Our Obsession With Being Busy Is Not Letting Us Enjoy Our Idle Time & Why It¡¯s Bad
What you think is benefiting you is actually harming you
¡®Hustle¡¯
Here¡¯s a word that defines the 21st century work ethic. A word you¡¯ll see in different fonts and sizes on a person¡¯s lock-screen, covering the walls of a startup¡¯s office and on the walls of people who are trying to motivate themselves on a daily basis.
Over the years, being busy became cool. Now, it isn¡¯t about what you¡¯re doing as long as you are doing something. We¡¯re keeping ourselves occupied with multiple tasks that might be unrelated and affecting the quality of our productivity negatively! We¡¯re constantly exposing ourselves to excess information which is a lot for our brain to process. A study by Microsoft revealed that the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds!
The dominant capitalistic system has turned us into robots who just can¡¯t turn themselves off. We¡¯re all working on the assumption that if we keep working and don¡¯t spend a single idle moment, we will make it in life.
We¡¯ve reached a point where when we don¡¯t have any work to do, we feel like we¡¯re wasting time when really, we¡¯ve forgotten how to enjoy that moment of idleness.
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This doesn¡¯t just need to be official work, by the way. It could be you forcing yourself to watch a documentary on Netflix even when your eyes are shutting off. It could be you tuning into a podcast while driving because there¡¯s always something to learn instead of just enjoying some music. It could be you reading something even when you¡¯re on your way to a vacation because who wants to look out of the window and enjoy the scenery when you can get some reading done? We¡¯re literally living from one task to another instead of actually enjoying the little moments we get to ourselves.
I mean, really, ask yourself when was the last time you just stared at the sunset or sat quietly with your cup of tea or just let your mind wander towards more philosophical thoughts about life?
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No matter how much you love to be busy, it's important to realise that this trend of always being busy is actually hurting your productivity. This habit of overworking ourselves just to have a task at hand is actually detrimental since we¡¯re constantly distracting our brains with tasks, information and causing mental chaos which then translates into a chaotic life.
Loren Frank, professor at the Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco says, ¡°The research on learning is extremely clear. To learn something well, you need to study it for a while and then take a break.¡±
In your race to complete all the tasks on your list for the day, you¡¯re not taking breaks and it is actually harming your mental capacity to absorb things. Moreover, it is also playing havoc when it comes to your mental health. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California says ¡°If you¡¯re stuck in this feed-me stimulation loop, we know that this is associated with the feeling of being out of control. It¡¯s associated with anxiety and disconnectedness, and a feeling of, what¡¯s really real?¡±
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But this hunger for always working and never sitting idle isn¡¯t just causing harm to your mental health and capacity but is hurting you physically as well without you even noticing.
A study published on the US National Library of Medicine shows that those who work long hours increase their risk of heart disease by 40%.
The Helsinki Businessmen Study observed people for 26 years only to find that executives and businessmen who took fewer holidays could be at a much higher risk for both earlier deaths and worse health in old age.
When you don¡¯t give your body or mind the time to rejuvenate itself so that you can get back to work with hundred percent strength, you¡¯re actually harming your productivity which is something you don¡¯t want to do. It is high time that we realise it and try to turn ourselves off just for a moment.
