When things are stressful we often resort to keeping ourselves busy.  This can feel helpful because:

1. At least we are doing something: we’re finding something that we can control and we are dealing with that
2. We’re potentially creating a distraction to keep larger worries at bay, so they feel more in the background.

This busyness can mean both ‘keeping busy’ – keeping ourselves occupied with tasks to help us manage/defer deeper worries, and ‘being busy’ – the relentless rush of multiple tasks that occupy our day lives.

Indeed, ‘busyness’ can be a type of ‘Problem-focused’ coping: we cope with difficulties by finding problems to solve and solving them.  According to Darrah (2007) busyness can comprise the following aspects:

1. Planning and routinizing: trying to make things predictable
2. Anticipating: so not only having plans in place but also thinking about where they could go wrong, and having a plan B in place
3. Adjusting: abandoning plans or adapting them
4. Protecting routines
5. Intelligence Gathering: researching and seeking to understand
6. Minimizing some demands (to make life simpler)
7. Doing similar activities together (called ‘chunking’)
8. Creating Priorities
9. Monitoring our success

Whilst Darrah formulated these criteria from an anthropological study of middle-class American families to understand ‘modern lifestyles’; the aspects of planning, anticipating, adjusting, protecting routines, researching, monitoring and stripping back on things like social life (or unsympathetic parties) struck me as key strategies that families caring for neurodivergent children (that I have spoken to) execute.  In other words, busyness becomes an inevitable and necessary practice for managing our complex lives and the needs of our children.

However, busyness can also place strenuous demands on us.  Govalsi and Solvoll (2019) investigated nurses’ experiences of busyness and found a discrepancy between what they called the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ dimensions of busyness.  They discovered that the ‘outer’ dimensions of busyness – getting tasks done – was socially acceptable.  However, the pressure nurses put themselves under through this constant busyness led to an ‘inner’ dimension of worry.  Where there were a lot of pressures as part of this busyness, nurses resorted to ‘haste’ which ironically led to greater inefficiencies as well as greater expenditure of energy, alongside negative feelings and self-talk.  Thus Busyness can be a double-edged sword: a way for us to build structures to manage and cope with our lives, but also a potential pressure on ourselves to over-reach beyond our capacity and chastise ourselves when we don’t achieve the ideal we want.

Here are some things for us to think about, if we find that busyness occupies our lives:

• With keeping busy to stave off our feelings, sometimes our deeper worries leak out anyway. Here we can think about emotion-focused coping strategies, which is where we identify and begin to process our emotions (coaching is really useful for supporting emotion-focused coping!).  In other words, we need to ensure that our busyness isn’t a way to try to squash difficult emotions out of our lives, as they will often end up returning in unhelpful ways.
• With being busy: being constantly busy can make us feel really exhausted. When we rush from one thing to another we are creating a mental load for ourselves which we never quite catch up to, and we end feeling overwhelmed and weary.  When we are busy our own self-care can also be squeezed out of the picture.  Alternatively, self-care can be something that we end up ‘fitting around’ the busyness, like a quick physical activities (a jog here, a walk there) rather than a holistic approach to what we need.  The risk here is that we burnout.

So to conclude, firstly we need to find ourselves a moment to ‘zoom out’ of our busyness so we can ask ourselves what is the purpose of my busyness: is it staving off deeper worries, is it a system that we are using to manage the complexity of life?  Secondly, we can consider: how effectively is this busyness serving me?  Does our system help us to cope with life?  Is there anything missing?  Finally, it’s worth checking on how we are talking to ourselves, by asking: what story am I telling myself about how I am performing this busyness?  We need to give ourselves permission to ‘pause’ the busyness so we can assess how it may be benefiting us and where it might be creating pressure for us.

If you would find yourself incredibly busy and stressed and/or you feel you need to build up your coping strategies, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.  We support you to support your families.