Too busy to do what you love?

I have been reading Refuse to Choose!: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love by Barbara Sher this week and last night I was up reading the chapter titled Too busy to do what I love. I didn’t even realise it applied to me until I was a few pages in, and then my jaw dropped. The chapter was really a look at people who build up too much stress and responsibilities and then use all the stress and responsibilities as an excuse for not getting anything done.

I think I’ve been doing a bit of that lately…

Basically, according to Barbara, there are people like her client Jeff who feel like if they are not in control of everything then the world will crumble around them and it will result in an emergency. As a result, these people try to organise everything around them and shoulder all the burdens so that they know that everything will get done right.

Have you ever heard the phrase “If you need something done, go ask the busiest person to do it?” Well in my first career as a mortgage broker that usually meant go ask me, or alternatively go ask the two other women in my office who were working at the same kind of crazy pace. In a team of about ten, the three of us were handling 80% of the work. Unfortunately a behaviour that is common among people who have too many things to do is to instinctively add more things to do until some kind of breakdown occurs.

Why would anyone allow that to happen to them, let alone encourage it?

One reason Barbara explains briefly is that people add more and more to their plate to prove that they are not a bad person. If someone has a feeling of low self worth they know that to slow down and not do much would be a luxury that would trigger feelings of guilt. I know that I personally experience this feeling of needing to be in control of everything and adding everything to my plate just to come crashing down again when it all becomes too much. And in my down-time while I am not doing so much the little niggling guilts start to raise to the surface. But now that I have identified this behaviour, I can ask myself “What would I have to believe in order to feel guilty if I am not busy?” And the obvious answer is that in my mind my self-worth is tied to how many things I achieve, not the quality of the things I achieve. I think I’ve had my priorities wrong. How about you, do you ever feel the same?

Next, Barbara suggests you could be testing yourself to see how much you can handle. Giving yourself some numerical ammunition like “I looked at FIFTEEN apartments today” – (that was me that said that, just last weekend). And why would you want to do that? For the next reason…

If you push yourself until you collapse then finally “they” will appreciate you. People will see how hard you work and will therefore know that you are a good person. Maybe people will give you gifts or praise and tell you how much they appreciate all that you do. For a person who tends towards stress and busyness, this feels like you finally feel loved. So to try to get more ‘love’ we might work ourselves harder and then tell everyone how much stress we are experiencing. This can be a negative spiral, because telling everyone about your stress does tend to generate drama, pity, amazement and praise, all the ingredients needed to affirm the behaviour. As a result we end up going through regular breakdowns, adding more and more burdens and responsibilities, reaching a peak of stress to the amazement of all on-lookers, throwing everything out and starting with a blank slate and then doing it all over again.

The fourth reason that Barbara explains is that you can’t remember being any different. For most chronically responsible people it started when they were a child. We don’t have many memories of being free to do whatever we like. In my case, I was raised by a single mother who had to both work and look after my two-year-younger severely autistic brother. At first she used small bribes to make me responsible (like paying 10c to whoever got dressed first, with the expectation it would be me) but soon we just had an understanding. Even as a small child I made my own lunch, got myself to school, organised myself as much as possible and kept out of trouble at all times. If I look back I can’t remember being any different. Maybe for some people an event occurred in their childhood where they just had to grow up faster than the other kids around them. If you tend to be chronically responsible, did you also have many friends who were older than you, because everyone said “oh, you act so much older than your age”?

This loss of childhood is a sad state of affairs and one that it hard to resolve. Its hard to just have fun or to do less than you are capable because it all feels like something bad will happen. So instead you have always got to be busy ‘just in case’. But here’s the rub: friends and family want to see you happy. If you’re always wound up, run down and stressed out, eventually your friends will find someone more fun to spend time with, and your family will either leave you alone or develop the same habits.

But, there are some things that can be done once we consciously realise that our behaviours are affirming and adding to our stress rather than relieving it. Here are some suggestions from Barbara Sher:

• Consciously do only half of the things on your To Do list and practise not caring about the things you missed. So you didn’t get to go to the grocery? Eat whatever is in the fridge even if you’ve only got a few bananas and some breakfast cereal (your kids will think its a hoot!).
• Pay for people to do things for you so that you don’t feel like you have to do everything yourself. I am sure a neighbour’s kid would love to walk your dog and take it to the vet for a bit of pocket money.
• Do important things for yourself first. Once you get used to doing things that really matter, your ‘quantity of things done’ mentality should start to get crowded out by your new belief that its good to work on quality projects that make you happy.
• Only do your favourite tasks and find a way to get around doing the boring bits
• Treat things that come up like you would sort through the mail. Many tasks are like junk mail – you can just toss them when they first turn up.
• If you think of something to do that would be fun while you’re in the middle of doing something that is responsible, jot it down to pursue later. Its always god to have a list of fun things to do instead of always having a list of responsibilities to do.
• Set up a fun project like a painting, some sewing, an invention etc so that it never has to be put away. Then come back to it in small timeslots like 5 minutes while your partner is brushing the kids teeth, or while you’re waiting for the spaghetti to boil (don’t let it boil over, use a timer!). When I was a kid I used to do this in reverse… I would alternate reading one page of an interesting book with picking up and putting away 20 items from the mess in my bedroom!

So I am going to be more aware this week and make sure I have some fun. I hope there are some good ideas in there for you too!

Popularity: 3% [?]