Prone to Busy Sickness?

Let go of your inner monkey and embrace stillness instead

Anyone can be busy. There’s not much skill to it and it fills the time, but it’s not a raison d’etre.

Busying your way through life isn’t really living at all in fact. It’s rarely constructive, creative or even useful. It’s simply bustle and diversion, ultimately self-defeating and a bit pointless.

Who wants to look back at their life and think ‘Well, I kept myself busy’?

An alternative to constant, mindless, even vigorous, busyness, is to be still at will (having the skill of stillness).

It’s purposefully taking time out to be quiet; pausing to consider and appreciate life - to reflect, and to look at your particular part in it and impact on it, which is reflexivity.

Often people don’t want to do either. They seem to sense that any kind of contemplation might be a threat to their ability to keep going. Perhaps because unoccupied or un-busy ‘down’ time might allow unwanted thoughts and feelings to surface from their usual hiding place and cause disruption.

So rather than viewing quiet time as an opportunity for review and exploration, people can be afraid of it. Afraid that if they stop doing they might start noticing instead and become aware of things they’re not happy with.

Then they might have to start doing something about these things, like making decisions, putting plans in place and acting on them.

All of this is hard work and might not even pan out; could in fact make things worse rather than improving them. So maybe it’s better to do nothing, better to continue managing the devil you know than have to master a devil you don’t.

Busyness can work as distraction from all this, the coping mechanism we use to fend off things we’re not ready to deal with.

It takes Courage to Contemplate

Not wanting to face difficult situations is an understandable human trait. We’re all prone to avoiding things by not acknowledging them or doing nothing about them.

But in always avoiding quiet and stillness in favour of constant busyness because we’re afraid of what that stillness might release, we’re kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Not allowing ourselves any ‘off’ time because we’re nervous of the consequences, creates a busyness of ever-decreasing circles. Constantly chasing our tail as a means of avoiding quiet, stillness, solitude and contemplation might be understandable but it’s not balanced or healthy.

Pausing a busy life to take breath is uncomfortable if you’re not used to it however. And always-busy people tend to be in a rut of busyness, feverishly looking outwards for anything that will distract them from their own inner workings.

Habitually they tend to create and collect multi-layers of busyness in every area of their life: sundry screening, people gathering, never-ending meetings, working a no-gap treadmill; a hustling commute; some sort of post-work hyperactive gym, cycling or running to music or an improving podcast, then making three or four different kinds of meals for family members; more work in the evening because at work they’re too busy to finish all the work, and of course extra assorted work/busyness at the weekend.

Being Afraid of the Quiet is like being Afraid of the Dark

Alcohol and/or drugs are often the only means of loosening a temporary space in the busy person’s head, the ‘deserved’ glass or bottle of wine after a day of self-imposed freneticism. Although alcohol and drugs themselves are often only replacing busyness as a distraction from one’s worries.

Most of us have never been taught the value of a good silence and can’t enjoy our own company without diversion of some sort.

We don’t how to exist alone, silently, even for a short length of time. It’s unnerving for the uninitiated (most of us). The immediate response is to try and fill the quiet space with sound, people, movement, anything, so long as we’re not left alone with our own thoughts.

All because it’s been inculcated in us, socially, culturally, spiritually even (the devil makes work for idle hands) that Busy is Good.

Being snowed under, drowning in work, nose to the grindstone, ticks the boxes. Anything else is idleness and grounds for universal suspicion and disapproval. In my own extended family, even these days, being caught with your nose in a book is frowned upon as vaguely time wasting.

Perhaps this busyness is inevitable considering our evolutionary biology. Our preferred and default way of being seems to lean towards movement rather than stillness. Monkeys are epitome of ceaseless busyness. Chattering, fidgeting, running and jumping, restless, always shifting around, looking for the next stimuli. But we have the human advantage.

Choose Your Busyness Factor

A more peaceful mind and physical composure can be ours. We have some will in the matter and the knowledge about the value of stillness is there for us all to access. Human wisdom through the ages stresses the benefits of a little rest and recuperation, of enjoying the tranquility of our own calm company now and again. The mindful, meditative state has long been recognised as worth striving after and practising regularly.

In the end then, to be busy or not is our own choice. We’re all just about as busy as we want to be.

As a recovering perfectionist and Master Busyist I know what I’m talking about. Keeping busy? my disinterested boss used to ask me in passing. You’d better believe it. Of course I made myself sick in the end.

Learning to sit back and take stock has been bought in hard yards for me. These days I quietly ownwork from home and practice transcendental meditation and reiki and a whole other raft of calming techniques nuanced to meet my particular downtime needs. My favourite is just sitting in the garden. But I wish I’d come across them earlier in my life.

Stillness is a fundamental growth and healing skill we should all have access to as early as possible. But it’s never too late to find quiet. Look at me.

Jane Anderson PhD is an writer, researcher and practitioner in Sociospacial Reciprocity and Place Therapy from home. She’s been helping people create supportive, productive and sustainable environments at home and in the workplace for over 30 years.

www.jcaconsult.co.uk

www.linkedin.com/in/drjaneanderson/

Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Given in memory of Eliphalet Fraser Andrews