Busy culture has deceived us, and our bodies are shutting down in protest.
Busy culture has us believing that our chronic stress, anxiety, inflammation, headaches, trouble concentrating, and feelings of isolation are normal and we should push through. They aren’t, and we shouldn’t.
Over half of the American population struggles with burnout, so we are heading into risky territory. A few know how to retreat, while many still need to awaken to the danger.
We have an entire workforce that has been more than willing to trade the leisure of their precious personal time for the rush of a 60–80 work week. We’ve convinced ourselves that the American Dream is to own nice things, like flashy titles and nice cars. Through social media's peer pressure, we believe that wealth and popularity bring acceptance and happiness. When really, those things actually come with leisure and close community.
So, after generations of hard work, we’ve ended up here: overworked in our jobs, stressed out as parents, caregivers, and members of society, yet under-functioning in our local community, hobbies, and downtime.
The imbalance is killing us.
Stress kills
Modern life has us busier than ever without any rest time or real reprieve.
We’re sitting more, spending less time outside, and overworking so much that we barely stop enough to eat a full lunch. We are constantly running from thing to thing. It’s not healthy, and it’s not sustainable.
It’s not sustainable because human bodies are not machines. They are not meant to overwork without equal time to rest and heal. They are capable of a lot, but we must nourish them and keep them whole to keep them going.
Right now, we’re conducting an experiment to see what the human body is capable of running only on stress and anxiety. The sick thing is that we already know the outcome. It’s depression, isolation, suicide, and death.
In Japan, there is a special term for this: Keroshi, which translates as “overwork death” and is absolutely devastating. It came from a phenomenon in the 1990s, where businessmen were working so many hours that they would suddenly drop dead from a body failure or end their lives due to overworking and a feeling that they couldn’t opt out of the system.
The World Health Organization did a study in 2016 measuring the worldwide deaths of heart disease and stroke from long working hours.
“The study concludes that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to working 35–40 hours a week.”
Yet, despite all of this data, we keep going. We keep pushing through the stress, we keep showing up at the office instead of showing up for our bodies. We are yet to see the correlation between the demise of our physical and mental health and our back-to-back productivity schedules.
How we got here
We are taught to ignore our inconvenient body cues for stress and anxiety because they get in the way of productivity. The science is clear it’s the opposite. Yet, no one wants to listen to that. They can't be ignored until they become so loud and extreme because they hinder our day-to-day lives. Had we listened earlier on, we could have avoided the limiting physical, mental, and spiritual ailments that end up arising in an effort for our body to get us to pay attention. When this is done for a long enough period, it becomes burnout, the body’s last-ditch effort to ask for what it needs before it starts to shut down.
Burnout symptoms are then reported to a doctor, often resulting in an undefined diagnosis or dismissed feelings.
Outsourcing your body’s health and wellness doesn’t help you heal, it breaks you down. — Dr. Rachel Dew, DNM, PHd
When you feel like complete crap, but there is no clear path toward relief, it’s defeating. Many times with burnout, the only path forward is to reduce and eliminate what is making you sick in the first place. Your chronic stress and anxiety.
Where does it come from? A whole host of things likely missing or misaligned in your life:
Lack of community
No leisure or downtime
Forcing yourself to keep going into toxic environments
Ignoring your body’s cues for rest and relaxation
Being over-scheduled
Moving your body less
Abandoning your body is getting in the way of your healing. To heal, you must connect with your body and start listening to what it needs. In many cases of burnout, your body knows what it needs to recover. You need to start listening to the feedback it's giving.
How to listen to your body
Your physical symptoms are your body’s feedback. Your body is made to communicate with you. The symptoms are subtle at first, but they build in intensity the less you pay attention.
When you have muted that connection with yourself through “powering through,” it often takes bigger symptoms to get you to acknowledge that something is wrong, which is a reactionary approach to health.
When you build a more sensitive attunement with your body, you begin to pay attention to softer and smaller cues, effectively adjusting your needs as you go along before your body is in crisis. This is how your body can help you regain and maintain well-being.
Bodies can’t communicate with language; they use their senses to talk with us. This is proprioception, or our body's sense of itself in the world.
Your ability to tune in and out of this is quite amazing. You use proprioception to walk and balance and to sense where you are in the world and how your body physically exists in that space. As you adjust to your environment, much of this becomes unconscious awareness. But you can tap into it whenever you want, forcing you to be very present and self-attuned. This self-awareness level can help deeply pinpoint areas of stress or relief.
Everything you do is either building in favor of health or dismantling it. Your body has cues that can help you determine which of those directions you’re moving in.
It’s time to pay attention.
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