Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

Time is murky. Porous. It has no sharp edges. What often matters more than the activity we’re doing at a moment in time, they have found, is how we feel about it. Our perception of time is, indeed, our reality.

That mental tape-loop phenomenon is so common among women it even has a name. Time-use researchers call it “contaminated time.”

Mothers’ leisure, Craig says, tends to be more interrupted, contaminated by mental noise, and “purposive.” “It’s all about meeting the family’s needs,” Craig says, even monitoring everyone’s emotional temperature. “It’s like she has host duties—she’s making sure everyone’s having a good time. On the whole, it’s good to be with the family and there is pleasure in that, but it’s stressful.

If the idle ladies who lunch were merely reflections of their husbands’ status, what kind of leisure have women ever experienced for themselves? Fisher, a woman with wavy red hair and big glasses and who moves in a fast-talking whirl, stops short. She cocks her head, as if surprised I’d even had to ask the question. “That’s why women became nuns.”

Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts.

To Rodriguez, the drive for busyness has become a powerful cultural expectation.

So strong was the urge to conform, Berns concluded, that the brain actually changed what the subject saw.8

Psychologists write of treating burned-out clients who can’t shake the notion that the busier you are, the more you are thought of as competent, smart, successful, admired, and even envied

Hallowell maintains that in addition to showing status, busyness is a new kind of high. I was hearing it in interviews. “There is a certain rush,” one young man told me, “when you’re going a thousand directions at once and getting it all done.”

In the purest sense, leisure is not being slothful, idle, or frivolous. It is, in the words of leisure researcher Ben Hunnicutt, simply being open to the wonder and marvel of the present.

The U.S. steel industry enforced a twelve-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule until 1923.37

when you really understand what leisure is, what it means to the quality of your life and the relationships you have, leisure is really, really important,” she said. “Leisure is so misunderstood. That’s what makes people feel guilty about it.”

Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, Hunnicutt says, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. “Then we starve the capacity we have to love,” he said. “It creates this ‘unquiet heart,’ as Saint Augustine said, that is ever desperate for fulfillment.”

“When you realize you’re going to die, you value your time more,” Burnett says. “That’s depressing.” “That,” Burnett says, “is living honestly and courageously in the moment. You’re able to step back, stop, and smell the roses. Or realize the roses are even there. You recognize the past is gone. The future’s not set. You may still be busy, but you’re savoring every second of it.”

And perhaps most disturbing, scientists are finding that when children are exposed to stress—often stemming from the overwhelm of their parents—it can alter not only their neurological and hormonal systems but also their very DNA.4

A study of more than 13,000 genes in four brain regions found that 667 were expressed differently in men and women. And of those, 98 percent led to more rapid aging in women, something researchers attributed to women’s “higher stress load.”12

Researchers have found that the way people feel about the stress in their lives is a far more powerful predictor of their general health—whether they’re more likely to be depressed, anxious, smoke cigarettes, or overeat—than any other measure. The perception is more precise, even, than actual stressful life events. In other words, what we think about ourselves and our lives is our reality.

those two factors are exactly what makes this particular Age of Overwhelm so insane. We have yet to learn how to control the unprecedented flood of information coming at us. And the nature of what we do and how we do it has been completely transformed in less than a century: We’ve morphed as a civilization from the hard physical labor of rural agricultural work to the sedentary chair sitting of urban knowledge workers. That’s a far more stressful life.

Trying to even decide what to pay attention to in all that noise, writes time management guru David Allen, not only taxes the brain but also wears down the willpower and leads to “decision fatigue.” We can’t decide what to think about, worrying about home stuff at work and work stuff at home, “so then we walk around with what I call the GSA of life—the Gnawing Sense of Anxiety that something out there might be more important than what you’re currently doing,” he told The Atlantic. If only we could remember what that something is.

“This overwhelm is not any one thing,” Huda Akil told me. “It’s not just technology. It’s not just two-career couples. It’s a thousand little stabs. You put that together and it’s like being constantly slightly jet-lagged.”

Both men and women say they feel productive multitasking. But women report feeling more frustrated, irritated, and stressed by it. That, Schneider says, could be because fathers multitask more at work, juggling between different work-related activities, while mothers switch from work to kids to home and back again. That distracted role overload takes an emotional toll.

There is no question that the overwhelm and information overload are fracturing time for both men and women and splintering it into whirling bits of time confetti. But for years time studies have shown that women’s time is more fragmented than men’s time. Their role overload, juggling work and home, has been greater and their responsibilities and “task density” more intense.

if fewer women spend uninhibited time in this thoughtful, creative, joyful space, the sort of timeless room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf imagined, what is the cost? To themselves and their experience of being alive? To their families? To the world, even, for the ideas or creations that don’t have the time and space to be born?

He has found discrepancies for women, not only in the actual opportunity to have time for flow but also for allowing themselves to get there in the first place. “When I lecture about flow, in the question-and-answer period, there is always the same question: ‘But doesn’t one feel guilty when you are in flow because you forget everything except what you are doing? Isn’t that giving up on the rest of your responsibilities—giving in to total involvement in what you are doing and not caring about anything or anyone else?’ That question, almost 100 percent of the time, is asked by a woman.

In his studies, he usually finds men do one and a half things at a time. Whereas women, particularly mothers, do about five things at once. And, at the same time, they are caught up in contaminated time, thinking about and planning two or three things more. So they are never fully experiencing their external or their internal worlds. And if you are never really here or there, then what kind of life are you living? “It is a problem,” he said. “It is often very difficult for women to be able to live in the moment.”

When you are overwhelmed, when you can neither predict nor control the forces shaping your time, when you don’t even have time to think about why you’re overwhelmed, much less what to do about it, you are powerless.

Although there has been a rise in female earning power and economic independence, the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently finds that men still outearn women at every age.25 But what those statistics mask, Williams said, is that the wage gap is not so much between men and women, but between mothers and everybody else. Williams calls it the “maternal wall.”

Research shows that forcing long hours, face time for the sake of face time, and late nights actually kills creativity and good thinking, and the ensuing stress, anxiety, and depression eat up health-care budgets.

Could Silicon Valley, I wondered, lead the way for the rest of the work world? It took less than a day of reporting to come to this disappointing conclusion: God, I hope not.

The young, testosterone-fueled geek culture has revved up the ideal worker standard to a superhuman level.

To top it all off, the fact that many women haven’t “made it,” that so few women have climbed to the upper echelons of business, academia, politics, science, and other fields, is seen as a sign—not that there’s something wrong with the workplace, but that there’s something wrong with women.

“Men with children have a sharp choice,” Williams said. “They can choose not to be equal partners with their wives, in which case having children will help their careers with the fatherhood bonus. Or they can choose to be equal partners and hurt their careers even more than women.

“People say there will never be equality in the workplace until there’s equality in the home. But to me, it’s really the reverse. There will never be equality at home until there’s equality in the workplace, until we redefine the ideal worker. Because until then, men will feel they have no choice but to meet that ideal, even if they don’t believe in it, because they want to be ‘successful’.”

the United States ranks dead last on virtually every measure of family policy in the world.

U.S. policy not only doesn’t work for more than three-fourths of all U.S. families with children, it makes their lives worse.

In France, the teachers at the crèche and écoles maternelles are part of the same civil service as the teachers at the Sorbonne.20 In the United States, child-care workers earn roughly what parking lot attendants and bellhops do.

That ambivalence about a mother’s proper role has led to inertia. The prevailing view seems to be: Why promote policies and change cultures to help mothers work if we aren’t so sure mothers should work at all?

By 2012, the Department of Defense was spending more than $1 billion a year to provide care for more than two hundred thousand children48 and now deems child care so critical to its mission—enabling parents to work free from worry about whether their children are safe, learning, and happy—that it is dedicated to providing the “best” child care in a “high-quality, developmentally appropriate, nurturing environment.”

They are consistently held up by early childhood education advocates for creating the absolute “gold standard” of child care.

Referring to DoD childcare.

Because it applies only to large companies, full-time workers, and those employed for more than a year, FMLA does not cover 40 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Schroeder said she could never understand the peculiar schizophrenia in political minds when it comes to mothers: “If you’re poor and a single mom, you damn well better get out there and work and don’t expect us to help you, thank you very much. But if you’re middle class and you can maybe afford to be home, then you should be guilty as hell if you’re gone and should be running around trying to do fourteen thousand things to make up for it.”

The Swedish government’s push for gender equity was driven in part by a labor shortage and the desire to avoid importing immigrant workers.60 Other countries, such as France and Germany, their populations decimated by world wars and flagging fertility rates, were similarly galvanized into pushing for “pro-natalist” policies.

In West Germany, mothers who worked continued to be called “Rabenmutters”—raven mothers—after the bird that lays her eggs in someone else’s nest and blithely flies away.

True, the United States boasts enviable rates of economic growth and total productivity, but that’s due in large part to the sheer amount of time Americans put in on the job, working long and extreme hours. Measuring productivity per hours worked, on the other hand, has in recent years put the United States behind such countries as France, Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Researchers have found that parents with stable child care are less stressed, better at coping, and more satisfied with their jobs.

It is the queasy ambivalence about this very point—should mothers work?—that stops any meaningful national discussion about what policies that acknowledge how families have changed since 1971 could even look like.

As I get up to leave, I ask how he and Shelley handled their child-care responsibilities. He shakes his head. “We never had children.”

He being Pat Buchanan.

The overwhelm, they want people to understand, is not an epidemic of personal failures, of whiny moms unable to juggle work and home efficiently. It’s a massive structural failure in society, and it’s holding everybody back.

The MomsRising organizers know that their natural constituency—tired and overwhelmed families—is too tired and overwhelmed just trying to keep it all together to do much else. So rather than try to organize protest marches, they get people to push change in the space of a few minutes. Busy and distracted people can read a short e-mail and forward it to a lawmaker, click on a Twitter link, post a comment, or add their story to the bank on the website in a matter of seconds.

MomsRising and other organizations are springing up to push forward where they say the mainstream feminist movement veered off course.