#187: Addicted to busy
If I was addicted to one thing.
It would be being busy. It would be DOING. It would be work.
I just love it. Doing things. Tasks, plans, ticking something off a to-do list. Oh yes, it gets me going. Crossing something from a to-do list, it’s my dopamine hit.
Sometimes if I’ve done something, I’ll write it on a list simply to tick it off.
Sometimes, I’ll even turn simple tasks that are required for basic human functioning into items on a list. My to-do list in the past has been known to have such tasks on as ‘make food’, ‘do washing’ ‘go to the gym’
I love doing. I need to do.
When I do something, I feel worthwhile. When I make something happen, when I do a task, I feel like I am validating my life here on earth. I feel like I matter.
Apply that to a work context where the value of certain tasks and my ability to produce is attributed to money. In this world, my addiction to doing compounds.
If I was to call myself an “olic” I could have called myself a workaholic at one point in my life. I’m in recovery now.
My addiction to busyness and being productive is supercharged in a business environment. In these environments, doing stuff relentlessly, isn’t just an addictive compulsion individually, it is collectively.
And what’s more so, it’s valued.
What’s more so, it’s deemed successful.
You will be praised for your innate affliction to over-working. You will be rewarded for it.
We live in a system where being busy and doing a lot with your time is directly linked to monetary worth. We live in a system where how much you do defines your job status and pay. We live in a system that is so incredibly efficient that this addiction to doing, this addiction to busy has transcended the workplace and has made it’s way into my chores on a Sunday.
Getting stuff done and doing a lot with your time are social norms.
I’ve lived like this for 10 years and only now am I exhausted from it. I’m tired even writing about it.
From 20-25 I knew no different and this live fast approach to life was fun and exhilarating.
Yet for the last 5 years, as my life, relationships and priorities have changed my allocation of time has changed and I’ve become much more conscious of how much I am doing, how busy I am making myself.
What began to happen is that to make up for the stress in my life, I had to plan in activities that de-stressed me from being so busy. “Self-care” became another task on the to-do list.
• Send follow up email to investors
• Book in 1:1 with Barry
• Book dinner for date night with Sarah
• Reach out to therapists because I am going insane
• Book 6am yoga class
• Make breakfast to eat after 6am yoga class
The healthy practices in my life needed to be placed into the continually crammed Tetris of my life.
My addiction to doing was most prevalent at work. Here, the list of potential things to do is never ending. A startup environment is a place of abundance for things that could always be better.
In work, as in life, if you have the inclination to, there is always more to be done.
Work became the vessel for me to become very good at doing and become very good at being busy. The faster I ran, the better I got at running, but the less time I had to see what I was creating around me. A wall, a life of busy-ness.
The intoxicating part of it all is that I am good at getting stuff done. I might see reward in the success of my company, monetarily, or friends or people I’d meet might revel in how much I was getting done. “You’ve done a lot for you age” My ego would dance, you couldn’t pay me a better compliment.
Little did many know that in the moments of down-time, on the tube or horizontal on the sofa, I’d still be doing, I’d still be busy, busy in my head.
I’d be on the instagram page of that founder with more followers than me, or who’s startup had more employees than mine. I’d compare myself to those who were “doing better” than me.
It’s like life was a constant game of candy crush saga. The more busy you are, the more economically productive you are being then the rewards and hits of dopamine keep coming.
Being addicted to your work, or being addicted to a busy life is an addiction that I think is so common you’d dare not call it an addiction.
The deep-seated need to be productive, to be contributing to society, to be making money is so entrenched that I don’t think it’s an addiction. It’s the current state of most of the western world, and definitely the business world.
I’ve wrenched myself free from both my inner demons that were keeping me busy and the environment that kept me in the perpetual roulette wheel of doing. Looking in I see my own frenzy and I see my own ambition. Yet I feel exhausted placing myself back there.
My need to prove myself and wipe the chip from my shoulder kept me there. My unconscious desires for money and status made me run faster and faster on the hamster wheel. All the while the environment I’d put myself in kept clapping.
I sound a touch bitter. I think I am. I feel like I gave a lot, and gave more than I needed to in that game.
I don’t regret what I have contributed, all the things I have “done” in my life. Yet I do wonder about how they got done and whether it all needed to be so... urgent?
Have I cured my addiction? Coaching and Therapy dismantled the ego that was driving me, often without me knowing.
If I am a workaholic or a busy-olic, then I’ve deleted the gambling apps from my phone and I’ve poured the alcohol down the drain. I’ve removed myself from the environments that weren’t bringing out the best in me.
If you were allergic to cheerios, would you eat them for breakfast every day?
Or, would you try and change yourself to become more tolerant to cheerios?
What if that didn’t work? Would you keep eating the food that was making you ill?
I’ve stopped eating cheerios.
Cheerio,
James x
Poem for someone who is juggling her life
by Rose Cook
This is a poem for someone
who is juggling her life.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
It needs repeating
over and over
to catch her attention
over and over
because someone juggling her life
finds it difficult to hear.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
Let it all fall sometimes.
– from Notes from a Bright Field by Rose Cook
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