In her new book “Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time,” journalist Brigid Schulte explores how “busyness” and a culture of extreme overwork have become status symbols in American life. @work sat down with Schulte to chat about working-mom guilt, face time and what happens to your brain when you’re stressed out.
The themes in this book — that of overwork, the attempt to balance work and family, the search for happiness — obviously all resonate with you personally. Was there a specific moment that made you realize, “I’m not the only one, and I need to write a book about this”?
When I was caught up in it all, working crazy hours, I didn’t realize it. I was crazy guilty at home because I was working like that. I never stopped — I thought that’s the way life was because I chose to work, and that was my “punishment.” My “A-ha!” moment came when I was doing reporting for a story, and a time researcher told me I actually had 30 hours of leisure a week, I just didn’t realize it. I told him he was nuts. So I wrote about this for the Washington Post Magazine and I got hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. They were long and impassioned, and there was so much sadness and rage. It was not just working mothers writing me — it was dads, and young people, and others setting out on their career paths and being scared of having families because there would never be enough time. Getting all those letters was my moment. One of them said, “You climbed into my head and you wrote about my life.”
Talk a bit about what actually happens to the brain when people feel overwhelmed.
The Yale Stress Center is doing research on the effects of stress on people’s lives. They sent people through an MRI and scanned their brains, and what they found is that with the people who had been through stressful events and who perceived constant stress, their gray-matter volume was 20 percent smaller than in people who were not stressed. Stress is literally the most toxic situation for your brain.
Let’s discuss multitasking and how it actually isn’t a good idea.
I think a lot of people — particularly women — might be shocked to hear this. Men do just as much multitasking but they tend to do it at work. Women do it between work and home. Switching roles is part of what makes you breathless — you’re at work, you’re a mother, you’re a cook and a chauffeur. Each time you switch, it takes a heavy [toll] on your brain. When we’re multitasking we tend to reward ourselves with, “Woo, look how much I’m doing!” But studies find that your brain literally cannot pay attention to two things at the same time with equal weight. You’re not giving either thing your full attention. So instead of doing one thing well, you’re doing two things poorly.
People in the US tend to spend a lot of hours in the office, yet you point out in the book that when you measure national productivity per hours worked, the US actually falls behind such countries as France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway.
Yes, and these countries also have more paid vacation, flexible work policies, paid family leave — they’re places where people tend to work short, intense but flexible hours. In the US, there is a cultural sense that we have to work these long hours. There are powerful myths out there and they’re difficult to let go of: “I’m just working so hard, I’m so dedicated.” But we’re not doing our best work, and it’s sucking the life out of us.
Let’s say someone works in an office where people regularly put in long hours. What do you suggest people do?
When you become aware of this and you see the water we’re swimming in, but no one else does, that’s an uncomfortable situation to be in. I talked to a man who worked at Citibank and had two young kids. And he said, “I did not want to miss their childhood.” So he came up with his own flex work strategy and he presented it to his bosses. He defined his goals and output, saying, “These are the days I’m going to work at home; when I’m in the office, this is what I’m going to do, that’s when I’ll meet with people.” And he was so effective, the boss said, “We’ll give it a try.” Then there are people like Sheryl Sandberg, who announced that she was leaving work every day at 5:30 to go have dinner with her family. The more people talk about what they’re doing to work more flexibly, the more it becomes part of the narrative that you can do excellent work in an efficient way. Also: Work in short, intense pulses of no more than 90 minutes, and take breaks to change the channel. Check digital media at specific times during the day, and use timers so you won’t fall into the rabbit hole.
How do you think busyness became such a status symbol for Americans?
There was a time at the turn of the last century where the elite were idle, and they showed their status by how idle they were. Now we don’t have a “leisure” class. Bill Gates owns an island, but instead we talk about how he gave up golf and sleeps under his desk! One reason, possibly, is that, as it became harder to transfer wealth from one generation to the next, the elites had to work in professions so their professions became how they showed their status. Then, in the 1980s, work hours began to tick up. And there are economic underpinnings to that. I think in general that there is a lot of economic fear and insecurity in the US, a lot of wondering, “Are we No. 1 anymore?” There’s a lot of fear at work, and busyness became a way to validate what we were already doing.
10 tips to a saner, less ‘busy’ you
1. Pause. Step off the gerbil wheel regularly — even if for a moment, even if you have to schedule it in — to figure out where you are and where you want to go.
2. Understand how strong the pressure is to overwork, overparent, overschedule and be busy and overdo. Our outlandishly unrealistic cultural ideals keep us spinning in “never enough” — that we can never be enough, be good enough, do enough in any sphere.
3. Change the narrative. Actively support big change — in workplace culture, in cultural attitudes, in laws and policies. Redesign work, reimagine traditional gender roles, recapture the value of leisure and play. Make unconscious bias and ambivalence conscious. Uncover. Be authentic. Expect it of others. Talk.
4. Banish busyness.
5. Plan. Do. Review. As you get clearer about where you are and where you want to go, begin to imagine in those moments of pause how to get from here to there. Experiment. Assess. Try something different. Keep trying.
6. Set your own priorities — and then set up your own network of support that lines up with your values — that you want to conform to!
7. When it comes to the to-do list, do a brain dump to get everything out of your head to clear mental space. Then give yourself permission not to do any of it. Also give yourself permission to put play or quiet time as top priorities and schedule it in until it becomes routine. You really DON’T have to earn leisure by getting to the end of the to-do list. You never will.
8. Chunk your time. Work in short, intense pulses of no more than 90 minutes, and take breaks to change the channel. Check digital media at specific times during the day, and use timers so you won’t fall into the rabbit hole. Technology is seductive, lighting up the same structures of the brain that light up in addiction — so find your own system to use it wisely, not let it use you or abuse you.
9. Set common standards at home and share the load fairly, even the kids. Remember, as parents, love your kids, accept them for who they are, then get out of their way.
10. More is not more. Think inverted-U curve. Like anything, some activity for kids, some novelty for the brain, some amount of hard work, some time for technology . . . it’s all good up to a point, but more is not better. Too much, and the benefits begin to diminish. Find your own sweet spot.