Why All That 'Busy' is Getting You Nowhere!

Women are getting faster, busier and unhappier. But are we our own worst enemies when it comes to managing our time? Meg Mason investigates

- Meg Mason

If you look now, women have no time,” said Germaine Greer, talking about the progress of gender equality in the nearly 40 years since the publication of her book The Female Eunuch. “Women do everything on the run. You just have to watch on any city pavement at lunchtime [to] see who is tearing down the street to pay the bills, get something for supper and all of that.”

That was 2007, and in the decade since there’s been no discernible slowdown in the pace at which women attempt to close out each day’s to-do list, get shit done and be on time – which is to say, early. And if you’ve ever woken up already scrolling through the day ahead with a sense of diffused dread, you know it already. Women are getting busier... and unhappier.

“She often feels very anxious, more so than unhappy, and then guilty for feeling that way,” says nutritional biochemist Dr Libby Weaver, who characterised our kind and gave a name to our condition in Rushing Woman's Syndrome, first published in 2011 and re-released this year. “It’s not a medical condition, but it’s the name I gave to a pattern I was noticing more and more in my practice. The Rushing Woman is typically 30 onwards, although it’s happening younger and younger. She cares very much about doing well in the world, achieving, showing people she cares, so in that sense, it actually comes from a beautiful place.” But as a result of the pressure the Rushing Woman applies to herself to do all those things, and be everything, Weaver says, “she becomes unable to connect to any part of her life, and as things go on, she begins to sacrifice her own health.”