Why I’ve stopped wearing “Busy” as a Badge of Honor

We all do it. “Hey, how have you been?”

“Oh, I’ve been so busy…”

Then either we stop there in vague “busy-ness,” or proceed to list all the things that make us “so busy.”

And then you and your friend compare busy schedules, perhaps attempting ever so subtly to out-busy each other.

Well, I am tired of this little game.

I was in college when I first noticed that saying I was “busy” seemed to earn me a certain amount of social caché. I could feel my social status rising in direct proportion to how busy I was. And I was, in fact, really busy. Overbooked, in fact. Cooking all-nighters and rushing from class to event to meeting to friends with rarely enough time to get from A to B and always stressed about being late. Never mind all the actual work I had taken on.

I was proud of my busy-ness. It seemed most of my classmates were proud of theirs. The busier the better. “Oh, she’s busy. She must be doing important things.” The more “busy” we were, the more important we were perceived to be.

It gave us things to talk about — namely, how busy we were. And then sometimes the actual projects. The more the merrier. The more stressed, the more busy, the more our stuff must “matter.”

And I bought into in completely. I swallowed it whole. Because I wanted to feel “important.” I wanted my stuff to matter. And being busy seemed to be the ticket into an important kind of club.

More than a decade after college, I notice that the badge and safety net of being “busy” has not gone away. In fact it’s settled in as almost an assumption. If you aren’t busy, the what *are* you doing with your life? You must not be a person, because people are, by definition, busy. Apparently. Like we are all supposed to be human bees. But can you be certain bees are always busy? I’ve been a beekeeper. And sometimes bees just chill.

For humans in their late-twenties, thirties, and beyond, busy takes other forms and outlets. Busy could be your grad school projects or PhD dissertation. Busy could be all the extra time you put in at work, bringing it home on nights and weekends. It could be your kids and all their activities — raising little mini-busies. Preparing them for the busy adult world.

I, personally, have lost interest in being “busy” just for the sake of saying so. I no longer feel like saying I’ve been busy in order to feel cool and important and accepted, when in fact my schedule is not all that full and I’ve got just enough down time. I like it that way. And maybe my down time makes some people uncomfortable. I need it. Yet it can feel like blasphemy to say so. We are not supposed to “need” rest, down time, or sleep. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as one former coworker liked to say. Okay, but there is a good chance you will be dead sooner if you don’t sleep.

Our bodies need rest. And at the end of the day, you can’t really argue with your body. You can fight it, but you won’t win.

As a massage therapist, I got to see frequently just how damaging overwork can be. I had one client who came to me to help her with neck problems. In intake, and while working with her, it came out that she had had to have neck surgery a year or two before I saw her. The surgery was due to two of her cervical vertebrae (aka neck bones) having “spontaneously” broken. That is, these two bones — let’s say C2 and C3 — did not undergo a momentary trauma, such as a fall. She maybe turned her head, and the vertebrae broke. It was from months, maybe years of stress.

She was young, in her twenties, and otherwise healthy. What I learned from her was that her job had been exceedingly stressful for her. She was asked to work long hours and her boss didn’t respect her. Like myself, and a lot of other people, she held the tension in her neck. This comes from a very subtle long-term holding pattern in which the muscles that lift the shoulder blades, which connect into the neck, are constantly working in a protective mechanism. Your back can withstand more than your sensitive front. So when you feel “under assault,” your body will often engaged these muscles without you even thinking about it. All you know is that your neck is sore.

From what I could gather, the tightness of her neck muscles simply made it so that her bones could not accommodate movement, and they broke. She felt the soreness, but didn’t address it until it needed extreme intervention.

This client is like many people. Some will not address shoulder pain until it becomes a tear in their rotator cuff and they need PT as well as other treatments. Stress and overwork hurt us whether we want it to or not. It’s not really up to us.

On the other hand, the solution can be incredibly simple and can save us a lot of time, discomfort, and money.

I had another client who had some pain in her pelvic area and her doctors were worried. She was maybe in her fifties or sixties and they wanted to do some invasive imaging tests to see what was going on. She didn’t want to do these tests. After talking to her, and finding out the exact nature of her discomfort, I decided to try working on her psoas muscle.

The psoas is a very deep hip flexor, and tightness can sometimes be felt as indigestion, nausea, and/or pelvic floor or generalized pelvic/hip pain. It can be hard to pinpoint the sensation because although it is a muscle we all use regularly, we do not interact with it much or ever see it, and we can’t touch it — not like our quads or biceps.

So I worked with this woman’s psoas muscle, focusing on the right side, where her hip pain was. And the next time I saw her, she said that the mysterious pain had resolved, and her doctor said she did not need to undergo any testing. For what she paid me in massage, she saved herself and her insurance company a lot more by not needing the tests, to say nothing of the discomfort she avoided.