Are You Brave Enough to Consider You May Be the Reason You Are Too Busy?
I saw a post on social media the other day that stopped me.
A friend was asking her community to consider shopping for a family in desperate need this holiday season. The request was simple, tangible, and human. As I read through the comments, one response appeared again and again:
“Can I just make a donation?”
On the surface, that looks generous. And in many cases, it is. But underneath the response was something harder to name. An admission of exhaustion. A recognition that people no longer had the time, energy, or bandwidth to do the work of care itself.
Writing a check is easier than showing up.
Efficiency has replaced presence.
Busyness has replaced participation.
This is not a moral failure. It is a cultural one.
We wear busyness as proof of importance. We confuse full calendars with full lives. Somewhere along the way, being busy stopped being a temporary condition and became an identity.
But this raises a deeper question.
Is all of that busyness actually making us happier?
Here Is Another True Story
Last week, Larry and I were at his doctor’s appointment. As is customary now, he completed a brief mental health assessment, the kind used in most medical offices:
How often do you feel stress? How many nights a week do you sleep well? How often do you feel overwhelmed or like giving up?
After Larry finished, his doctor looked at his answers with visible surprise. When we asked whether most people scored higher, she said her best guess was that the average adult would score close to ten out of ten on stress and overwhelm. Larry’s average score was one.
That reaction aligns with what broader data shows.
About sixty percent of U.S. adults say they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. Among parents with children under eighteen, that number rises to nearly seventy-five percent. More than half of adults report stress levels that interfere with daily life. Fewer than half say they get adequate sleep most nights. Over eighty percent of workers identify work as a significant source of stress.
These are not isolated problems. They are patterns.
Busyness, chronic stress, poor sleep, and diminished well-being tend to travel together.
So again, the question is worth asking plainly.
Is busyness improving our lives, or is it hollowing them out?
Steps Toward Busy Syndrome Recovery
The good news is that busyness is not a fixed condition. It is learned, reinforced, and therefore changeable. There are practical steps we can take to relieve it and reclaim a life that feels intentional rather than perpetually rushed.
Acknowledge that you are the one who created this. Acknowledge that you have the power to change it. Investigate whether you are addicted to it. Take deliberate steps to reclaim your life.
Change does not begin with drastic action.
It begins with clear seeing.
The Inventory Exercise
This is where awareness turns into insight.
Start by identifying the experiences that bring you true joy. Not productivity. Not validation. Not what looks good on paper. Genuine nourishment.
Examples might include time in nature, time with your children, meaningful conversations, creative work, rest, reading, or travel.
Choose your top four.
Next, place each one into a single category:
Family Time Work Time Personal Time Giving Back Time or Volunteering
Be precise.
Resist the urge to betray yourself.
Just because your work supports your family does not make work activities family time.
The Reality Check
Now review your calendar from the past month.
Assign every activity, including errands and obligations, to one of the same four categories. Each activity goes in one bucket only.
When you are finished, calculate the percentage of time spent in each category. The total should equal one hundred percent.
Now compare the two lists.
If time with your children ranks as your highest source of joy, but only twenty-five percent of your time was spent there, the imbalance you feel is no longer abstract. It is measurable.
This is not a moral judgment of how time should be spent. It is a clear accounting of how time is spent.
The goal is not equal time across categories.
The goal is alignment between values and lived reality.
When those two are out of sync, dissatisfaction, restlessness, and a sense of living off-center are almost inevitable.
From Awareness to Action
This first exercise does something powerful. It exposes the gap between our words and our actions.
Once that gap is visible, change becomes possible.
Busyness thrives in vagueness.
Clarity is its undoing.
Here are practical ways to realign your life based on what you discover.
1. Shrink Before You Add
Do not start by adding more meaningful activities. Start by removing one low-joy, high-busyness commitment each week.
Balance returns through subtraction.
2. Put Joy on the Calendar First
Schedule your top joy activities before work commitments whenever possible. If something matters, it must appear in ink, not intention.
3. Reclassify Honestly
Notice how often work leaks into personal or family time. Answering emails during a movie is still work. Name it accurately.
4. Set a Busy Ceiling
Decide in advance how many hours per week you are willing to give to busyness. When that limit is reached, something must be deferred or declined.
Without a ceiling, busy expands endlessly.
5. Expect Discomfort
Reducing busyness often brings guilt, anxiety, or a sense of uselessness. This does not mean you are doing it wrong. It often means you are interrupting an addiction.
6. Revisit Monthly
Repeat this exercise once a month for three months. Patterns become unmistakable, and course correction becomes easier.
Busyness is not a life.
It is a coping strategy that has overstayed its usefulness.
When your calendar begins to reflect what you love, purpose stops feeling abstract. It becomes visible, measurable, and lived.
And perhaps then, when asked to help, we will not be too busy to show up.
-Jan💕
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