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

by Brigid Schulte

These dads are also spreading the word on once obscure research that has found that preschool children with more involved fathers show more cognitive competence, more self-control, more empathy, and less gender stereotyping than preschool children with less involved fathers. Adolescents with more involved fathers are more likely to have better self-esteem, self-control, social competence, and life skills—provided the father is not overly controlling or authoritarian.12 Surveys have found that girls are less confident than boys as early as in elementary school, and girls’ self-esteem continues to drop throughout high school. But spending time with a loving father, researchers are finding, is an important factor in keeping a girl from losing her self-esteem and confidence once she hits puberty.13

Why did I automatically assume that when the babysitter couldn’t make it, I had to step in? Had my poisonous guilt, my desire to be the perfect mother, the blind panic not to disappoint my children or have them miss out because I wasn’t home all the time so clouded my vision that I couldn’t even see how insane that decision was? But more important, what was I teaching her? Beyond giving her a working mother role model of an angry, cursing, crazy harpy, I was teaching her that she was at the center of the universe. Far from the lesson I thought I was teaching her—to stick with something and not become a quitter—I was teaching her the opposite. I was teaching her that she was entitled.

All that schlepping around in the car, from voice lessons to the tutor to baseball practice, doesn’t build the intimacy or the independence that gives rise to a quality that researchers are finding is key to both success and happiness. A quality they call grit. Grit is the ability to set your mind to something and stick with it when the going gets hard.

Studies have found that the more grit children have, the higher their grade point average, the more likely they are to get through a tough program, outrank others on competitions like the National Spelling Bee, be better educated, and have a more stable career. Grit is a better indicator of success, these studies found, than either SAT score or IQ.11 The more grit, the more likely you are to follow a passion, persevere, and do the sometimes arduous work on your own to reach a goal. And the more you do that, research shows, the more likely you are to be happy.

What we need to be parenting for is happiness first. Focusing on grit becomes more about them fulfilling their own potential rather than honing showy skills that look spectacular on a college admission application.”

That’s because achievement, all that showy résumé building, does not necessarily lead to happiness. Instead, she says, feeling positive and happy in the first place is what fosters achievement.

happy people, those who are comfortable in their own skin, are more likely to have “fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health and a long life”—in other words, success.13 And that positive, happy state, she says, arises from grit.

Grit isn’t something you’re born with, Carter says. It’s something you can learn and exercise, like a muscle. If you’re a parent, you can teach grit. How? Let your children struggle. A little challenge, a little anguish, even, is good for them. When children learn to resolve their own conflicts, without Mom or Dad swooping in to the rescue, they build grit, self-confidence, and the creative problem-solving skills that lead to higher academic achievement.14 Teach them to try new things, she says, to take risks, follow inklings, see if they turn into passions, work hard, maybe master something, maybe make mistakes, but love the journey itself, not the reward.

“You did really well, you must have worked really hard.” That kind of praise, they said, reflects a “growth mind-set”—or someone who believes that success is a result of grit, effort, and hard work rather than innate aptitude.

“When you’re growth oriented, you’re driven by love, passion, and who you are,” she says. “When you’re in a fixed mind-set, you tend to perfectionism. You’re driven by fear and who you think other people want you to be. And perfectionists, by definition, can never be satisfied. They’re never happy.”

To raise “gritty,” happy kids, Carter teaches parents to first lose the self-sacrifice. Depressed parents have been linked to negative behaviors in their kids, she says, while positive emotions tend to be contagious.15 So it’s important that parents start by taking care of themselves and their marriages or partnerships. She advises families to become more mindful of how they spend their time and how they talk to one another, to build support networks, create easy routines, meaningful rituals, and savor the small moments of connection. And most important, teach them gratitude. “Teach your kids to count their blessings,” Carter says. Adults who often feel grateful are more generous, more empathetic, and “have more energy, more optimism, more social connections and more happiness than those who do not,” wrote Melinda Beck in The Wall Street Journal, reporting on a decade of gratitude research. “They are also less likely to be depressed, envious, greedy or alcoholics. They earn more money, sleep more soundly, exercise more regularly and have greater resistance to viral infections.”16 And, Beck writes, researchers are beginning to find the same benefits in children. “Kids who feel and act grateful tend to be less materialistic, get better grades, set higher goals, complain of fewer headaches and stomach aches and feel more satisfied with their friends, families and schools than those who don’t.”

Leisure researchers have found that daughters learn about leisure from their mothers. And since most mothers put themselves last and reach for the to-do list first, their example teaches their daughters to do the same.

Leisure researchers have also found that the more one plays in childhood, the more likely one is to play in adulthood, that trying a range of activities and experiences early on, when the stakes for failing or proving oneself are so much lower, makes it easier to return to them later, in adulthood.

Henderson and other scholars say women taking time for themselves, deliberately choosing leisure without children or family, is nothing less than a courageous—subversive, almost—act of resistance.7

the true test of leisure is not what the activity is that fills a certain block of time but how that time feels. And different activities feel different to different people at different times in their lives. A carefree day at the beach with friends in your twenties can feel a whole lot different from a day with two toddlers prone to sunburn, who can’t swim, need naps, and insist on painfully scraping the sand off their tiny feet on your bare legs.

Just as the overwhelm is the result of unpredictability and a lack of control, true leisure, researchers say, is the result of feeling both a measure of control over the experience and also choice, free from obligation. “But women have more of a sense of obligation rather than a feeling of voluntary choice,”

Leisure time for women, studies have found, often just means more work. Women are typically the ones who plan, organize, pack, execute, delegate, and clean up after outings, holidays, vacations, and family events. And in addition to being physically taxing, leisure for women can be mentally and emotionally draining, Gibson and other researchers have found, because women tend to feel responsible for making sure everyone else is enjoying the leisure activity and so are constantly taking the emotional temperatures of all involved. That strong, self-sacrificing “ethic of care,” as leisure researchers call it, is also the reason women tend to have the ongoing tape loop of tasks yet to get done, responsibilities, and worries that play in the head like an annoying and hard-to-shake jingle, which contaminates the experience of any kind of time.9

Few animals continue to play into adulthood. Humans do. Play sculpts the brain, Brown maintains. In horsing around, pretending, telling stories, moving our bodies, creating, making jokes, tinkering, being curious, competing in sports, daydreaming, and playfully exploring novel experiences—like soaring on a trapeze, or writing a book, even—the brain creates rich new neural connections that fire together in new ways. As a child, play is how we begin to understand ourselves and the way the world works, simulating experiences and emotions, learning skills without risk. As adults, play is what keeps our brains flexible. And that, Brown says, is what enables our species to innovate, create, solve old problems in new ways, and continuously adapt our behavior to thrive in an ever-changing and often dangerous world.

The way you live your days is the way you live your life. —Annie Dillard

You can’t manage time. Time never changes. There will always and ever be 168 hours in a week. What you can manage are the activities you choose to do in time.

And what busy and overwhelmed people need to realize, she said, is that you will never be able to do everything you think you need, want, or should do.

“When we die, the e-mail in-box will still be full. The to-do list will still b...

the stuff of life never ends. That is life. You will never clear your plate so you can finally allow yourself to get to the good stuff. So you have to decide. What do you want to accomplish in this life? What’s important to you right now? And realize that what’s important now may not be two years from now. It’s always changing.”

But that ragged feeling of being neither here nor there and vaguely inadequate in both is what I remember most about being a working mother with little kids in the early twenty-first century.

“I don’t describe my life as overwhelming. I see it as deeply rich and complex. I feel energized by the challenges I have to confront,”

Balance is a simplistic formulation because my life is often not balanced. It tips in various directions at different times between my work, my kids, my partner, or myself. But I’ve found that rather than seek perfect balance, it’s better for me to ask myself: Am I trying my best? Am I doing things for the right reasons? Do I make those I love feel loved? Am I happy? And then adjust as I go.”4

They have worked their way into positions of authority, so their time is their own to control and is predictable.

The essence of their advice all seemed to boil down to what my kids learned in preschool: Plan. Do. Review. Take time to figure out what’s important in the moment and what you want to accomplish in life. If you’re ambivalent, notice it. Pick something anyway. Embrace it. Play. Try one approach. Assess. If that isn’t working, ditch it and play with something else. Keep yourself accountable but enjoy the process. There is no right answer. This is life. Like Monaghan does herself, I began using bits of one method, pieces of another.9 If they seemed to help, I kept on using them. If the methods were too complicated or took too much work, I moved on.

Human beings, he said, are designed to pulse, to alternate between spending and recovering energy. The heart beats. The lungs breathe in and out. The brain makes waves. We wake and sleep. Even digestion is rhythmic. We’re built to work the same way, he said, alternating between periods of intense focus and time for rest and renewal.

Pulsing—deactivating and reactivating the brain—actually makes it pay better attention.

Breaks also inspire creativity. Scientists have found that people who take time to daydream score higher on tests of creativity.16 And there’s a very good biochemical reason why your best ideas and those flashes of insight tend to come not when you’ve got your nose to the grindstone, oh ideal worker, but in the shower.

When the brain is solving a problem in a deliberate and methodical way, Kounios and Beeman found that the visual cortex, the part of the brain controlling sight, is most active. So the brain is outwardly focused. But just before a moment of insight, the brain suddenly turns inward, what the researchers called a “brain blink.” Alpha waves in the right visual cortex slow, just as when we often close our eyes in thought. Milliseconds before the insight, Kounios and Beeman recorded a burst of gamma activity in the right hemisphere in the area of the brain just above the ear, believed to be linked to our ability to process metaphors.

Working in pulses, chunking time, the brain dump, and the Worry Journal have helped me begin to knit the scraps of my time together.

When we live by the clock, the Greeks said, we are bound by chronos time. This is the time that races, marches, creeps, and flies.

But kairos is the time of the “right moment,” the eternal now, when time is not a number on a dial but the enormity of the experience inside