THREE SIMPLE WAYS TO BRING BALANCE TO YOUR BUSY LIFE, ACCORDING TO A GP

Look outside your window and you will see that spring is well and truly here. Everywhere you will see activity, progress and movement, whether that be plants, birds, insects or trees. If you spent some time just watching an insect or could follow a bird through its day, you would come away with one message – this is a busy time of year.

It is worth taking some time to think about how busy you are and, more to the point, what being busy means to you, what it symbolises and its purpose in your life.

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Modern society has made being busy all the time a badge of honour – something we seem to take pride in saying, and something we find very difficult to let go of. Of course, life can be busy, and societal systems that we have created, although seemingly designed to help us streamline and simplify, actually make our lives more complex and fragmented.

But, even considering this, if we are all truly honest, we tend to make “busy” almost a status symbol.

And “busy” may not be good for our health. It increases our stress and cortisol levels – our fight-or-flight hormones – as well as our blood pressure and pulse rate. It can also make us less likely to sleep well or make time to exercise, and more likely to neglect our physical needs and to multitask, which fatigues our brains and makes us less efficient.

So how do we get a good balance between “healthy busy” which is productive, good for our self-esteem and satisfying, versus “unhealthy busy”, which is over the top, out of control and almost used as a marker of our self-worth?

Nature can teach us some useful lessons.

Be “appropriately” busy

Nature is busy when it needs to be and rests when it doesn’t. It knows how and when to expend its energy and when to conserve it. It knows how to pace itself and works to a rhythm. Although it has this constancy, it also has flexibility and can change its work-rate when needed, for example, in response to unusually warmer weather. We need to learn from this. Identify in your calendar when you need to be busy and plan for it. Learn to work with the natural cycles of your body and physiology: are you more productive in the morning or evening? Work with how you work.

Have a clear purpose and outcome

Nature knows why it is busy and knows what it is trying to achieve. Can you say the same thing? “Busy” and “productive” are two different things and should be distinguished as such in your own life. Be productive, not just busy. Before you start a task, work out why you are doing it, what you are trying to achieve and when you will stop.

As humans, “being busy” is sometimes used to justify our behaviour, our irritability, our lack of attention or to prove our self-worth. It can also become an identity in itself. “I am a busy person” becomes the energy with which we greet people and how we interact with them and can damage our relationships. We miss the small yet important things and, before we know it, life has passed us by. Every time you are busy, ask yourself why, and if it is worth your time and effort.

Self-Regulate

Nature stops itself when it becomes too “busy” and self-regulates before any harm is done. In the same way, we humans can burn out and don’t notice when we have been too busy for too long. Be busy and then know when to stop. That might not be when you have achieved your intended goal, but rather when you notice you are tired, stressed or inefficient.

Sleep and rest are fundamental to our health and well-being – they are a safety net to stop us being too busy. Sometimes we are fearful of not being busy – for fear others might judge us, for fear of silence or to feel certain feelings. Or it might be for fear of facing certain things, that it means we are not “needed’ or “important” or even for fear that we have to face ourselves. But it is when we become less busy, that we start to notice the important moments and people around us, and only then are we able to start being our true selves.  

2025-03-29T07:56:02Z