15 minutes, that we’d rather hurt ourselves with the kind of electric shock that we’d normally pay for to avoid!

So that’s one of the reasons we’re subconsciously inclined to keep ourselves busy:

We seek to avoid this perceived pain of ‘nothing-ness.’

But why does ‘nothing-ness’ feel so uncomfortable in the first place?

Well, that’s the other reason we often keep ourselves ‘stuck in a rush’ – it’s because doing so also leads to direct emotional payoff.

Here’s how…

The Pleasure of ‘Busy-ness’

In many ways, the evolution of our brain hasn’t kept up with the high rate of change in our environments and ways of life that took place over the past millennia, and especially in the last few decades.

As a result, to a large extent our brains are still wired to react to what happens around us in ways that may have fit the hunter-gatherer era, but keep shaking us up less constructively in our modern-day world.

In short and simplified terms:

• Consider the imminent dangers to our lives (<-- e.g. predators, enemies, climate…) and day-to-day struggles (<-- e.g. safeguarding food and resources, finding a suitable mate, protecting family and peers…) in the hunter-gatherer age…
• In an environment like that, any type of attitude or behavior that would increase our chances of survival and procreation was useful to the furtherance of the human species.
• As a result, the human brain evolved in such a way that it would come to automatically encourage those types of attitudes and behaviors, which it did – and still does – with a ‘reward’ in the form of a pleasurable emotional surge.

But today, that neurological ‘wiring’ can actually work against our well-being and ability to thrive in life. Here’s why:

• Since our brains are – to a large extent – still wired to the environment of times past, they often ‘mindlessly’ react with ‘emotional reward’ to events and stimuli that are totally irrelevant.
• So what traditionally proved itself to be evolutionarily useful may no longer be as beneficial in today’s completely changed world…

In concrete, our brains keep falling for numerous debilitating illusions:

Emotional Reward #3: The Illusion of Urgency Ages ago, when our ancestors were still running around as hunter-gatherers, it was vital to react to things like…:

• Sudden changes in sound (<-- back then the sound of a snapping branch indicating a predator or enemy closing in – today the little beep of our smartphone)…
• Things that move fast (<-- back then a saber-toothed tiger rushing toward us to attack – today the flashing lights on our phones and in the commercials we see everywhere)…
• Availability of food, drink, and other resources (<-- which were often scarce back then, but typically ubiquitous and even over-abundant today – with exceptions, of course)…

Likewise, social information and gossip were important to consider and react to as well:

• Our ancestors lived in tribes of about 50-150 people.
• So if during our entire life we only knew about a hundred folks – of whom we’d also merely interact directly with just about twenty – then pretty much everything they had to share was relevant.

But ever since, the sheer amount of social information coming at us has literally exploded, especially the past few years:

• We’re now bombarded with it from all directions and all the time – through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and so on.
• And the number people we ‘know’ and keep track of these days – including celebrities from all over the world – has increased enormously along with it.

So while most of today’s social messages are really not that urgent at all, to our brain – which is still wired like in the old days – it feels like they are. And that leaves us with the issue of false urgency:

• Back in the day it may have been essential to pay attention to ‘gossip’ about a member of the tribe who had gone crazy raping others’ mates and killing people…
• Yet today it’s far less essential to hear about Paris Hilton’s latest antics, Justin Bieber smoking a joint, or some Kardashian’s new butt implants.

That’s also why we can have a hard time withstanding the temptation to spend every other minute checking how many people ‘liked’ our latest Facebook post, while we may have far more important matters on our hands. But it’s not just a matter of distinguishing relevant and irrelevant social information… In fact, it turns out that our brains have a hard time in general deciding what is and what isn’t important: According to neuroscientist Daniel Levithin, the decision making network in our brain simply doesn’t prioritize. [6] In other words, it considers the question of what socks to wear today just as urgent as the need to solve that complex issue that’s claiming our entire life. And that’s exactly where we run into the next problem: Because every single day, we’re literally engulfed with such little ‘urgent’ choices and decisions…

So in summary:

• What starts out as apparently harmless and perhaps useful emotional reward, for many of us ultimately results in an ongoing and debilitating sense of rush, overwhelm and exhaustion.
• We simply feel completely stuck… paralyzed by the over-abundance of opportunities… and trapped running the metaphorical hamster wheel trying to work our way through what feels like an overpowering amount of stuff to do in too little time…

And we have no idea how we can get out of that race and find our peace… Because being rushed, harried and overwhelmed comes with a tunnel vision that simply can’t see a way out.

This mental and emotional state is what we refer to as ‘busyness blues’…

‘Busyness Blues’

The more our minds are filled up, the harder it is for our brain to see what’s really important and what’s not. And as a result, we just keep running about… all the while resisting our lot, yet continuously pushing through – possibly to the point of burn-out.

A well-known illustration of this type of tunnel vision is the parable of the woodcutter – popularized by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

The Parable of the Woodcutter: A woodcutter strained to saw down a tree. Meanwhile, a young man was watching and asked: “What are you doing?” “Are you blind?” the woodcutter replied, “I’m cutting down this tree.” The young man was unabashed. “You look exhausted! Take a break. Sharpen your saw.” The woodcutter explained to the young man that he had been sawing for hours and did not have time to take a break. The young man pushed back: “If you sharpen the saw, you’d cut down the tree much faster.” But the woodcutter said: “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. Don’t you see I’m too busy? I have to cut down this tree!”

The original moral of this story is that we should take time to rest, so that we remain healthy and capable of delivering effective work…

But the deeper insight to be gained from it is actually something else:

The real issue is not that the woodcutter doesn’t take time to sharpen his saw… Rather, like most of us who are ‘stuck in a rush,’ he doesn’t even see the need for it:

• The more we’re rushing, the less we notice we’re doing so – stress and pressure simply narrow our focus, which makes us lose our larger perspective and capacity for accurate deliberation.
• The only thing the woodcutter – like ourselves on a ‘hurry high’ – thinks, is: “Keep going – no matter what!”

In this state, new incitements and stimuli all seem equally urgent. In fact, every next one seems more pressing than the one before, and we typically find ourselves hasting from one thing into the next:

• We think that if we could just finish all the items on our ‘to do’-list first, then we’ll have all the time and space we need for the truly important stuff.
• But the end of the list never comes, so we just keep going, all the time, without ever stopping…

All the while our implicit focus remains on keeping busy, as a result of which we keep recreating that reality for ourselves. And while we’re at it, we actually keep pushing away the very experience of ‘peace’ we think we’re working so hard to create.

What’s worse – suffering from our ‘busyness blues’ we simply can’t see any other solution than to just keep working away, and often resign ourselves to what we now consider to be our ‘fate’… be it under heavy emotional protest and constant mental resistance.

There’s also good news though:

While it may always not seem so, we actually do have a choice…

Do You Want To Be Full, Or Fulfilled?

Here’s the treacherous thing:

The short-term burst of emotional reward (discussed above) can make us feel pretty good about ourselves in the moment:

• We think we’re productive, efficient and useful when we spend day after day running about… doing laundry… working through a whole list of emails… rushing into a store to quickly buy something on our way somewhere else… hastily answering a couple of Whatsapp messages on our way… and quickly paying an invoice while we’re online anyway.
• This way of jumping from one thing to the next and doing everything at the same time makes us feel extra efficient.

Indeed, research at Stanford University shows that regular multitaskers are truly convinced that doing so helps their performance. But the same research actually proves the opposite: [8]

• It shows that multitasking is actually less productive than doing a single thing at a time.
• It even turns out that frequent multitaskers are actually worse at multitasking than those who are used to focusing on one thing only!

The reason why they performed worse was because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and were slower at switching from one task to another.

And it’s not just that…

Every item we can cross off our ‘to do’-list gives us a pleasurable ‘emotional fix’ from the idea that we’re making progress, which is even more deceptive. Here’s why:

• The minor and less important items on our ‘to do’-lists are often also the relatively straightforward things to do…
• As a result, we’re typically inclined to focus on those minor things first, in order to make a ‘quick emotional score’ and hold up the illusion that we’re making great progress towards our goals…
• But overall, the stuff we consider truly important actually gets the least of our attention that way!

So following our natural and emotional instincts, we typically not only end up feeling rushed and exhausted under the false impression that we are at least working towards realizing our visions…

In truth, we also direct most of our energy and attention not toward, but away from what we say we really want in our lives!

And as a result, we hardly ever manifest the outcomes we truly long for…

Ouch!

Sometimes – either after a long day, or perhaps only when we finally take a vacation – we wake up from our ‘multitask myopia’ or ‘hurry high,’ and ask ourselves what we’ve really accomplished…

And only then do notice we haven’t really made any significant progress towards what we really want… let alone experienced it.

We find ourselves full, but completely unfulfilled… and slowly but steadily run on empty when it comes to energy, inspiration and lust for life.

But fortunately, we all have the ability to stop, reflect and turn the tables in our favor!

Here’s how…

Conclusion: 3 Simple Strategies To Turn The Tables

First of all, we all know about the obvious practices that support peace of mind and train our mental deliberation and control, like meditation and mindfulness.

But by themselves those disciplines don’t immediately get us (proactively) engaged in directing our energies toward bringing about the results and experiences we want to manifest in life.

For that, the following three practices will help:

Put these three practices to work for you for just a couple of weeks, and you’ll begin to notice the difference in your life sooner rather than later:

• You’ll experience greater mental clarity, enhanced productivity, and much higher sense of fulfillment… both personally and professionally. And moreover:
• You’ll find peace in your mind – without having to withdraw yourself from life, but rather by keeping yourself constructively engaged and consistently creating the outcomes you long for!

And across the board, that just feels awesome!

P.S. Please share your thoughts by placing a comment below – I’d love to hear from you!

References:

[1] Schulte, B. (2014), Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time, Sarah Crichton Books, New York NY, p.4;

[2] Schulte, B. (2014), Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time, Sarah Crichton Books, New York NY;

[3] Colvile, R. (2016), The Great Acceleration: How The World is Getting Faster, Faster, Bloomsbury USA, New York NY;

[4] Wilson, T.D., Reinhard, D.A., Westgate, E.C., Gilbert, D.T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C.L. and A. Shaked (2014), “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345(6192), pp. 75-77;

[5] Compernolle, T. (2014), BrainChains: Discover Your Brain and Unleash Its Full Potential In a Hyperconnected Multitasking World, Compublications, Belgium;

[6] Levithin, D.J. (2014), The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, Penguin Random House LLC, New York NY;

[7] Schwartz, B. (2004), The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Harper Perennial, New York NY;

[8] Ophir, E., Nass, C. and A.D. Wagner (2009), “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(37), pp. 15583-15587;

[9] Bregman, P. (2011), 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Business Plus, New York NY;

[10] Schwarz, T., Gomes, J. and C. McCarthy (2010), The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance, Simon and Schuster Inc., New York NY.