Busyness is the Avoidance of Connection
"I go too fast to see much, only the tops of everything. I've got to prowl slow some time through this country."
~ Will Rogers
Being busy, being productive, achieving and overdoing have been my norm for most of my life. If I'm really honest, this is still my default mode.
I need to do or be more to be complete. It’s never enough. There is always more we could be doing in each and every domain of your life. Not only in work, but how we show up for other people, our activism, how much we exercise…whatever it is, do more.
I can ignore my own needs and stress arousal limits to the point of becoming overwhelmed and exhausted and yet still keep dragging myself forward. When I'm busy, I don't feel hungry. I can push through and make sure the job gets done.
Busy focusing can come at the expense of our relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.
That was really useful during my military training when there was a Corporal screaming at me to leopard-crawl faster. It was still useful when I was working 16-hour days every day for 6 months on operational deployments in the Middle East.
It's the perfect strategy to deny, suppress and mask pain, ignore my physiological needs and override my own limits. Striving is a way to avoid pain.
Busyness is the avoidance of connection.
When I'm busy, I can avoid being with myself and all those big, messy feelings. I can avoid being in connection with others; I can avoid the risk of vulnerability and intimacy.
Being busy feels safe to me.
There's something that feels inherently threatening in slowing down and relaxing. Something in my system equates softness with weakness. I exacerbate this relationship by going until exhaustion forces me to collapse, leaving me small and defenceless.
At some point in my life, I learned to prove my worth and earn love and attention through doing, not being. Whilst I intellectually understand that's not true, I still have an embodied pattern that continues to rely on these outdated behaviours, no matter how outdated they are.
You might be thinking that striving and doing is essential for growth. That's it's necessary to push yourself outside your comfort zone or to work through challenges to build resilience. I disagree. Our soul deeply desires growth; it can't help but naturally expand. The only way this expansion is sustainable is when our nervous system is rooted in safety. We can only build resilience when we give ourselves time to recover and integrate.
Yet all too often, I'm onto the next thing before the paint has dried.
When I slow down, I give myself the gift of awareness. I can recognise my own needs and respect my limits. Slowing down stops me swinging between the highs of overdoing and stress and the lows of shame and not-enoughness. I can see that my needs and limits change in accordance with my rhythms and cycles.
Allowing myself to be more turns out to be less scary than I thought. On the contrary, it's richer and deeper. It's how I live up to my own desire to have a life I don't need a holiday from.
Slowing down isn't for perfection or even optimisation. It's for wholeness.
Letting go of '“busy” hasn’t been easy. It still isn’t easy.
One of the things that helps me most is community. I’ve come to realise that being with other messy, imperfect humans helps me slow down and be more present. It also has the wonderful benefit of opening me up to more intimacy and connection. Rather a break through for a former lone wolf.
If you’d like to join a community of productivity rebels wanting to slow down, be less busy and still bring a project to fruition, come and join us in The Decelerator.