Addiction to “Busyness” and It’s Link to Unhappiness and Symptoms of Illness
Generation overstimulation? Generation Y’s addiction to being busy.
A fantastic article (linked below) shared by Laura Walsh at Quay Osteo in Torquay. I highly recommend Laura’s services to anyone on the Surfcoast and neighboring areas. Her awareness goes beyond the mainstream
This addiction to busyness is something I see regularly in the Mickel Therapy work I do with clients with chronic illnesses such as CFS, fibromyalgia, anxiety, depression and IBS, amongst many others.
But this addiction affects most of us. Not just gen Y’s.
And I believe the addiction to busyness is one of the primary reasons that most of us end up chronically hyper-vigilant or in ‘fight or flight’ responsiveness.
This creates an internal disconnect between our thinking or rational brain (our mind – or the voice in our head) and our more primal emotional brain centres or our intuitive body-mind (which sends pre-thought emotional signals to our body to keep us happy, safe and comfortable with relationship to our environment). These two intelligence centres exist in all animals and, ideally, or in harmony, work together.
When we become addicted to busyness, we get stuck in our head or rational mind and a disconnect occurs, meaning that we internalise or suppress stress, and resulting in our hypothalamus (in our brain) going into overdrive. As our hypothalamus is involved in homeostasis or regulation of most automatic bodily functions (including sleep, mood, cognitive function, temperature regulation, digestion, immune function, our endocrine systems, circulation, respiration, and the stress response), when it goes into overdrive for too long or too much, symptoms, and eventually syndromes or chronic illness can be the result.
This addiction to busyness is not a conscious thing. It is most often the result of a self-limiting pattern that has resulted from our childhood and is therefore sub-conscious and habitual.
Put simply, we develop a sub-conscious relationship between stress or busyness (interesting the similarity between busyness and business!!) and safety. As a child, if you are threatened physically or emotionally, a way to stay ‘safe’ (remembering that children haven’t developed a strong rational brain yet) is to be ‘on-guard’ or hyper-vigilant. Keeping yourself busy achieves this, and it helps you stay protected from physical or emotional pain. As an adult, this pattern becomes habituated and sub-conscious, yet it defines our life.
However this pattern no longer serves us as adults. We are no longer as unsafe or vulnerable as we were when we were children. Yet this pattern persists as it has no other choice – it is sub-conscious.
And, whilst it continues to do so, it continues to dis-regulate homeostasis or balance in our bodies and makes us unhappy, unfulfilled, far from optimal wellness, and predisposes us to many chronic illness.
When we break this pattern with clients, by an action-centred approach using Mickel Therapy, it is very common to see complete resolution of the symptoms of many chronic illnesses.
And it works beautifully even if you are not chronically ill. Both performance and relationships improve, and clients feel more free and happier than they have for most of their lives. Well, since they were young children before they felt threatened and contracted.