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

by Brigid Schulte

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.

When women began working in a man’s world, their lives changed completely. Yet workplace cultures, government policies, and cultural attitudes, by and large, still act as though it is, or it should be, 1950 in Middle America: Men work. Women take care of home and hearth. Fathers provide. A good mother is always available to her children. But obviously, life isn’t so sharply divided anymore. And until attitudes, however unconscious, catch up with the way we really live our lives, the overwhelm will swirl on. Nowhere is that disconnect between expectations and reality more apparent than when a woman has a child.

That mental tape-loop phenomenon is so common among women it even has a name. Time-use researchers call it “contaminated time.” It is a product of both role overload—working and still bearing the primary responsibility for children and home—and task density. It’s mental pollution,

Women’s leisure tends to be fragmented and chopped up into small, often unsatisfying bits of ten minutes here, twenty minutes there that researchers call “episodes.”

Make time for leisure when the spirit seizes you, no matter what you happen to be wearing.

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.”

It’s about showing status. That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life.” There’s a real ‘busier than thou’ attitude, that if you’re not as busy as the Joneses, you’d better get cracking.”

“As a culture, we have translated speed into being a virtue. If you are busy, if you get things done quickly, if you move quickly throughout the day, it expresses success. You’re achieving,” Rodriguez said. “We’re validated by those around us living the same way and sanctioned if we aren’t following this cultural expectation. The feeling is, if I’m not busy today, something’s wrong.”

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.22

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 miracle of now,” he calls it, to choose to do something with no other aim than that it refreshes the soul, or to choose to do nothing at all. To just be and feel fully alive. The high-minded Greeks called leisure skole. Like school, they considered it a time for learning and cultivating oneself and one’s passions. It is a time not just for play, recreation, and connection with others but also for meditation, reflection, and deep thought.35

What changed, she argues, was the introduction of the clock in the thirteenth century and the rise of manufacturing. Time became money and employers had the power to control both.

But economists like Schor argue that a voracious advertising industry creates shiny new wants and that insatiable consumer spending now powers 70 percent of the U.S. economy. The astonishing rise in the cost of medical care, the cost of living, and ever-steeper housing prices for ever-larger homes have outstripped stagnant earnings. As a result, household debt has reached historic highs,39 and people are drowning in stuff—caught up in what she calls a vicious cycle of “work and spend.”

Hunnicutt sees something deeper happening, too. “Work has become central in our lives, answering the religious questions of ‘Who are you?’ and ‘How do you find meaning and purpose in your life?’” he told me. “Leisure has been trivialized. Something only silly girls want, to have time to shop and gossip.”

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.”

Maybe that’s the attraction of busyness, she says. If we never have a moment to stop and think, we never have to face that terrifying truth.

So a little stress is good. Some excitement or a new challenge rewires the brain in positive ways to help you learn and acquire new skills. But if the body is repeatedly stressed-out and anxious, when it is continuously bathed in cortisol rather than just spritzed now and then, all the finely tuned systems designed to protect the body begin to turn against it. That’s when it goes into what scientists call “allostatic overload.”8 That overload is not only shrinking our brains, it’s making us sick.

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.

Stress, she said, is no more and no less than the inability to predict and control the forces that shape our lives.

And 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.

In flow, humans lose themselves and feel most at peace. It is a state that he describes as greater than happiness. And it requires undivided attention and uninterrupted time.

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.

The premise is simple. Today’s workplace thinks and operates much as it did in the 1950s, when people expected the world to be neatly divided into two separate and unequal worlds: the man in the gray flannel suit who could devote himself entirely to work in one, and, in the other, his homemaker wife, taking care of everything and everyone else. But the worlds of work and caregiving have collided. The lawsuits show the workplace is harshest on those who try to live in both worlds at the same time. “Look, if you design work around someone who starts to work in early adulthood and works full force for forty years straight, who have you just described? Men,” Joan Williams, the legal scholar who helped shape the new theory, told me. “We have organized the workplace around men’s bodies and men’s traditional life pattern. That’s sex discrimination.”

A majority of African American mothers have always worked. Blue-collar families were able to afford the single-earner lifestyle only in the two decades of economic boom following the Second World War.17

Working mothers are judged unfairly not only as workers but also as mothers. Studies have found that employed mothers are seen as more selfish and less dedicated to their children than at-home moms, especially if they are thought to be working because they want to, rather than being forced to in order to make ends meet.23 No wonder just walking out the door in the morning as a working mother can be so fraught. Already, you’re judged as guilty at best, a jerk, or worse. As Joan Williams told me, “You just walk around feeling polluted.”

Some have called this disappearance of women “opting out” of the workforce and choosing to stay home, and they worry about the consequences if their marriages end: Divorced older women are more likely to live in poverty.32 But Joan Williams said the ideal worker often gives women no choice. “Women are being pushed out both by gender discrimination and by this ‘all-or-nothing’ workplace,” she said. “I don’t call that choice. I call that lack of choice.”

The writer William Chalmers, in his book America’s Vacation Deficit Disorder: Who Stole Your Vacation?, estimates that the stressed-out ideal worker culture of no vacations, endless work, and exhausted butt-in-chair face-time “presenteeism” costs the U.S. economy as much as $1.5 trillion a year.

In fact, a raft of new research is finding that better work gets done when workers have more control over and predictability about their time and workflow, and when managers focus on the mission of the job rather than the time in the chair and recognize that workers are more engaged, productive, and innovative when they have full lives at home and are refreshed with regular time off.

I began to wonder if the crazy way the entire child-care system is organized is really one not-so-subtle message telling mothers to hang it up, quit, and go home where they belong. “We’ve heard that from policy makers,” Michelle Noth, an advocate with Child Care Aware of America, told me. “That’s what they had as children. With their wives at home, that’s what they have now. They’re not thinking about how employers can work with both mothers and fathers to figure out a way to support people who have children in this country.”

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.” That double standard was on display in the 2012 presidential election when Republican candidate Mitt Romney, whose wife stayed home to raise their five sons, said at an NBC Education Forum that to have one parent that “can be at home in those early years of education can be extraordinarily important.”57 But a few months earlier, he had talked with pride about the tough work requirements he’d passed as part of welfare reform as Massachusetts governor: “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well, that’s heartless,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work.’ I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.”58 The “individuals,” of course, being poor single mothers.

The brightest spots have some key ingredients in common: They bore deeply into their work cultures and, like Menlo, change their very DNA. The transformation is thoughtful, deliberate, and embraced from top to bottom. The best workplaces recognize that working in a new way requires learning new skills and not assuming people automatically just know how to work with flexibility. Employees are trained to understand their own work style: Do they do their best work with distinct boundaries separating work and home? Are they adept at integrating the two? Managers are trained to measure performance, not hours. The mission of the company and the scope and quality of work expected from each employee are clearly defined and communicated—none of the we’ll-know-it-when-we-see-it ambiguity that, organizational psychologists have found, is the biggest workplace stressor.3 The clarity of purpose helps people better answer the three questions that drive so much of the unending overwhelm: • How much is enough? • When is it good enough? • How will I know?

But times and work have changed. Unlike manual laborers, knowledge workers have about six good hours of hard mental labor a day, futurist Sara Robinson found in a review of research on work and work hours. Work late for too long, she wrote, and “people get dull and stupid … They make mistakes that they’d never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they’re fried.”15 A study of medical interns found that those on long shifts made 36 percent more potentially serious errors than those who worked shorter shifts.16 Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that companies can get short-term gains by pushing employees to work sixty or seventy hours a week, Robinson reports. But after two weeks at that pace, workers were not just fried—they were crispy. Microsoft, like most other high-tech firms, has a “churn ’em and burn ’em” long work hours culture. (Apple once made T-shirts for employees proclaiming 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT!) But in a 2005 survey, Microsoft employees reported that in a 45-hour workweek, they put in only 28 productive hours. That’s 5.6 hours a day.17

The “third path,” DeGroot explains, is for couples who want to share their work and home lives as full partners, each one with time for work, love, and play.

For both men and women to have time for work, love, and play, she realized, the way most people work, their relationships and their attitudes about play would have to change. But with no real role models, she didn’t know how. So she began to imagine: What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? What if a performance-based instead of an hour-measuring work culture could more easily absorb both men and women “taking their foot off the gas pedal” for time to care for children or families or have lives, as well as ramping up again when that time had passed? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives?

“When couples are angry with each other, standing in their living rooms fighting about ways to create more time and not seeing any, they don’t realize that there are these other invisible forces in the room with them,” DeGroot said. The ideal worker, the ideal mother, and the provider father are right there, pulling the strings. “They’re the ones creating the stress.”

To start down the third path, DeGroot asks people to fight what she calls “the good fight” right when the overwhelm kicks into gear: when the first baby is born. That one event, as I had discovered in all the time-use research around the world, changes a woman’s life profoundly and, until very recently, a man’s life hardly at all.

Helping couples find Their Own Private Netherlands, so to speak, is a key mission of DeGroot’s institute. Her approach includes three main elements: vision, space, and story. When she asks couples to fight the good fight, she uses a well-researched curriculum to help them see the powerful unconscious forces at work in their lives—the ideal worker, the provider father, and the ideal mother. Then in what she calls “active listening” sessions, she creates a regular and predictable space for couples ordinarily too overwhelmed to even think, so they can begin to sort through where they are and how they got there. It’s a time to pause, to step outside the swirl and examine their own work cultures, work creep, how their own histories can unthinkingly shape their expectations, and how easy it is to fall into what she calls reactive, no-win “tangos” when those unconscious forces are pulling the strings. She asks couples to talk to each other about what they really want for their life together. She asks them to start to imagine how to get across the gap between where they are and the vision of what they really want. Then she tells couples to experiment and see what happens. Over and over. Until the vision gets clearer and the path to it better lit. And when they get stuck, when change seems impossible, like MomsRising, she, too, has a bank of stories, and connects couples, families, businesses, and leaders who are striving to remake their lives on the third path to those who already...

If work is something working fathers are supposed to do, nonstop, unending for forty-plus years because they are the “providers,” the stakes are high for them at work. They are under pressure to perform and always be on their toes. Home is a place of refuge. And, Csikszentmihalyi’s studies found, men tend to have a choice whether to be involved in domestic duties. They tend to do only chores they like and tend to care for their kids only when they’re in a good mood. What’s not to like? For women, however, home, no matter how filled with love and happiness, is just another workplace.

No matter where they were or what they were doing, the women in his studies were consumed with the exhaustive “mental labor” of keeping in mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands, and family calendar. That, he wrote, only intensifies the feeling of breathless time pressure for women.17

That strong, insidious, and sometimes unconscious cultural belief, that working mothers are bad mothers, and the pressure mothers feel to prove they aren’t, drives much of working mother guilt, said Jean-Anne Sutherland, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Kathryn Masterson, a journalist and bewildered expectant mom, writing in D.C.’s City Paper brilliantly—and depressingly—captured this scarred landscape by tracking the anonymous mortar attacks on the popular Listserv DC Urban Moms over … strollers. “Bugaboo is rich and trend-oriented. Maclaren is highly-educated upper-middle class. Graco is low class,” one mother wrote.

“The whole idea that mothers stayed at camp and the men went off to hunt? No way! These women were walking thousands of miles every year with their children. Or if it was not safe, they were leaving them back at camp.” She pauses to drive that point home: Sometimes mothers left their children back at camp. The children were with their fathers, older siblings, grandparents, relatives, and other trusted, nurturing adults—people Hrdy calls “alloparents” (“allo” means “other than” in Greek). “It’s natural for mothers to work. It’s natural for mothers to take care of children,” she says. “What’s unnatural is for mothers to be the sole caretaker of children. What’s unnatural is not to have more support for mothers.” And not just mothers who work outside the home. “Moms who stay at home still need and deserve a lot of help,” she says. With so much support from alloparents early in human evolution, mothers’ lives were more integrated between work and home, she says. “What’s different today is that the workplace is no longer compatible with being a mother. It’s as simple as that.”

If humans are wired for anything, Hrdy argues, it’s to trust and care for one another. Infants have evolved to instinctively scan the world for people they can count on, appeal to, and elicit care from—not just parents, but alloparents. It’s an impulse, Hrdy says, born of a long human history of what she calls “cooperative breeding.” In brain scans of adults looking at images of babies’ faces, neuroscientists have found that reward centers and brain regions associated with communication, attachment, and caregiving instantly activate. And not just in parents’ brains but also in the brains of adults with no children at all.6

Sharing care and staving off starvation are what enabled human childhood to become long in the first place, Hrdy theorizes, just as the young of other animals that share care have longer periods of dependency. And that longer childhood, she says, “was a wonderful opportunity for big brains to evolve.” Sharing care may have also forced adult brains to become more sophisticated in order to cooperate and share information.

For people living far from extended family or a “tribal” network of supportive alloparents, Hrdy says, it’s imperative to create your own.

“The marital structure will have to adapt and learn how to do this better,” he says. “And men will have to learn how to communicate better.” Though Kaibel continues to look for full-time work, he loves his new life. “Men are starting to realize, Wow, we lose this massive dimension of our relationship with our kids by just enslaving ourselves at work all the time,” he says. “And we’re starting to figure it out, that we need to have that connection, too.”

no one was looking at how perhaps men didn’t even think they had a choice, stuck at work and expected to work all hours as ideal workers and providers. In other words, no one has spent much time asking, “What do men really want?”

trying to be new fathers at home and live up to the expectations of the ideal worker provider at work was creating the very same time insanity for fathers that working mothers began experiencing in the 1970s.

fathers, like working mothers had for decades, were giving up sleep, personal care, and leisure time.9 In other words, they were becoming … overwhelmed.