Too Busy for Your Own Good (8 page)

This is the tale of two ladies. As in Charles Dickens's
A Tale of Two Cities
, it begins with the best of times and the worst of times, so to speak. Dawn and Pat have similar full-time positions as retirement community managers across town from each other. Each has a husband with a full-time job, and they have children of a similar age. These women's days are jammed with meetings, activities, and obligations.

Similarities in their days end when you see the way each of them handles her busyness. Pat is clearly on the brink of a breakdown. Dawn, however, gets just as much done, but she doesn't have the frazzled look and short-fuse reaction that Pat does. Since neither one of them has the luxury of
getting rid of any of her obligations, the difference is how each of them handles her ensuing stress.

Dawn's day begins forty minutes before the rest of her family wakes up. She calls this “sacred private time.” She does some light stretching, gets a cup of coffee that was set to brew automatically before she woke up, and gets ready for work, using her shower time to review the day ahead and say some positive affirmations. Her husband, twelve-year-old, and teenager scuttle through their morning preparations that began the night before when the day's schedule was worked out. When leaving the house, everyone grabs his or her respective backpack or bag sitting by the door. They've learned that when the car is idling in the driveway, Mom will leave on time with or without them. During Dawn's one-hour commute, she listens to the latest book on tape from her favorite author. At work, she often takes a “walking” lunch and has a method for handling copious e-mails and voice mails. At home she enlists the entire family to pull their own weight in housekeeping and occasionally puts her foot down to more evening commitments.

Even with a similar job, commute, and family structure, Pat's days start chaotic and only get worse as she juggles her workload and home demands. She is known for always being late even though she works late and through lunch most days. It's hard to find what she needs on her desk, and a recent hard drive crash nearly got her fired when she admitted that she hadn't backed up as requested. It's easy to see the stress in her face, hear the tension in her voice, and she's exhausted by her own admission.

The difference between these women is that Dawn has a plan for handling all she needs to do at work and home, while Pat doesn't. Dawn controls her stress level a little each day, while Pat figures she'll catch up someday—which never seems to happen.

Some degree of busyness is a fact of modern-day working life, but you can take steps to manage the impact your busyness has on you. These steps can range from something as simple as walking during lunch or practicing deep-breathing exercises every hour to investing in cognitive-behavioral therapy, a psychotherapeutic approach shown to successfully reduce stress, depression, and anxiety. Before you decide what actions to take to reduce your stress, though, it's important to evaluate your stress response in three areas:

Life events

Physical symptoms

Emotional indicators

The mind-body connection is not a new concept; science has long been studying the effects of cumulative life
events on not only your mentality but your physiology. As an organism, the human body is fairly hearty, but even a champion prizefighter will drop from multiple, successive blows. Note whether the following experiences have happened to you in the last two years. There are no right or wrong answers. You'll also notice that not all the events are negative. (This quiz is based on my contemporary adaptation of the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, which was originally published in 1967.)

Place a check mark after each and calculate your score.

0–149 No significant problem

150–199 Slight crisis
, 33 percent chance of getting stress-related illness

200–299 Moderate crisis
, 50 percent chance of getting stress-related illness

300+ Major life crisis
, 80 percent chance of serious physical illness in next two years

Many of these situations are negative situations where stress is expected, but you may not crumble under the weight of these terrible events. Your stress increases exponentially the more life events you have to deal with, though, and you need to be aware of this reality.

These are in-your-face signs that your busyness is starting to cross over from efficiency to stressful. They are easy to evaluate because they are obvious. Perhaps people have even pointed them out to you. Busyness is often contagious, and your colleagues or kids might mirror them back at you by exhibiting similar symptoms. In tight-knit groups or loyal
workplaces, it's hard to identify which came first—symptoms of being too busy or acting like someone else who is too busy. The result is the same: your body is taking the brunt of your busyness.

The following quiz is distilled from my firsthand experience with thousands of people in stress classes over the past twenty years and personal interviews I've conducted with overbusy, overwhelmed women and men.

Place a check mark beside what you have experienced in the past six months.

Frequent headaches, dizziness

Stiff neck, backaches

Heart racing or pounding in ears or throat