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

by Brigid Schulte

At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to do or didn’t get done. I worry that I’ll face my death and realize that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff. Once, my sister Claire told me that when you smile, it releases some chemical in the brain and calms anxiety. I have tried smiling. At 4 a.m. In bed. In the dark. It didn’t work.

It’s not that I didn’t want to refresh my soul. I just always felt too busy to get to it.

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.

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.

You recognize the past is gone. The future’s not set. You may still be busy, but you’re savoring every second of it.”

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.

There will never be equality at home until there’s equality in the workplace, until we redefine the ideal worker.

because we’ve been so busy shouting past one another since 1971 about the best way to protect the time it takes to create these havens at home, we’ve failed to protect that time or those havens at all.

America has it all wrong. Its leaders don’t understand that what drives people to greater creativity and productivity is giving them autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose, not longer work hours and a smartphone that goes off in the middle of the night.

“Managers are the linchpins to change,” Hammer told me. “They are the ones who really need to get it.”

“I presented it not as a woman’s issue, but as a morale and staff issue,” she said. “Because this has never been just a woman’s issue.”

For women, however, home, no matter how filled with love and happiness, is just another workplace.

“What this intensive mothering culture tells us is valuable is at discord with what really is valuable: Love your kids. Keep them safe. Accept them as they are. Then get out of their way.”

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.

women say they’ll get to leisure when everything else is done,”

“Maybe it takes too much effort to be a little uncomfortable, to learn something new, and they don’t have the energy. But really, I think they’re afraid. They’re afraid of what having free time to themselves would feel like.”

Play is also a state of mind, an attitude of lightness, curiosity, wonder that can infuse any situation. Both are so essential to human evolution, development, innovation, and civilization

Play, he says, is what builds complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept, and flexible brains, which in turn build complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept, and flexible people and societies.

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.

Working continuously, without breaks, is in fact a surefire way to produce subpar work.