Are You Too Busy To Be Happy?
The following is an edited excerpt from the book Too Busy to Be Happy: Using Emotional Real Estate to Grow Your Work-Life Wisdom by Christine Laperriere.
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You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
— TONI MORRISON
Years back, I was asked to teach a course on “Mastering Me” to a large group of managers and executives. The man leading the rollout of the program had decided that this was the right title for the course, even though I struggled to understand what “Mastering Me” meant. To prepare for that event, I spent a lot of time in my office trying to dig through my expertise to figure out what I’d actually mastered. What was I an expert on that I could teach in the form of a course?
I’d spent seven years in engineering school — I survived years of undergraduate and master’s level calculus. I had been a vehicle design engineer for one of the big three American automotive companies, which made me the envy of most men at every dinner party I attended. I had worked in management consulting, which had helped me build business acumen to build trust, help clients, and win repeat business. I had started my own consulting firm, and I was becoming well-known for my work helping teams reach a higher level of performance. From the outside looking in, I’d mastered a great deal. But what wisdom did I really have to share? They too were full of similar lists of flashy accomplishments. The only thing that I felt was a real, unique accomplishment was a skill I had never prepared to learn — it was how to manage my stress and finally conquer my vicious battle with burnout.
It’s important to know that I’m an expert in being busy. For the majority of my life, I was especially amazing at being too busy to be happy. My lifestyle of busyness had ultimately led to burnout, then years more spent healing and learning all I could in order to recover. I’d wanted to figure out how to be both busy and happy. And today I can say I’ve made great gains in this area thanks to the framework of emotional real estate. Although I worried people would leave that course feeling they wanted their money back, I took a risk and taught the course around that framework, to help people create mastery around work-life wisdom. I wanted them to know how to bring more happiness back into their busy lives.
Although I tossed and turned the night before the course, to my surprise, the audience — a roomful of high-achieving women — loved it.
On each break and after class, person after person came up to me to thank me and tell me they finally understood what was happening in their lives. I must have had twenty-five people tell me their life story — how they felt like they couldn’t keep up with the successful lives they had created. So many shared how their stress levels were high and balance was hard, and how they felt they were being smothered by their to-do list. Women who I’d been intimidated by — who looked like they had it all together — would tell me, “Oh my God, the same thing is happening to me.” Like me, they’d spent hours in courses and conferences just like this one, where they were taught sales and communication and all sorts of tactical things, but never how to manage stress. This is one of the biggest problems we all share. How do we manage it all?
Robert Epstein, PhD, of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, surveyed 3,000 people on stress and its effects. In that study, he found that 25 percent of happiness hinges on how well you handle stress.* Yet no one is talking to us about this thing that we’ve all lost sleep over at night, and we see the repercussions everywhere. This is why there’s a huge market for pharmaceuticals to manage stress and stress-related illness. It’s why so many people these days struggle with depression and sometimes turn to drug and alcohol abuse. It’s why we’re frustrated at work and in our homes — the feeling of stress is directly connected to our feelings of happiness (or lack thereof).
I’d struck a chord. I started to teach this content regularly. And so many times, I ran into people at restaurants or events who would remind me that I’d taught their Mastering Me course. They would thank me, and they’d repeat that phrase over and over again — emotional real estate. They would tell me about how they shared it with their sister, their friend, their husband, and how they felt it should be a standard part of education for everyone. People told me they were making decisions differently so that they could allocate their energy more consciously. They asked where they could read more about it. It was like magic. I was onto something that not only changed my life but could really help other people.
So, as we embark on this journey together, I want to start by asking you a question: are you too busy to be happy?
When you hear people talking about work-life balance as though there’s a perfect formula for “having it all,” do you ever catch yourself thinking, Yeah, right?!
Balance implies, first of all, that work and then life are a 50/50 split. And that there are only these two elements to the whole. And striving for the ideal concept of balance makes us think, incorrectly, that achieving that ideal will make us happy all the time. After all, if you can manage to give exactly half of yourself to your kids, husband, work, and an attempt at a social life, why wouldn’t you be happy?
But you and I both know it’s not that simple. Balance feels less like a shifting scale and more like spinning plates. And if you are like me, you’re tired of stepping over broken glass.
Here’s the real kicker: even when your schedule is impossibly crowded, the busyness is not actually the crux of the problem. It’s the guilt. It’s feeling like there’s not enough time to devote to what really matters. It’s being mad at yourself when you procrastinate on the things you’d like to focus on. It’s how you keep saying, “I should do that” — how you keep “shoulding” all over yourself. I should exercise more, I should eat better, I should get to the gym, I should read more books, I should do that course. It’s the dusty DVD cases or video downloads filled with infomercial-sourced yoga classes that you’re convinced you’ll get around to when you have more time. The things you keep around because you’re sure you’ve just been too lazy to get to it and that, one day, you’ll be able to.
If you find yourself too busy to be happy, you have a bigger issue to deal with than balance. In fact, the struggle for balance creates a mental dizziness, where you’re always counterbalancing and shifting the load from one side to the other. You have committed yourself (your full self) to more things than you can sufficiently pay attention to. We understand this with time and with money. We know there are only so many hours in the day and dollars in the bank. Sometimes we can borrow time from sleep hours or run up a credit card bill, and we know we’ll eventually have to pay back the debt. But when it comes to energy and focus, we tend to overspend without a second thought. And the debt piles up, but it’s less obvious to see — the quality of our relationships suffer, the quality of our health suffers, and ultimately, if unattended, we feel our soul being sucked dry.
This is stress. It’s when the perceived workload is greater than the perceived resources to get that work done. And if we continue to borrow in the form of stress, the consequences can range from missed small moments to unrepairable damage to our health, relationships, and career.
Everyone gets stressed, though I’ve found that men seem to stay very goal-oriented and laser-focused, able to compartmentalize to experience stress in different ways. Women, on the other hand, tend to take on seventeen different things and try to keep them all moving at once. When we’re helping out at the bake sale for one daughter, we’re also preparing for the board meeting, thinking about whether the other daughter has her gear for swim day tomorrow, and planning to grab a present for a coworker’s birthday later that week. It’s a mental game that many of us feel like we can’t stop playing. From the stay-at-home mom to the high-powered professional, a reel of high-pressure self-talk spreads our focus around to everything that’s happening, all at once, and we convince ourselves that it’s all at the same priority level. It’s an unsustainable way to pursue an unattainable goal, yet so many of us keep trying anyway.
Believe me, I know. In the next couple of chapters, I’m going to tell you about how I allowed stress to start to eat away at my life and how heavy the burnout became. The good news is that you don’t have to reach that same level of burnout to want to shed work-life balance and instead pursue work-life wisdom.
Having The Wisdom To Stop The Balancing Act
Tell me if any of this seems familiar to you. It used to be that even when I was seriously overbooked, I’d still add one more thing to the calendar. I felt like I needed to keep adding one more thing and one more thing in order to keep up with it all. Did I have an hour of downtime? I should listen to three chapters of a self-help audiobook! Half an hour in the car driving home? That’s the perfect time to (over)think about a conversation I’d had with a teammate and further justify what I said in that meeting. Forty-five minutes on the treadmill? A chance to consider how to rethink that failing project. Mentally, I did not rest. Even if I was eating ice cream and watching Netflix, inside I was plotting a path to my next big goal. If I was not busy or stressed to some degree, I felt that something was missing. I assumed that I wasn’t living up to my fullest potential unless every second was filled, so I never let my mind be quiet. That attitude kept me relentlessly busy and, ultimately, unhappy.
I devoured volume after volume in trying to work out how I became too busy to be happy. Maybe this isn’t the first book you’ve read on this topic, either. And while I appreciated the common theme among these authors — slow down, try yoga, practice meditation — I could never make space for any of their advice. Meditation seemed particularly ridiculous. Spending what I assumed to be hours doing nothing at all was the enemy of everything I had become attached to. I recoiled at the thought of sitting still or slowing my mind down. I felt unimportant when I didn’t have something important to think about. So, if none of the best books had the answer, how could I find this coveted “balance” I’d heard so much about?
When you’re too busy to be happy, there’s a feeling of being out of control. Whether it’s a calendar that’s constantly full or mental clutter that doesn’t ever slow down, choosing happiness and finding time for yourself seems impossible.
At peak busyness, I felt like I was on a treadmill that kept going faster, and it was all I could do to just not fall off. Like Lucille Ball at the candy factory, I was grabbing everything that was going by me, stuffing it in my pockets, eating all that I could, never managing to catch up. What I didn’t know was that I could slow down the machine. That’s the thing about busyness — it’s reactive. Everything seems to be happening to you, and you have to respond to it.
The concept of balance implies that if you don’t have everything exactly where it should be, you’ll fall or fail. The treadmill will keep running, and you’ll either have to keep up until you burn out or get off entirely. Work-life wisdom, on the other hand, allows us to optimize our energy — to become empowered to get back in the driver’s seat of our own lives.
Instead of aiming for balance and delicately tipping the scales from side to side, work-life wisdom can create the space we need to be both happy and busy. While work-life balance demands us to fill our schedules out with enough pieces of the pie for everyone and everything, work-life wisdom allows us to move through the day to the rhythm of our priorities in the moment, paired with our strengths and our passions.
Work-life wisdom is noticing when you’ve missed two dinners in a row at home and you are aching to see your kids — announcing itself like gears grinding in a car when you haven’t shifted in time. It’s becoming attuned to what your life looks like when it’s running smoothly and knowing when you need to make some adjustments. It’s creating priorities and making active decisions to stay present in the moments that make up your life. It’s asking ourselves not only if we have enough time or money to do something, but if we have enough energy — enough emotional real estate.
Work-life wisdom is empowerment to finally break the cycle of busyness. In this book, I want you to learn what boundaries look and feel like and realize that setting them can help you become empowered to make decisions in your life once more. You don’t have to settle. You can learn to manage your life rather than reacting to the way life seems to batter you around.
Learning to negotiate work-life wisdom requires more than writing a new to-do list. It requires you to take on an entirely different perspective — to learn a new language. I call this language “emotional real estate,” and it’s one I want you to be fluent in by the end of this book.
Through the framework of emotional real estate, I’ve found and created reliable tools and practices that have helped not only me but so many of my clients navigate our busy lives without succumbing to them. There’s a huge win waiting for us when we learn to employ work-life wisdom effectively in our lives. On the other side of emotional real estate, there’s genuine enjoyment of our busy, modern lives. It’s how we can stop to smell the roses, in real time.
What To Expect In The Pages Ahead
Whoever you are and whatever your story, I want you to know now that the paradigm of emotional real estate can help you make decisions, negotiate conflict, manage change, do away with baggage from the past, and handle baggage that’s already filling up for the future. I want you to know that you can develop an awareness of what your emotional real estate looks like and become empowered to make choices that help you manage your energy wisely.
If you feel like you can’t find the time to be happy, I hope this tool kit will help you create that space in your life again. If you feel yourself nearing burnout and want to prevent it, I hope these tools keep you from hitting bottom. If you’re rebuilding your life, I hope to teach you to see what you’re doing right so that you can keep doing it intentionally. I say “hope,” because this book is not for people who just want to think about these ideas once; this book is for people who know that progress comes with practice. Make these concepts a practice, and I hope one day you’ll look back at pictures thinking of them much like the “before” shots from that new body makeover advertisement you just saw on Facebook. You’ll look in the mirror at the “after” shot of yourself looking stronger and happier, lifting those heavy weights with confidence.
I’ve learned these lessons the hard way, and I’m going to challenge the habits you’ve formed over many years — habits that have served you in some way and will be difficult to let go. In these pages, I’ll help you understand what a system of stress looks like and learn to identify those danger zones. You will begin to notice when you’re succumbing to circumstances and slipping into old habits, and you’ll have the tools to stop the spiral before it begins. I think of it as constant forward momentum; if happiness exists on a scale of one to ten, managing your emotional real estate helps you to move ever closer to ten on the scale every day.
In part one, I’m going to get real with you and take you on my journey through burnout and recovery. This is not some idyllic dream about a balanced life or a one-size-fits-all prescription to add to your growing list of obligations. I’ve lived the journey to the bottom, and I can share the concepts and tools that I used to find my way back out.
In part two, I’m going to share with you critical concepts you need to understand. If you just want the meat, head right to this section. Read and re-read these so you feel completely up to speed with these simple but useful concepts.
In part three, once you have a working knowledge of the language of emotional real estate, we’ll be able to get into the specifics of those tools. One by one, we’ll walk through the habits and perspectives that are littering your emotional real estate, then the tools that you need to clear them.
By the end of the book, you’ll not only have a new context for decision making, but you’ll have a tool kit full of practical habits, exercises, mindsets, and routines ready and at your disposal. I could simply offer up this new perspective — an infrastructure for work-life wisdom based on what I have learned. But I hope you’ll get more out of this book than just lessons and speeches. I encourage you to sit down with a pen and paper, think each concept and tool through thoroughly, and then put them to practice. Reach out to your friends, coworkers, or mentors to start the conversation about emotional real estate with them. Work through these tools side by side. Share the language of emotional real estate with others who can encourage you along your way. Support each other as you regain control and rediscover how to create more happiness.
With the right mindset and a good set of tools, you can be both busy and happy. I promise.
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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Too Busy to Be Happy: Using Emotional Real Estate to Grow Your Work-Life Wisdom by Christine Laperriere.
