Too Busy for Your Own Good (13 page)

Approximately 750,000 attempted suicides per year are related to stress.

Up to 80 percent of industrial accidents are due to stress.

One million people a day are absent due to stress, causing $200 billion in absenteeism, workers' compensation claims, and health insurance.

It is estimated that 40 percent of employee turnover is stress related.

Stress accounts for $26 billion in medical and disability payments and $95 billion in lost productivity per year.

Keep a check on your chronic busyness. You may not realize the toll it takes on your health until it's too late. A frog would never willingly put itself into a pot of boiling hot water, but it would relax in a nice warm pot of water that gradually got hotter and eventually boiled. That is what your busyness is like. It gradually propels you forward until you're in a persistent state of alarm, which then causes stress symptoms to manifest physically, mentally, and emotionally.

The human body developed our fight-or-flight reaction, or defense mechanisms, to deal with the threat of predators and aggressors. Cavemen either killed the saber-toothed tiger that showed up on their land or fled for the hills if they thought they were in danger. Thousands of years later, we humans still have these same response patterns in our
day-to-day world. Your reality of managing a job, making ends meet, and taking care of your family is full of new threats.

It makes sense that your body automatically kicks into high gear when you are facing a physical threat. A tiny part of your brain called the
hypothalamus
sets off a series of alarm signals to your adrenal glands, which are located on top of your kidneys, to release adrenaline and cortisol. The alarm signal also goes out to parts of your brain controlling mood, motivation, and fear, and that part of your brain in turn delivers a fight-or-flight reaction.

Here's the catch-22 of your highly complex alarm system. Your body doesn't distinguish between physical threats (that saber-toothed tiger) and psychological threats (work problems, life changes, overwhelming busyness). This problem is compounded since psychological threats tend to be prolonged. Your alarm system is intended for short-term crisis and not for long periods of time. It's like when you push your gas pedal to the floor while passing a car. The engine roars into a different gear, and it gains power and speed. Like trying to keep your car in the red zone, if you continually have your alarm system on, you risk permanently damaging your engine.

The National Academy of Sciences reported the direct link between stress, aging, and growing old before your time. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, studied mothers caring for chronically ill children. They were otherwise healthy and between the ages of twenty and fifty. It was found that these women's chronic stress hastened the shriveling of certain genes inside cells—shortening their life span and speeding the body's deterioration.
In one year, they had undergone the equivalent of ten years of additional aging!

This study demonstrates on a molecular level there is no such thing as separation of mind and body. Dr. Dennis Novack, a researcher with the Drexel University College of Medicine, reported that your very molecules respond to your psychological situation. If you're in peril from stress on a cellular level, the big picture isn't pretty either. The
New England Journal of Medicine
reported on the physical price your body pays when you make accommodations to stress. The concept of “allostatic load,” coined by Bruce S. McEwen at the Rockefeller University, points out that chronic stress creates a slow and steady cascade of harm to your health involving the brain and the body. Consequences of allostatic load can include the altering of the response of your adrenal glands in releasing hormones, which, when unchecked, can result in hypertension.

The stress resulting from busyness is an equal-opportunity syndrome. It used to be thought that women have better stress-coping mechanisms from their tendency to talk things over with friends. As recently as the early 1990s, men got more stress-related diseases. Studies showed it was because they were expected to be strong, self-reliant, successful, and all-knowing—in control and solving their problems alone.

Today, women not only share stress-related diseases equally with men but they also react worse to trauma. Women are more likely to suffer depression, have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's, and the risk for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) following a trauma is twice as high in women. Most impressive is a fifty-two-country study of more than twenty-four thousand people, examining stress at home and at work, financial stress, and stress surrounding major life events. It found that stress raised heart attack risk by 250 percent, almost as much as smoking and diabetes.

When your busyness gets out of hand, your body needs to recover and reset the stress response. Your body does this by releasing endorphins to stabilize your hormone levels. But if stressful situations persist and your body is continually forced into the alert mode, it is like plugging too many power tools into one electrical outlet. The drain is too much, and eventually you blow the circuit breaker.

It is impossible to live completely free of stress when you're as busy as a modern-day lifestyle demands, but you can prevent some stress and minimize the impact when it can't be avoided. You may feel like you have no choice but to accept that a stressful level of busyness is a necessary part of your job and your life. You may feel trapped. Many women I've interviewed have been unable to delegate their duties enough to take a much-needed vacation. They've told me, “I can't fire my family,” and “I don't want to walk away from my business.”

I believe that many times it's not just being too busy that ends up getting the best of you, it's your feeling of hopelessness about the situation. To this, I say, “Relax!” This book will teach you how to eliminate some of your busyness and change your perception of and reaction to the stress that comes with it. Take a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Now that you realize the dangers of your current lifestyle, are you ready to make a change? That's the good news. Read on and follow the exercises, and in no time at all, you'll bring new vitality, balance, fun, and a sense of purpose into your life.

Please give me some advice in your next letter. I promise not to take it
.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

It wasn't until the birth of her daughter that time-management expert Julie Morgenstern felt that her right-brained, creative style of living was anything that needed changing. She had never suffered for this until one beautiful spring afternoon when she decided to take her child out for her first waterfront stroll. After two and a half hours of gathering everything that she needed for the trip, her daughter was asleep, and Julie had missed “the moment.” The chance for the first walk had passed, but more important, she realized that if she didn't change her cluttered and chaotic lifestyle, her child was never going to see the light of day.

How many “moments” have you missed? You might not even know, because you probably manage to pull things off most of the time. In the past, you somehow have always found the keys, made the deadline, got the tickets, or balanced the budget. Sometimes we can get so busy and wrapped up in the tasks at hand, coming one after the other, that the truly important moments in life can sort of pass us by.

You picked up this book because “too busy” isn't working for you anymore. You want off the “Island of Too Busy.” No quick trip to the organizing store or day at the spa is going to de-busify your life. De-busifying isn't like putting a cast on a broken arm. It's building a new, bionic arm that is stronger, more capable, and unbreakable. It's a journey to look at your life at work and at home and to acquire skills to prevent your excessive busyness from ruining your job, your
health, and your relationships. This journey will empower you and make you happier, healthier, and freer.

You may be overbusy and wanting a change, or you might be what I call “happy overbusy.” All the parts of your life you love, but the sheer amount of tasks you must accomplish has pushed you into overdrive.

Eventually, after going with your pedal to the metal for too long, your life begins to unravel. Whether you're running around for your children, closing the deal of a lifetime, or frantic with charity work, it doesn't justify what it does to your body and soul. At some point things start falling through the cracks—you forget a meeting, lose a vital document, and you miss “moments.” Then the unexpected or unscheduled vitally needs your attention—your sister needs chemo, your parents have to move to assisted living, or your company moves across the country.

If you're going to leave all this behind and get away from the “Island of Too Busy,” you have to take the first step. Like the first step of any recovery program, you must admit that you are powerless against the forces that be. You're alive in this moment, working this job, being a member of this family, living in this world. It is what it is, and you will have to admit that your life is chaotic and possibly spinning out of control. That's it. Say it: “I'm too busy.” You might even start feeling better already by simply admitting it to yourself.