These phrases point to a mental state that we’re all craving some relief from. And yet many of us seem strangely attracted to it. In fact, busyness is often presented as a modern-day status symbol. We tell ourselves that we don’t want to be so busy. But we’re also unwilling to make the changes to become significantly less busy. And some of us even have judgments about people who aren’t as busy — perhaps that those who don’t have full calendars are lazy or lonely (after all, who wants to miss out on the action?). One thing we know about the state of busyness: it’s the product of a distracted mind. To put it more precisely, we feel busy because we have a habit of doing one thing while thinking about the next. This mental habit is so ordinary that it goes unnoticed most of the time. We’re unloading the dishwasher but thinking about wiping down the counters. We’re showering but thinking about the next text we’re going to send. We are adept time travelers, physically here in this moment but mentally thinking about the next. This habit doesn’t just arise at the micro level of day-to-day tasks. It also arises in our thinking about long-term life stages and events. We’re working at one job but considering the possibilities of the next. We’re having dinner at our favorite restaurant while mentally planning our meal at the next desired spot. Our default mental state is to lean forward, off the axis of time. It is like we are standing on our tip toes looking over our own shoulders into the future. We need to interrupt the ordinary mind state that leaves us feeling overwhelmed by the demands of life. In other words, we don’t need to change what we do but how we do it.
The One-Thing-at-a-Time Meditation Practice
We have found that the best way to make this shift is through the “One-Thing-at-a-Time Meditation.” The practice is simple: pay attention to the thing you’re doing while you’re doing it. To help you build this practice into a habit, we recommend using a simple strategy called Notice-Shift-Rewire that we have developed in our work with busy professionals.
The key is to first Notice when you’re caught in the state of busyness.The next step is to Shift gears and bring your attention back to the present moment by focusing on the task at hand.The final step is to Rewire, savoring the experience of being fully engaged in what you’re doing.
Like formal meditation, the only way to experience the full benefits of this practice is by building it into a regular habit. So here are some tips:
How to Make Present-Moment-Awareness a Habit
If you’re successful in creating a new habit out of this one-thing-at-a-time meditation practice, you should begin to notice a shift in your experience of busyness. Your day may still include the same long list of to-dos. But your mind may experience more space and leisure. And that might lead you to say something shocking in your next conversation — something like, “I actually don’t feel all that busy right now.”
The Stoic’s Cure for the Busy Brain
Research in psychology confirms this ordinary tendency of the mind. In a 2010 Harvard Study, psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that we spend around 47 per cent of our day mind wandering — lost in thoughts about past and future. Significantly, they also found that the more we get caught in this state, the more unhappy we feel. This may be why so many of us feel so busy so much of the time. Even when our bodies are still, our minds are racing through the day, fueling that out-of-control feeling that we don’t have enough time to do what needs to be done. So how can we ease this tension? The typical approach is to cut down on the sheer number of things you have to do. This might involve limiting the time you spend on email, text, or on social media. It might involve changing your relationship to work or finding ways to offload some of your responsibilities. Of course, this approach can have profound impact. But, for many of us, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape the sometimes-chaotic circumstances of life. The outer constraints of kids, jobs, mortgages, and technology leave us with a long list of daily to-dos that may be impossible to alter. And that’s where the second solution becomes so powerful. The key to this strategy comes to us from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “We are disturbed not by the things that happen,” he observed, “but by our thoughts about the things that happen.” Put differently, we’re not busy because of the length of our to-do list but because of our thoughts about it. This more Stoic cure for busyness doesn’t involve changing our outer circumstances. We don’t have to leave behind the stresses of modern life by moving to Costa Rica or Bali. Instead, it’s focused on overcoming busyness at the level of mind.
