Busyness Is Not a Long-term Health Plan

by Joan Friedlander

"I'm really busy right now, but it's a good busy." I heard these exact words quite a few times the first few weeks of the year. Every time I heard someone say it, it made me wonder what that really means. When I heard it from one person after another, I became quite curious. Although I knew that I was in a transition mode, and that I was happy about being less than busy, it still caused me to feel twinges of concern. I actually had moments when I became concerned about my lack of busyness - was even a little envious - and also wondered why so many people were saying the same exact thing. What did this mean?

In divine order, I was given a chance to experience busyness first hand during the first couple of weeks in February. Truthfully, I didn't like it. I'm pretty sure my busyness wasn't a "good busy," as I gather "good busy" means that it's accompanied by lots of money. Is it because I was busy doing things I didn't want to spend time doing, or spending time on things that no longer suited my purpose and my goals? Or, am I the kind of person who doesn't thrive on busyness, no matter how good it may be?

Last Wednesday I decided I'd had enough. I noticed I was having a hard time sleeping and that I was going to bed later and later. On many nights I wasn't fully present during family time (I was still working in my head even when I "stopped"), and it was beginning to take a toll on my health.

On this important Wednesday I decided that if I was unhappy about my stretched schedule, then I was the one person who could do something about it. First, I had to determine the sudden source of my busyness. Then I had to make decisions about my priorities, including what I was spending time on that wasn't serving me. I chose to let go of some pretty interesting things, and recognized the need to make more time for others.

This is not necessarily an easy thing to do, but I knew it was important. As someone who needs to manage my level of stress in order to stay healthy, it was critical. I think we all need to monitor our busyness more than we usually do, but someone who has a physical challenge, one that has caused weakness in their body system, really needs to do this. Either way, for most people, busyness is not a long-term health plan.

Our most important business asset is our body

When we are in business for ourselves, we pay a lot of attention to our assets and our goals, but I think we can easily forget that our most important asset is our body! We cannot do our work and fulfill our mission if our body can't support us. Many of us left the corporate world because we had little room to honor our personal needs, and now we're doing the same thing to ourselves. As they say, wherever you go, there you are.

In today's busy world, self-care habits are the first to go. Whenever I work with an entrepreneur who is attempting to bring more order to their life - the very person that's supposed to have the most ability to choose how they spend their time - exercise and self-care routines are the most frequently named missing practices. Next come consistent time off in the evenings and on weekends.

The role of adrenaline

Adrenaline is very misleading. It is a chemical produced by your adrenal glands that fools you into thinking you have plenty of energy. It is one of two chemicals released by the glands in your body (cortisol is the other one) when you get into those crunchy deadline situations. It's the chemical that has you say, "I do my best work under pressure." It's also detrimental to your health in long-term doses and adrenaline production is a symptom of busyness.

Not everyone reacts the same way to stress (and different people respond differently to different kinds of stress - the filters are individual), but if you are reading this and experiencing a nagging feeling, perhaps it's because your body wisdom is sending you messages. When I did some research for this article, I searched through Google.com using the following 3 words: adrenaline health problems. I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight about adrenaline. All links and articles I pulled up on the first 2 pages were discussions about stress in which adrenaline and cortisol were mentioned.

Making Changes

No, it's not easy to change your habits, to slow down, or to let go of projects that don't truly serve your purpose. In addition, without adrenaline pumping through you, you may experience a temporary loss of creativity and drive. And that possibility scares us more than the long-term alternative! But when you don't slow down, when you don't stop for lunch, nor take time to exercise because you are stringing deadlines together, you run long-term risks.

Your body is a well-tuned system. If you don't make good decisions on your own behalf, you can bet that it will. Do you know anyone who had a bizarre accident, seemingly out of nowhere only to discover that it was the best thing that happened to them? I met a man last month that told me about an accident he had over Labor Day weekend. He slipped and fell at a pool party, which laid him up for a bit of time due to a resulting back injury. I asked what he learned from this experience. He said one word, "patience." He is now more patient on the freeways, with his children and family, and with life in general.

Is there one thing you can do, just one thing that will eliminate one ounce of busyness from your life? Can you trust the future enough to take that action? Will you any way?

Resources

The following excerpts are from a few of the sources I found on the Internet when I performed my search.

Adrenaline and Stress
By: Dr. Archibald Hart
"In the fast-paced, pressurized environment of life in the '90's, many people may be hooked on the "rush" they receive from their body's own adrenaline - and not even know what's happening. But prolonged adrenaline arousal can lead to stress disease and - ultimately - premature death. Heart attacks and other chronic forms of stress-induced illness are the lethal by-products of too much adrenaline pumping through our systems. Dr. Hart's advice-packed book points the way out of the trap…toward a more peaceful, healthy life."

Excerpt about the book from Time for Hope Resource Center
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"Bursts of adrenaline give us a buzz or feeling of excitement. But when you don't get a chance to unwind from stress, when the battering of adrenaline and other stress hormones continues without a break, the body goes into overdrive. The result is a drain on your body's vital systems."

Stress Can Rot Your Brain
By Dr. Trisha Macnair
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/features/dealing_with_stress.shtml

Healthy Lifestyles
Understanding Stress
http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/primary/life11.htm
(University of Michigan Health System)

What is happening?

Our bodies are accommodating to stress in some rather remarkable ways. If the event that triggers the response is perceived as very bad adrenaline is pumped out of the adrenal glands. Adrenaline helps our bodies meet the problem. When there are less emergent but an overload of challenges, the body does another thing. It alerts the pituitary glands to release hormones called cortisols. Cortisols, like adrenaline, are toxic if experienced for too long a time. Also, when the continuous stress and the hormones are affecting the body we usually resort to comfortable but unhealthy habits: over eating, drinking, smoking, over working, etc.

When does stress become a health problem?

Stress from major life events or just the hassles of daily living affect everyone at some point. The problems arise when you get no relief. Under chronic stress, you may stay on guard all the time. This leads to exhaustion or burnout, a state that sometimes causes physical changes in different body systems. Also, the by products of habits you often associate with the temporary relief are risk factors for many diseases. An example is overweight, which plays a role in diabetes and heart disease.
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A 1999 government report found that the number of hours worked increased 8% in one generation to an average 47 hrs/week with 20% working 49 hrs/week. U.S. workers put in more hours on the job than the labor force of any other industrial nation, where the trend has been just the opposite. According to an International Labor Organization study, Americans put in the equivalent of an extra 40-hour work week in 2000 compared to ten years previously. Japan had the record until around 1995 but Americans now work almost a month more than the Japanese and three months more than Germans. We are also working harder. In a 2001 survey, nearly 40% of workers described their office environment as "most like a real life survivor program."
http://www.stress.org/job.htm.

 

by Joan Friedlander, © 2004. All rights reserved.