Hanna:
Welcome friends to Episode 35. “Just trying to stay busy!”
So today I am going to do a quick episode for you about this idea of staying busy as a form of healing or solving for your emotions. Maybe some of you have done this. Yes? I have had a lot of personal experience trying this tactic my own self, which is honestly how I like to evolve the coaching I bring to you and to my clients…I want to share from a place of having lived in my own head with these thoughts, and learned how they were keeping me stuck and using self coaching or coaching with my coaches over the years to break through these patterns and now I can share with 100% confidence with you about what works and what does not and this pattern of trying to outwit emotions like anxiety or stress or feeling like upset or angry or really any feeling you struggle with, it’s one that comes up a ton with new clients and I want to just help you to retrain your brain away from this thought now so that when you come to work with me you’ll be able to be like hey hanna guess what I’m not doing to try to counteract my anxiety: stay busy! Right so I’m giving you a kind of heads up here, staying busy is not an effective solution to your emotional health. It seems obvious when I say it like that, I think. But I want to invite you to just bring awareness to how often you do actually use business or some activity or action to try to solve for your emotions. It could sound like “Oh god I’m having such a hard time I’m so stressed about this job I need to go to the gym and blow off steam” or “Ugh my fiance is driving me nuts and I’m so anxious about this wedding planning I have to just like do a girls weekend and focus on that. Or like “I’m dealing with my anxiety by keeping busy, it’s better if I just stay busy.” You know what I’m talking about right?
Trying to distract yourself from how you feel by doing more shit. And passing off doing more shit as the solution to your anxiety or stress and then when you still feel anxiety and stress your brains like oh wait remember what the solution is, to do more shit!
If distracting yourself from anxiety is your strategy to eliminate anxiety, when do you sit down and rest?
Seriously though. When I ask “how are you handling [stress, anxiety, worry, overwhelm, heartbreak, etc.]?
And you say “just trying to stay busy!”
it’s cringeworthy to me.
Only because I literally used to subscribe to this belief this too, that to keep our tough emotions at bay we should keep busy, before I understood that creating distraction from anxiety was not a viable solution for anyone.
And because it’s burning women out when the last thing they need in an already anxious state is more shit to do.
And because it feels like self oppression.
And because it’s glorifying busy-ness which in general is trash.
And because it’s a generally accepted LIE about how to manage emotions.
And because when you say that, all I hear is “I’m still struggling.” And it breaks my heart.When I hear someone say “Just trying to stay busy” it breaks my heart because that to me is code for I’m not really okay. I don’t know how to do this. This is the only tool I have right now.
Girl, stop pretending that “staying busy” is working for you. It’s okay to admit that.
If you feel anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed, and your solution is to try not to think about it by doing more, and that’s not working…. Duh.
But also, I get it. No shame. Self compassion is key here, because honestly this desire to fix how you feel with staying busy didn’t come from you, it’s what we were all taught to do when shit gets hard. Distract yourself. Stay busy. I know I was told that. I learned that somewhere. (I can literally give you a list of all the shit I used to do to distract myself from my anxiety that didn’t work. Even a bunch of really “good” stuff like working out, cooking, building a meditation garden in the backyard out of scrap wood and heart shaped rocks, being on a mission to make all the money…all the stuff. So I get it. It’s easy to justify keeping busy when it’s disguised as necessary and good work.)
BUT I have another way.
I’m 100% sure it’s more helpful and effective than staying busy.
And you can even sit down for it.
It is called Life Coaching and is a thing of miracles. Come and get yours. Come and get your miracle.
How do we create business? With our minds right? You have this thought that you need to stay busy in order to dodge the stress. Like if I just fill my calendar it’ll take my mind off of it. If I just read this book or watch this show or book into these seminars, or schedule my kids for 12 after school sports I need to drive them to or adopt another puppy, I’ll have so much going on that I won’t have time to think about my stress or being sad or anxious.
And here’s the thing, it works sometimes and your brain tells you that obviously the solution is to keep adding shit to do to your calendar because it’s working.
But is it working?
There’s a lot of conditioning that we’re exposed to around business being the solution to your negative emotions and also business being the way to earn positive ones. Ugh I got it all done I’m so busy and I deserve a break.
If the result you’re after is feeling better, and the thought you have is I just need to stay busy, the actions you’re taking are not about feeling better, they are about being busy. And business itself doesn’t create happiness, we know that right?
I was on a call once with a guy, this was while ago I was offering free sessions during my certification so I don’t work with men now but I had this guy who was arguing for all the ways that he counteracts his stress and anxiety. And of course I was like great tell me more about that! I want to know how you do it.
Because he came to the call and said he was feeling really anxious and he said it was weird because he knows how to counteract anxiety but for some weird reason it wasn’t working now. I had asked like what have you done in the past to feel better, and he was like well I do yoga, I like to read, I am taking a dance class, I go mountain biking, I volunteer at the animal shelter, I work on my work projects with coworkers… and I was like so why do you think those don’t work? And he was like well they do work! And I said but you still feel stressed and anxious though, which is why you came to this call. And he said well most of the time I don’t feel anxious while I’m doing those things.
And I said well why do you think that is? And he was like because when I mountain bike I’m like getting the endorphins and when I work at the animal shelter I’m getting more oxytocin from being around animals that calm me…
And I said sure that’s possible. Could it also be possible that you are distracting yourself in those moments from something that’s always there?
And he was like hm. Dumbfounded. Right like we think that because in moments when we’re petting a puppy that it has put an end to our anxiety but it’s really just creating different thoughts in that moment that are not anxiety-inducing ones, but as soon as the puppy goes back in the cage, and your mind is free to wander around again, the same anxiety inducing thoughts are right there waiting.
This is why when someone is like why would you invest in coaching when you could just start doing yoga and get the same results for free I’m like OH HELL NO.
Do yoga because you want to do yoga and you enjoy yoga, not because it takes your mind off of anxiety. Maybe it does take your mind off anxiety and thats great, you get to have that time unbothered by anxiety, but I guess it’s more like the expectation of healing anxiety through doing more things. Like we need to stop expecting our anxiety or negative emotions to be healed through what we do.
Actions do not cause feelings. They do not heal feelings. Your thoughts cause your feelings. So how do you create better feelings is by working on your thoughts, and if you’re busy all the time you can’t do that. Haha So you create better feelings by taking the time to think better thoughts and eliminate the fear of your feelings. You can do that all sitting down. Not even multitasking. And how relieving it could be to know this and take your foot off the gas pedal.
When you think “I just need to stay busy” “ I should do some stuff to take my mind off of it” “I have to keep moving” it’s like green light green light green light to do more do more do more and never actually address the emotions.
Running from your emotions just amplifies them. You know this correct? Trying to outwit your emotions, amplifies them. This is not Survivor. You cannot outwit, outplay, or outlast your emotions. Your torch will get snuffed eventually and your emotions will be crowned the ultimate survivor and you’ll just be on the jury fighting with your emotions and wishing you woulda done something differently.
Damn every episode I try so hard to make it through without a survivor reference but shit I’m gunna just let em flow from now on. Haha
So emotions, running away or distracting yourself from them doesn’t make them go away.
Like I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was on a beach and a giant tsumani was coming and in the dream I’d see it first off in the distance on the water and it was just a regular wave like people were surfing it and it was no big deal but in my dream I’d like get this sense of impending doom like what if it gets bigger and like totally washes away all of our towels and beach chairs and umbrellas and shit, I should move back away from the waters edge. So I’d like scramble to get all my shit and move back like 20 feet and then look up again and this time the wave would be like 3 times as tall. But still people would be swimming and whatever like maybe some of the littler kids were getting out of the way but generally it was still looking okay to everyone else but to me I was like holy shit this thing is about to destroy this beach so I would start running and trying to gather shit as I went and save things and then, since it was a dream, the faster I tried to run the more I’d sink in the sand and the shadow of the wave would grow bigger and bigger and eventually it would be like blocking out the sun and I’d be struggling so hard like my feet were in cement trying to hard to move and go away and like willing my body to make stronger harder faster movements and eventually the dream would end with the wave crashing on top of me and I’d wake up. But I honestly think about that dream so often with respect to emotions and the struggle we put ourselves through trying to outrun them, trying to avoid, dodge, shut them off, right, and all that does is give the emotions, just like the wave in my dream, more time to grow bigger and more aggressive. And I haven’t had that dream in years but I so want it to come back now so I can just see the wave far off in the distance and sty right there on the beach in my chair in the sun and see what would happen if I just relaxed and didn’t scramble to run. I bet it would probably just crash onto the shore and I’d stick my toes in and I’d meet it like all the other waves. Right?
So we think I don’t want the emotion to catch up with me so I should just stay busy and keep moving. But not only does it not work to avoid the emotion, it will always catch up so to speak, but it also exhausts and burns you out to put such a high premium on staying in action.
When I talk about healing anxiety, or any emotion, whether it’s my own or helping to support someone else to do that, people will say like I do want to heal anxiety but I don’t know if I want to do all the stuff that will take. Like I would burn myself out and get totally exhausted by doing everything you must need to do to learn how to feel better. How on earth would I have the time to create an incredibly beautiful emotional range that isn’t scary without being totally busy all the time?
And it’s because we are conditioned to solve for our problems with action. We always think that the solution is found in the actions we take. Sometimes it is, right, if your house is on fire you need to take an action to call the fire department. But what If the solutions to most of your problems, especially how you feel, are not found in action? What if mostly, they are found in our thinking.
What would that mean for your business? What would that mean about how much you need to DO?
So, if you’re scared of healing your emotions because you think you’re too busy, and you think the solution is to stay busy, and you think that a better solution must require getting even busier.
Phew, that sounds exhausting.
What if the solution was to create a more spacious life with room to breathe and sit down and be in the moment and let your emotions be there and do with your time what you want, not do with it what you think you need to do to stay out of the wake of your own emotions.
Because when you aren’t staying busy, or keeping busy, it means you’re not fooling yourself with these thoughts of I have to and I need to and I should. Right? Those are the creators of business. You are confused if you think need and have to and should are good reasons to stay busy. Your brain has tricked you into thinking that you need to and have to and should and it might be time to question if that’s truly working or helpful.
Ok so not only is staying busy not a viable solution to your emotional health, NOR should we wear business as a badge of honor. If you are that person who’s always busy. You are creating business with your mind. Your thoughts are creating business. Your thoughts are creating your emotional life. You have control over both and one does not solve the other.
Now that you know that you don’t need to do that, you don’t need to stay busy, do you want to?
Take action because you want to not because you are afraid of emotion. And the way to tell the difference is to just ask yourself like what is my motivation for being busy? For doing this thing? Am I trying to avoid feeling some kind of way or am I doing this from joy or excitement or alignment or desire?
Fear is an incredible motivator right? Like if you’re afraid of snakes, how fast would you run to get your ass away from a giant python? Being afraid of feeling anxious, being afraid of facing the feeling of stress or hurt or sadness…it’s going to motivate us to do things to try to get away from the feelings but unlike running from a snake which will get you away from it, running from your emotions does not work, because you still live with your brain. Your brain is inside your head living with you and there’s no action-ing your way away from it.
The only reason that I am ever quote “busy” is because I want to be. That is the only good reason for me to be busy or stay busy. Because I want to. I want to create this podcast. I want to talk to my clients all day on Tuesday and Thursday. I want to get up early and go to Body Combat on Mondays and Fridays because I love my instructors and I like starting my day that way on certain days. I want to create new content for you. My schedule is usually full on at least 3 days per week and it’s because I want it to be that way ok, not because I think I need to stay busy to avoid or manage my anxiety. You know what else is on my schedule. Allowing my anxiety. Sometimes, I am busy allowing and processing my anxiety you guys. If that’s what you’re “busy” with, I’m in.
I think so many of you would be surprised by how in touch with your authenticity, your flow, your energetic perfection were the actions you take neither drain nor bore you, but are a perfect balance for you when you act from desire instead of this false sense of “I need to”. I need to stay busy. Always a statement that deserves some inquiry. Always a thought that deserves some questioning. If you think you need to stay busy you’re going to end up ruining your relationship with yourself when you come to a point in your days when you physically cannot stay busy any longer and the anxiety, stress, sadness, hurt, is there waiting for you, and you have no understanding about how to face it without the cushion of business.
If we weren't using up our energy to try to escape from our emotions, we might be able to hear our true desires better. I think sometimes when people come to me and say you know I don’t feel turned on or excited by anything, I don’t know what I want to do with my life one of the things I notice is that their fear of their own emotions is like creating this hamster wheel scenario where the only outcome of being busy or doing anything is to get away from or subdue their emotions. And they've essentially trained their brain to use all their energy for that and it blocks the ability to find out what you really want to be doing.
And the worst part? It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy of busy bullshit because when I offer you the biggest value of all. 1000x more value than this show or my Instagram posts or my emails or my mini courses…when I show up with a delectable platter of the most tantalizing goodies every presented to you in your life (and I’m talking about a life coaching package where you work with me one on one to change your life for good) guess what you say,
I’m too busy.
Staying busy is The fucking antisolution! So it’s not helping you to feel better and it’s getting in the way of what could.
I can help you. But you can’t be too busy.
That’s what I have for you today. I’ll see you back here next week.