HOLY GRAIL OR EPIC FAIL? WHY BUSY IS THE NEW RELIGION

Our lives have become full to a point defying logic - and our brains simply weren’t designed to cope. When did never having a spare moment become something to boast about?

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The proverb “more haste, less speed” is said to originate from the 16th century but the message seems pertinent to a world in which ‘busy’ has become the new religion.

The problem is our brains weren't designed to use every conceivable bit of time efficiently. And there's more sobering news. Multi-tasking is just another term for not paying attention.

Craig Carey is a personal trainer and life coach. He says the questions we should be asking are: ‘What am I busy doing? Is it serving me or am I busy because society has conditioned me that busy is the holy grail of success and contentment?

“When we say we're busy, it’s like self-validation - I'm doing well, I'm successful. As a society, we place judgement on how we're perceived by our peers,” he says.

But when did we turn the whole of our existence into a to-do list and when did being busy become a competition? It gets worse because - assuming you're brave enough to admit you're not busy - along comes the disgrace of being labelled lazy or, perish the thought, unsuccessful.

“Being busy is not the problem. It’s the outcomes of being busy,” says Carey. “When I work with clients, I immediately ask them to address awareness and honesty. How do they feel? Is all this busyness serving them or is it just plain exhausting?”

The busiest people rarely are

Not only have we become addicted to busy, studies show we're not actually getting any more done. Researchers asked people whether they're ‘always busy’, ‘sometimes busy’ or ‘never busy’. Their findings show that, pretty much without exception, the people most likely to say they're ‘always busy’ are rarely those who are.

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks [the average life span, assuming you make it to 76] addressed this in his BBC Radio series Oliver Burkeman is Busy: