How Constantly Staying Busy Affects Our Well-Being

Staying busy is often seen as a badge of honor and a marker of self-worth, with a lack of leisure time viewed as a direct indication of status. However, over-scheduling ourselves to the point where we are always busy can negatively affect our physical and emotional wellness, also impacting our ability to maintain healthy relationships.

Why We Love Staying Busy

Research suggests that an individual's perceived level of busyness is heavily connected to their feelings of self-worth, as well as to how others view their status. Individuals who are always busy by choice tend to feel needed, in demand, and important, thus elevating their feelings about themselves.

Culturally, there has also been a shift in status perception in that material objects and goods are no longer the only indicator of one's social standing. Now, individuals who are busy at work, overworked, and have a lack of leisure time are perceived as having a higher status.

In addition, some people are always busy as a way to avoid or numb painful feelings and situations. By staying super busy, they are unable to focus on what may be bothering them or causing them discomfort beneath the surface.

Busy vs. Productive

Being busy and being productive can often be confused with one another. If we are busy, we may have a lot on our plate but this doesn't necessarily mean that we are being productive or using our time efficiently.

Being productive means being able to complete a task or get something done. We do not need to be busy in order to be productive.

Impacts of Being Always Busy

Staying busy can impact our lives in several different ways. Namely, it can affect our emotional and physical health, our relationships, and our ability to achieve a healthy work-life balance.

Emotional Health

When busyness is glorified and encouraged, we may end up overextending ourselves with varied obligations, commitments, and responsibilities. The emotional consequences of being always busy include having feelings of:

• Anxiety or depression
• Increased stress and overwhelm
• Inadequacy or incompetence
• Frustration, anger, and guilt
• Loneliness or hopelessness

When being overly busy leads to an increase in stress and/or decreased self-esteem, this may trigger more serious mental health disorders. This includes anxiety disorders, depression, and substance use disorders.

Studies have also found that moderate to high levels of busyness can lead to reduced medication adherence, especially in older adults. This can be harmful to their emotional health if the medications are prescribed for mental health issues.

Physical Health

Busyness may lead to sacrificing our physical well-being for the sake of getting tasks done. This can include not prioritizing exercise as much as we'd like or not getting as much sleep as our body needs. We may also find ourselves ignoring or pushing aside any physical health concerns instead of seeing a doctor right away.

Excessive busyness can also negatively impact our physical health by triggering or exacerbating:

• Muscle tension or pain
• Restlessness or insomnia
• Headaches
• Inflammation
• Compromised immune function
• Fatigue
• Changes in sex drive
• Digestive issues
• Cardiovascular disease

Follow Now: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts / Amazon Music

Relationships

Demanding schedules can leave little to no time for meaningful connections with others. This can leave busy people feeling isolated and lonely. Those around them can also sometimes feel rejected or angry with the person's lack of availability.

Relationships require time and effort from all participating parties. Being pulled in multiple directions by our obligations can leave us feeling stressed and unable to engage fully with others. This makes it difficult to support and nurture healthy relationships with the people we care about most.

Work-Life Balance

Constantly staying busy can lead to poor work-life balance, impacting our ability to experience healthy work and home environments in which we can thrive. While this balance will look different for each unique individual, in general, if we have it, we feel more in control of and comfortable with how our time is spent.

Conversely, if our work-life balance is thrown off, we may experience burnout and feel overworked, exhausted, and disconnected from our social and/or family life. Poor work-life balance can also lead to chronic stress, which can impact our mental and physical health.

Staying Busy Isn't Always a Bad Thing

To be fair, living a busy life isn't always associated with negative consequences. For example, some studies have found that in older age, being busier is linked with cognitive advantages such as:

• Faster cognitive processing
• Improved episodic and working memory
• Greater reasoning abilities
• Stronger knowledge crystallization

It's when staying busy negatively impacts one's life that it becomes an issue. This includes when it is harmful to our health (whether mentally or physically), when it hurts our relationships, or when it creates a work-life imbalance.

Tips to Overcome Staying Busy

Everyone will have their own idea of what being too busy means to them. If we feel overworked, overwhelmed, or burned out, it's important to prioritize our health and wellness. Although it may feel difficult to shift our priorities and our time, doing so may lead to increased mental and physical well-being, as well as more connected relationships with our loved ones.

Here are a few tips to overcome being always busy:

• Practice mindfulness. This helps us connect with ourselves, observe our thoughts without judgment, and ground ourselves. It can also help interrupt a racing mind if we're feeling overwhelmed.
• Plan a vacation or staycation, if possible. It's important to not fill this time off with activities so we can recharge.
• Spend time with loved ones. Make this a priority. Doing so can help us feel connected, loved, and energized.
• Take small moments every day to appreciate one's self. This may include offering positive affirmations or journaling about one thing we are grateful for every day.
• Set boundaries with others. It's okay to say "no." Sacrificing our well-being to overextend ourselves can have severe consequences in the long term.
• Remember that self-worth does not come from being busy. Come up with a mantra that expresses what self-worth truly means or reasons for self-love. Recite it every day.
• Set a reminder to breathe and take some solo time. This can be as simple as scheduling a phone notification or placing a post note somewhere in the home where it will be seen regularly.
• Connect with a therapist. This is especially important if acts of daily living become difficult or one's overall quality of life has decreased.
• Set appropriate expectations when it comes to how much can be comfortably taken. Keep in mind that this may change over time.
• Work to pinpoint the discomfort if busyness is being used as a tool to avoid unpleasant thoughts or feelings. If this seems too overwhelming, reach out to a therapist for support.
• Schedule work or busy time in chunks. It's important to leave time for ourselves throughout the day, even if it's just for a small break, and deliberately disconnect from our work.

We all deserve to take time for ourselves, whether that means a full vacation or mini breaks during the day. Doing so is an important reminder to ourselves that we are worthy and valuable individuals.