I can’t remember the last time that I talked to a friend or family member and asked them how they were doing and didn’t get the cookie cutter response: “I’m good; busy, but good.” It seems like everyone everywhere is busy all the time, with no end in sight. I have the suspicion that the fast-paced society that we live and work in isn’t all to blame, but in fact we are making ourselves busy; that the busyness that we are trapped in is a prison of our own making.
I’m not exactly sure why we do this to ourselves, but perhaps it has something to do with some collective notion that being busy is good and the alternative is not productive. However, as Ferris Jabr notes in an article for Scientific American, “devotion to perpetual busyness does not in fact translate to greater productivity and is not particularly healthy.” So it seems that all we accomplish with being endlessly busy is actually burning ourselves out.
The Busyness Complex
Of course, if you are a single parent, you are busy. Period. It comes with the territory. I’ve said it before, that life as a single parent is a juggling act, but one of my strongest beliefs is that if you want to keep successfully juggling, you need to make time for yourself. If you don’t, you are likely to see the whole juggling act come crashing down.
The problem is, people seem to feel validated by being busy. If they aren’t busy, then they aren’t doing anything meaningful with their time and their contribution doesn’t really matter. There is also a social construct that associates hard work with advancement, which causes people to burn the candle at both ends because they think that is the only way to succeed. I can say nothing amiss about hard work; however, if people want to truly get ahead in anything in life, performance is key – quality over quantity.
As Jabr explains, downtime is necessary to give your brain a break from taking in the endless influx of information and to be able to actually process it. This is often why when we are focused on a problem, we get nowhere by intensifying our focus, but usually it is only when we walk away from it and give our brains a rest that we actually find the solution. “Epiphanies,” he explains, “may seem to come out of nowhere, but they are often the product of unconscious mental activity during downtime.” In fact, your unconscious mind stores a lot of information, and you merely have to give it free-range for that information to come to the surface.
The Guilt Complex
What’s worse, it’s not only that we keep ourselves endlessly busy and don’t take the necessary downtime that we need, but if we do take even a moment of reprieve from that busyness, we then tend to feel guilty for not being busy. I don’t often get a chance to indulge in downtime, and in the past I used to think that watching Netflix wasn’t the best use of my time. But really, that shouldn’t be the way that we think. Indeed, I recently came across a new entertainment search engine called CanIStream.It – you can read a summary and review here. It was nice to be able to look for programs across multiple streaming platforms, and not have the reaction of “this is going to distract me and cause me to waste time.” As Tim Kreider explains in his piece for The New York Times, “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.” Our bodies and minds need downtime, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about that.
Final Thoughts
It seems, then, that the only way for us to really be able to get it all done or keep all of those juggling balls up in the air is to stop, and step away from it. Pausing, taking a break, prioritising some downtime; whatever you call it, it is just as important as committing your best effort to a project or task. In fact, if you truly want to be able to give 110%, then productive downtime is the only way to truly achieve that.
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