9. Your Busy-Free Playbook: Refreshers and Reminders
“I’m busy” has become the new “I’m fine,” a chant heard everywhere, from the sidelines of soccer games to the hallways of offices. There is a cultural expectation that women should always be busy, and if they’re not, well, they must not be all that important, or worse, they must be lazy.
Busyness is not just a behavior; it is an ethos that claims ownership of our time. Moving away from busy behavior takes more than just solutions; it requires each of us to discover the motivation underneath our behavior. That’s the only way we will stop the endless overscheduling and the side-eyeing of our fellow sisters when we see them not being “busy enough.” As soon as we understand what’s driving our behavior, we’ll be able to make changes and reclaim our leisure time rather than simply giving it away.
Busy is an odd status symbol. It is like fake designer clothing — it looks really good from the outside, but on the inside the structure is uneven, details are missing, and only the wearer knows that what others see is an illusion. For many this ruse provides a sense of fitting in to an elite group. And don’t we all want to fit in? It’s human nature to want to belong and to feel our contributions are being valued. But what price are we paying to be a part of this busy group? And how did being busy go from being a pastime to a lifestyle?
The Overscheduled Woman (OSW) knows all too well what being busy feels like. For her the “I’m busy” refrain is all too accurate. As she time-slices through her days, trying to keep up with all the demands, busy is setting the pace. What would help? A clone, an assistant, a vacation? Yes, as a matter of fact, all three are exactly what she needs to get busy off her schedule. But without the use of a helpful robot or a hands-free voice-activated virtual assistant, she’s on her own, long to-do list in one hand and cell phone blowing up in the other. A screen-shot of her days reveals a variety pack of demands and requests: Where are you? I need this. . . You’re late for. . . Hey, can you also pick up. . . I need that report done, stat! You’re already booked at that time. Mom, why haven’t you answered my text? Honey, where are my. . . I’ve started the meeting — when will you be here? Your reservation was canceled; you were too late! The list of texts, emails, and missed phone calls rips through her busy days with the precision of an X-Acto knife, swift, deep, and without mercy.
How is the OSW supposed to make it all fit together and still find a little me time? Is that asking too much? How will she know when she’s on the edge of that notorious rabbit hole, ready to slip into the abyss of busyness? Unfortunately, the OSW is so busy she often misses the signs, free-falling into that overscheduled lifestyle, and before she knows it, her busy tempo is her new normal. However, if she’s lucky, something will show up before she takes the final tumble, a push sufficient to wake her up but not enough to make her fall headfirst.
For me, that push happened on a beautiful August morning: mascara in hand, coffee set to one side of my makeup mirror, as my world suddenly went black. Stars flying, vision blurring, heart racing, chest seizing, right there in my bathroom. I collapsed to the floor and desperately tried to breathe.
I thought I was having a heart attack, and with that realization, my panic of losing everything I loved set in. I instantly counted all the people in my life who depended on me. How could I let them down like this? How could this be happening to me? Was I going to die right there on my bathroom floor?
The paramedics arrived, and as they administered oxygen to my mid-made-up face, my vanity surfaced. I thought about my messy bedroom, the breakfast dishes stacked in the sink, and the one eye that still had no mascara. These were clear signs that my priorities were severely out of whack. How could I be thinking about not being perfectly pulled together at a time like this?
Loaded into the ambulance and on my way to the hospital, all I could think was, Not now, I have too much to do! After a battery of tests, and several hours of waiting for results, the emergency room doctor announced I had not had a heart attack. Looking over the top of his glasses, he declared, “You’ve had a panic attack.” Me? A panic attack? Surely, he’s got the wrong report! I felt embarrassed. And when he followed with, “This happens to women all the time,” I was insulted yet curious. How had I missed the signs? Was I in denial about my life slipping off its well-organized rails? I had repeatedly excused my frustrations and irritability as normal, because it all had become so normal. The rushing, the overplanning, the overscheduling, the commitments, events, and obligations: they all began to unfurl in front of me. I was blindsided by my own busyness. I was ashamed, annoyed, and downright determined to make some changes. I didn’t have the time, or the money, to be taking trips to the hospital or waiting in an emergency room on a gurney seeing other people with real emergencies. It was time for a me intervention. In the moment after the doctor said, “It happens. . .” I promised myself I would not let it happen again. I didn’t know how I would stop the madness, but I was determined to find a way.
I decided to take a closer look at what was generating so much angst and tension in my life. I was perplexed as to how someone like me — a positive-thinking, active, organic-eating exerciser — could end up in the back of an ambulance.
As my curiosity took flight, and I shared my experience with other women, I was astounded at how many of them had similar stories. Numerous women described feeling overwhelmed and had experienced panic attacks, fatigue, chronic frustrations and irritability, depression, and the occasional meltdown behind the closed doors of their offices and bathrooms. The mix included women who seemed to have it together, getting their stuff done and making it look seamless, appearing to effortlessly balance their careers with their personal lives. These women were the highly motivated and successful women in the room, the best PTA parents, community volunteers, and organizers of social and corporate events. They were the first ones on the block to have their holiday shopping done, spring garden planted, and family summer vacation planned by the first of January every year. They were the ones who sailed through college with wit and determination, built a career in which they excelled, balanced everything with a zesty social life and skilled execution, both in the boardroom and in their private enclave of home and family — or so it appeared. They were overscheduled, and I needed to figure out a solution to help all of them, myself included.
The solutions were at my fingertips, but I had been so busy in my relationship with busy that I didn’t even realize I had become the proverbial cobbler without any shoes. I had spent more than twenty years sharing my techniques for living a healthy lifestyle, and yet I was ignoring a big piece of that prescription: mindfulness.
Mindfulness is more than just having a good attitude, and I sensed there was a way I could connect it with the positive impacts that fitness and healthful food offered. Everyone knows how important both are, but for some reason, until recently mindfulness has not been as fully accepted as a tool for transforming one’s life.
As I turned my attention to making that connection, I recalled an experience I had had with my mother some twenty years earlier. It was Mother’s Day weekend, and she had invited me to go to a Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) seminar. It was a small group of about fifty, all looking for ways to improve the quality of their daily lives or to help their clients do the same. The presenter was dynamic, charming, and a powerfully poignant speaker. When he asked for a volunteer from the audience, I raised my hand. Why,