The easiest way to reduce the burden of being too busy

“I’d love to, but I’m too busy at the moment.”

Busyness has become the bane of our lives. We’re so busy doing, thinking, worrying and stressing, we’re at risk of forgetting to ensure we have enough joy, fun and happiness in our lives.

If all you ever think about is work, that not only makes you boring it means you’re at risk of creating the perfect storm leading to mental distress, anxiety, depression and burnout. Finding ways to manage your busyness so you can get stuff done without sacrificing your health and happiness is possible, but it requires your permission first to make that happen.

Have you got your permission slip signed?

OK so let’s look at what the science tells us.

1. Too busy leads to being too stressed leads to increased risk of mental illness 

In a study of 20,000 people, Mathew White et al from the University of Exeter in the UK, found that spending a minimum of 120 minutes a week outside in nature is the time required to maintain your mental wellbeing. How you spend that time doesn’t matter. This means that on those horrid overly busy days where you don’t have time to scratch yourself let alone get outside for 5 minutes you can make up for it by getting out more another time.

Why not try adding in 10-15 minutes of walking time to and from work, scheduling in 30 minutes to walk with a friend on the weekend or taking your lunch break outside? It all contributes to meeting that 120-minute threshold.

 

2. Stress increases the sense of time pressure

I recently asked an audience of 1000 GPs what the biggest obstacle to their well-being was, and the answer was a resounding “not enough time.”

Feeling time pressured is horribly stressful. You can’t escape from it and the more you stress, the less time you feel you have AND now you can’t think straight either.

The irony here being that our busyness and high level of stress add to the illusion of not having enough time. Yes, that’s right, it’s an illusion. You have all the time you need, until you think you don’t.

Let me put it a different way. If your office is a pressure-cooker environment with over tight deadlines, high expectations from your boss or your client and you’ve got a foul headache building because of all the associated stress, one of the easiest ways to resolve this situation is to step outside and take a couple of slow deep breaths in of fresh air while looking out over a green or blue space.

Miracle of miracles. When you get out into nature, time feels like its moving more slowly. Perhaps you’ve noticed how if you’ve spent an afternoon tackling the overgrown jungle formerly known as your back garden, that you didn’t notice time passing, you were engrossed in what you were doing and not stressed.

This is because how you experience time passing is profoundly different in a natural environment. Psychologist Richardo Correia, at the University of Turku in Finland found that people walking in the countryside thought they had walked for longer, than when they walked the same distance in an urban environment, though the time taken was the same.

The suggestion here being that nature experiences can help restore a healthier and more balanced relationship with time. Getting outside regularly can help you maintain a more accurate perspective of how much time you do have available.

 

3. Busyness can derail all your healthy habits.

It’s so annoying. You spend months cultivating a more regular habit of exercising or going to bed at a more reasonable time and then BANG! along comes that curveball that sideswipes all those healthy habits and knocking them into the bowling lane gutter. Just because you’ve suddenly got a whole lot busier.

Sigh.

Just at the time you needed those habits the most.

There’s nothing wrong with you if this has ever happened. It’s happened to me many times, mostly likely when I’ve just finished polishing my halo of virtue and then ‘boompha’ it’s knocked off my head.

It’s because too much busyness triggers the ‘fight or flight’ signal in your body. Stress levels rise including the stress hormone cortisol which can have the effect of either driving you to eat all those foods you normally try to keep in check, especially the sweet fatty stuff or choose not to eat at all.

Either way, you’ve now lost the opportunity for healthy eating habits to maintain your ability to think well, and importantly keep your mood and emotions stable.

Your overbusy brain has gone into overdrive and you’re forecasting disaster ahead so you batten down the hatches, refuse to answer any calls from friends, stay up into the wee hours of the night desperately trying to complete the task, stay chained to your desk for days on end and you wonder if things will ever return to normal.

 

Can you prevent this from happening?

Yes, through greater awareness of how your body and mind reacts to turbocharged busyness and stress.

Then work out what matters the most to you to maintain your sanity and energy. This is your top non-negotiable habit, your “I will continue with this daily habit regardless of what else is happening” because past experience has shown you it works.

Next, when it’s time, you calmly leave that busyness behind and go do what you need to do, even when your inner voice is screaming at you not to go.

It’s not easy, but the more you practice, the easier it becomes.

My top non-negotiable is to get outside for a walk.

All those justifications and excuses as to why I should defer, get put to one side because every time go for that walk, I return calmer, less stressed and find I can then get all that busy stuff that was bogging me down, done quickly and easily.

If busyness can become your constant companion and you’re looking for a way to lessen the strain and to enjoy life more, one way that can make the biggest difference to your overall health and well-being is simply this.

Step outside into a green or blue space.

How do you best manage your busyness?