“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

“The truth is that stress doesn’t come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about your circumstances.”

“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”

“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”

John Newton

“It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out; it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”

“There is no such thing as a stress-free life. No evidence has ever been presented which suggests that a stress-free life can ever be achieved. Stress can be managed, relieved and lessened, but never eliminated.”

“Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.”

‎"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'"

When you are stressed, there is nothing more calming than reading stress quotes for some relief. Click here to read some of the best stress quotes.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

mentalhealth

Mental Health

55 Best Stress Quotes - Driven

We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating. People work through emotions by being able to identify them and use them as signals. A lot of the time, we’re left in the dark. Enter the <a href="http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/">Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows</a>, the brainchild of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you were having. Here are 40 words to describe your emotions.

Background

n . frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.

Adronitis

n . weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

Altschmerz

n . a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.

Ambedo

n . a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.

Anecdoche

n . nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.

Anemoia

n . the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…

Avenoir

n . the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.

Catoptric Tristesse

n . the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.

Chrysalism

n . an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what you’re doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far away and don’t call much anymore.

Daguerreologue

n . to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

Dead Reckoning

n . the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.

Ecstatic Shock

n . the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

Énouement

n . a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room, idly locked in the middle of some group conversation, their eyes glinting with vulnerability or quiet anticipation or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains, watching stagehands holding their ropes at the ready, actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for some other production.

Fata Organa

n . an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling back and forth in your head like a dog stuck in a car that’s about to arrive home, just itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.

Fitzcarraldo

n . a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

Gnossienne

adj . finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.

Hanker Sore

n . a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

Heartworm

n . a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Jouska

n . the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

Kairosclerosis

n . the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

Kenopsia

n . a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.

Keyframe

n . the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

Liberosis

n . a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

Mal de Coucou

n . the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

Monachopsis

n . the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”

Mimeomia

n . a feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

Midsummer

n . a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.

Nighthawk

n . the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

Nodus Tollens

n . the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.

Pâro

n . the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

Onism

n . the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

Occhiolism

n . the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

Rückkehrunruhe

n . a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

Rigor Samsa

n . a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic ‘I know the feeling’—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some foreign country.

Semaphorism

n . the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

Silience

n . the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Sonder

n . a phenomenon in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you put it down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths—peaceable, generic and out of focus.

The Tilt Shift

n . the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Vellichor

n . the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Vemödalen

n . the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

Xeno

These ideas are a like a trip down memory lane, and I could relate to a lot of the descriptions here that surprisingly have a name!

Heartworm: a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago…

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

philosophy

Philosophy

40 Words For Emotions You’ve Felt, But Couldn’t Explain

<ul><li>People are coping with collective grief and trauma on a global scale, which means leaders have to learn and exercise new skills</li><li>Foster healthy coping mechanisms and discourage unhealthy ones</li><li>Help ward off some of the typical mistakes that people make under pressure</li><li>Ensure you don't cause additional anxiety on top of what people are already dealing with</li><li>Be a Role Model: Self-care is not a luxury: It's essential.</li></ul>

Everyone is exhausted

<ul><li>In a time of crisis, there is a greater need for mental acuity as new information is constantly coming in and circumstances constantly changing. During stressful times, ask for input and admit what you don't know</li><li>Normalize and destigmatize admitting mistakes</li><li>Acknowledge conflicting impulses and values</li><li>Make it OK to change your mind when new information comes in</li></ul>

Mental flexibility

<ul><li>Acknowledge when you're having a hard time or are not at the top of your game</li><li>Team members can tell you when you are having a bad day - you may as well admit it so that they know you know, and everyone can make the appropriate adjustments</li></ul>

Emotional openness

<ul><li>Take care of yourself in all the simple, basic ways: sleep, exercise, nutrition, hydration, mental downtime</li><li>Ensure that your team has what they need to do these things for themselves</li><li>Make self-care a regular topic of conversation</li><li>Occasionally begin a meeting by asking everyone to state one good thing they've done for themselves</li></ul>

Healthy behaviors

<ul><li>Stress has a cumulative impact. For the body and brain, there is no difference between deadline pressure, an argument with one's spouse, financial worries, the dog that won't stop barking, and the computer that keeps crashing.</li><li>The patience, self-control, perspective, attentiveness, and wisdom to deal with these situations all come out of the same fund, psychologically.</li></ul>

Lighten the Load

<ul>
<li>Make a positive goal out of decreasing stress, across the board, for everyone</li>
<li>Don’t add to anxiety</li>
<li>Leaders can do a lot to ease or exacerbate anxieties</li>
<li>Let employees know that it is OK if their home office is messy on Zoom</li>
<li>In meetings, make it safe to ask questions that may seem stupid - or to simply not have any pertinent questions, or comments, or ideas to share</li>
</ul>

Reduce stressors

<ul>
<li>Grief, trauma, anxiety all can lead to losing time, focus, and endless pairs of reading glasses.</li>
</ul>
Mitigate mistakes
<ul>
<li>Acknowledge the mental burden that people are under</li>
<li>Create checklists, cross-check protocols, backup plans, whatever is appropriate to your particular business, to prevent serious errors</li>
<li>Double down on corporate culture and values to strengthen the sense of who “we” are, what we stand for, and what we do</li>
</ul>

Create a cognitive safety net

<ul><li>Focus on all aspects of the situation being examined by using role-play and other mental exercises</li><li>Bring up hypothetical points of view</li><li>People do better on creativity tests if they are simply asked to do things like a creative person would</li><li>Ask "What questions would someone who really doesn't understand this issue have?"</li></ul>

Reduce tunnel vision

Teams that destigmatize failure do a better job of both learning from past mistakes and experimenting with new ways of solving problems.Don’t make employees afraid to admit mistakes. analyze failures together with your teams, and figure out ways to improve.

Learn from failure

<ul><li>Encourage team members to engage in meaningful activities inside and outside of work</li><li>Foster on-the-job friendships and chances to connect</li><li>Talk about what you find meaningful in life and how you ensure you have the time and energy for these things.</li><li>Non-work activities and identities matter to your team</li></ul>

Make It Meaningful

Make sure you aren’t causing unnecessary anxiety on top of what people are already dealing with.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Leading an Exhausted Workforce

<ul><li>At the most superficial level, puttering (occupying ourselves in a desultory but pleasant way) may be useful because it occupies the mind so that we devote fewer resources to the things that are worrying us. </li><li>Even if we struggle with structured forms of meditation, for instance, we may find household tasks can anchor us in the here and now. But that will depend on where we place our focus.</li><li>On YouTube, there’s even a huge audience for videos of other people going about their chores, with millions of views for some of the most popular clips.</li></ul>

Pleasant distractions

Unlike other distracting activities – such as playing computer games or watching trashy TV – puttering also has the advantage of being proactive and useful, increasing our “perceived control”.When we feel anxious, a sense of helplessness can heighten the physiological stress response, increasing levels of hormones such as cortisol. Over the long term, the sense of helplessness can even harm the function of the immune system.We can gain a perception of control from activities that may have little effect on the situation that’s bothering us.

Perceived control

If you are sitting at your kitchen table with your laptop surrounded by clutter, that’s a lot of visual stimuli that your brain is continuously having to process while you simultaneously try to concentrate on the task at hand. Take away the visual clutter and you can focus much more easily.Importantly, you don’t necessarily have to remove the clutter to prevent this from occurring – simply rearranging it will do. Organizing objects into groups – by color, for example – may provide the brain with more obvious cues for navigating the chaos.

Tidy room, focused mind 

By reducing anxiety, soothing stress responses, increasing focus, and triggering the release of endorphins, it’s little wonder so many of us take to household chores as soon as we are faced with uncertainty.Like all activities, the extent of these benefits will be influenced by your personal tastes and the associations that you link with the tasks.

Pleasant associations

Especially when you’ve got a lot on, tiny household tasks can be soothing. Why do pleasant distractions feel oddly good?

timemanagement

Time Management

Puttering around: Why small tasks feel so therapeutic

In today’s high-stakes and the high-stress world, people often seek out nonmainstream healing practices used in many parts of the world. Currently, these practices are often known as complementary or alternative medicine, typically referred to simply as CAM. The past 2 decades have garnered such an increase in CAM practices that these practices rival traditional medicine in many nations, including the United States and Australia.

Ho’oponopono: Traditional Form, Modern Practice, and Benefits

Loosely translated as “to make right, orderly, or correct,” ho’oponopono is a prayer-based healing practice that promotes forgiveness, healing both the self and others, problem solving, and conflict resolution.

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

health

Health

Ho’oponopono: Traditional Form, Modern Practice, and Benefits - The Human Condition

Emotional intelligence is the result of good habits, not nice ideas. And if you want to improve your emotional intelligence, commit to these practices:Let go of unhelpful thoughts Accept difficult emotions Handle your mistakes with compassion Choose values over feelings

Summary

While our instinct to think more and think harder serves us well most of the time, there are still a lot of situations when more thinking makes things worse Thinking hard is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used well or poorly. Emotionally intelligent people understand when a situation can benefit from more thinking and when it will only make things worse.<ul><li>Practice letting go of unhelpful thoughts, even if they’re true.</li><li>Exercise your ability to refocus your attention, instead of letting it wander anywhere it pleases.</li><li>Work on being aware of your thoughts without thinking more about them.</li></ul>

Let go of unhelpful thoughts - Idea

<ul><li>When an irrational worry is spinning through your mind, thinking more about that worry rarely fixes anything and usually makes you feel more anxious. </li><li>When you’re lying in bed at 2:00 am not sleeping, thinking more about why you’re not sleeping is only going to keep you awake longer. </li><li>Once you’ve reflected on a mistake and tried to learn from it, ruminating on it over and over again will only make you feel miserable. </li> </ul>

Let go of unhelpful thoughts - Examples

It’s natural to run away from painful feelings. But that only makes them stronger in the end. How you react to things—especially emotionally charged things—teaches your brain what to think about those things in the future.More than understanding that just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad, emotionally intelligent people train themselves to react to painful emotions with acceptance, not avoidance.Because here’s the thing: When you accept your emotions with willingness, you teach your brain that they’re safe and normal however uncomfortable they feel.

Accept difficult emotions - Idea

<ul><li>If you consistently try to escape your grief by using alcohol or drugs, you’re teaching your brain that grief and sadness are dangerous. Now you’re anxious about grieving.</li><li>If you immediately try to calm yourself down any time you feel anxious, you’re teaching your brain that it’s bad to feel anxious. Now you’re going to become anxious about getting anxious.</li><li>Just because you feel anxious speaking in public doesn’t mean public speaking is dangerous and you should avoid it in the future.</li></ul>

Accept difficult emotions - Example

The habit of self-critical negative self-talk doesn't motivate us to be better in the future. All it does is discourage you because it keeps you feeling anxious, insecure, and full of self-doubtWhat if you changed your self-criticism habit into a self-compassion Self-compassion simply means treating yourself after a mistake like you would treat a friend: with kindness and encouragement.In practice, try this:<ul><li>Acknowledge the mistake for what it is.</li><li>Accept that you are helpless to change the past.</li><li>Focus on what you can actually control moving forward</li></ul>

Handle your mistakes with compassion - Idea

<ul><li>We tell ourselves that if we don’t study harder we’ll fail and not get into a good college. </li><li>We tell ourselves that if we don’t “suck it up” and “push through” our coach will think we’re lazy and we won’t get to play. </li><li>We tell ourselves that if we keep acting awkward no one is going to want to hang out with us. </li> </ul>

Handle your mistakes with compassion - Examples

The heart of emotional intelligence is the ability to subordinate your feelings to your values.The problem is when you get in the habit of making decisions based exclusively on how you feel because your feelings will get you into trouble just as often as they will help you.To become more emotionally intelligent people, train yourself to notice conflicts between feelings and values. And then ask yourself a simple question:What do I REALLY want right now?

Choose values over feelings - Idea

<ul><li>Is your feeling of desire for that bag of potato chips more “authentic” than your desire to be healthy and fit?</li><li>Is your feeling of anxiety and self-doubt more “authentic” than the evidence that you’ve given presentations like this dozens of times and they’ve always been well-received?</li><li>If you only take on new projects at work when you feel confident, you’ll never grow and probably miss out on some amazing opportunities.</li><li>If you only go to the gym when you feel excited and motivated, you’ll never get in shape.</li></ul>

Choose values over feelings - Examples

If it helps, try to get in the habit of thinking about Little-W wants and Capital-W wants: <ul><li>Little-W wants are things like the pleasure of tasting a candy bar or the relief from anxiety when you take those first couple shots of vodka. While not necessarily bad, Little-W wants often distract us from and interfere with our Capital-W wants… </li><li>Capital-W wants are things we want based on our values: Iwant to be healthy enough to play tag with my grandkids without getting winded or I want to do high-quality work not just rush through it . </li> </ul>

Little-W vs Capital-W wants

habits

Habits

4 Habits of Emotionally Intelligent People

In today’s time, we as a society have glorified the idea of being ‘busy ‘. People that are seen constantly stressed, buried in their work are viewed as more accomplished than someone not swamped by work and worry. Today’s hustle cultre views these so called ‘hard-workers ‘ as the image of the ‘perfect employee ‘ and holds this standard of being busy on a pedestal.

No, it’s hard to say that everything about hustle cultre or being busy is bad. But it’s definitely a point to note that these do glorify the idea of constantly being on the go and working and have even made it the norm for today’s generation to constantly be working and measuring their own self worth by how much they’ve accomplished.

Is being busy actually bad?

Think about it, how many times have you criticized yourself because you didn’t do ‘enough work ‘ or you didn’t ‘work harder ‘?How many times have you actually been happy on a day off and been glad that you took care of yourself?According to the standards we’ve created for ourselves, anyone who isn’t busy and doesn’t spend every second immersed in work simply doesn’t stand up to these standards and is just termed as ‘not hard working ‘ or simply ‘lazy ‘.This outlook of society makes us judge our own self worth by the amount of work we do and the labels society puts on us.

* Putting Labels On Ourselves 

Glorifying the idea of always being busy tends to make us much more about self and can, in a sense, make our thoughts and actions even more selfish. We tend to get more stuck in our own little world excessively brooding about our own work and our own problems which obviously have a negative strike to our mental health but also end up in us neglecting close friends and family.Cancelling plans last minute, not being present for special occasions and being missing from important moments tends to become ‘normal ‘ for busy people.

* Busyness Affects Our Relationships 

The current idea of busyness doesn’t necessarily put in ‘quality of work’ as an important factor, instead, ‘quantity of work’ becomes the deciding factor. When we place priorities in the wrong areas it does end up being counter-productive and instead of actually getting things done we might only be wasting precious time.It’s necessary to keep track of how and what you spend your time. Know if the time you spend on doing something is actually for something ‘productive ‘ or is it just being busy.

* Quality Over Quantity Or Quantity Over Quality? 

Being ‘busy ‘ isn’t something you’re forced to do, it’s a life choice – something you make and continue.Know that being efficient isn’t about the number of hours you spend doing something that may or may not have a positive outcome. Efficiency is about the number of positive results you get on doing things. Think about the things you do on a daily basis that you think are ‘productive ‘ – does it actually give outcomes that help you grow? Does it help with things you’re struggling with/find difficult?

How to know if you’re actually productive or just busy?

Being busy is just about passing time doing things that seem productive,while actually, using time for things that support growth is real productivity.Answering emails is one such task that might seem and feel productive but it has more cons to pros. It always makes you feel productive but in reality it just gives you that extra stress that hampers with actual productivity.It’s often advised to check your emails only once or twice a day to allow some actual productivity instead of spending hours each day in ‘pseudo-productivity

* Being Productive Or Pseudo-productive 

Being busy is just about passing time doing things that seem productive,while actually, using time for things that support growth is real productivity.Answering emails is one such task that might seem and feel productive but it has more cons to pros. It doesn’t matter how many times a day you check your email, you can always expect more to be there eventually. It always makes you feel productive but in reality it just gives you that extra stress that hampers with actual productivity. It’s often advised to check your emails only once or twice a day to allow some actual productivity instead of sp<warningtag>ending hours each day in ‘pseudo-productivity ‘.</warningtag>

When we’re constantly under stress and lose work-life balance (which is a consequence of hustle cultre) we tend to mess with our attention span, and the constant pressure from work and personal life harms the cognitive bandwidth.Even though having narrow cognitive bandwidth might help you hyperfocus on something, it also has its cons – popularly termed as Tunneling.In the most simple terms, tunneling is being extra focused on things that are right infront of us that may not be so productive, which is caused by extreme stress in our lives.

But why is it that we fixate ourselves in pseudo-productive work?

A definite point of importance is that when we become so fixated in our own lives doing ‘productive’ work, we tend to have less time for things that actually matter, like our own physical and mental health. We tend to have less time for decisions that affect us, instead we make impulsive decisions because taking cautious, calculative steps isn’t an option anymore.

* Pseudo-productive Work Affects Our Health 

• It might make us feel important to be constantly busy and get that validation from society. But remember that the same busyness has long term effects on your health.These long hours of stress and lack of sleep and completely ignoring self-health can lead to problems like headaches, insomnia, fatigue, seizures, etc. When you make changes in busyness, you will only have positive changes in your physical and mental health and will improve relationships with people you’ve been pushing away.

So how can we get rid of busyness and make time for things that actually matter?

• Take a deep dive into the work you’re always busy doing – then think if spending all that time and resources is actually a wise decision. Spend time doing things that you actually find valuable – does it feel productive?• Learn to ignore the voices, views and opinions of society that promotes hustle cultre and being busy. Keep in mind the actual goal you have, that which you strive for. (I know it’s so much more easier said than done, but give it a shot!) Challenge the idea of being busy and go for what you believe you want to do.

• Understand the importance of saying no to things that don’t serve purpose to your life, instead, spend that time on things that drive you and things you find yourself excited to do.• Sometimes you can find true satisfaction in doing less. You could do hundreds of tasks a day but they won’t necessarily bring you happiness, but even doing one task that drives you can be the source of your happiness.• Encourage yourself and people around you to get the image of being busy out of their mind and instead set being productive as the idealistic mindset.

The idea od being busy has become glorified to an unhealthy extent, maybe it's time to take a step back and think of not always being busy, but being efficient. 

Being Busy Is Good?

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