 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Lab. There are some people you know from the moment you pick up the phone, you're just going to have a great conversation. Even if the phone line's terrible and the guy's describing his favorite way to fix eggs. My favorite way currently to prepare eggs is in the Instant Pot, and I've been a total Instant Pot convert for a couple of years now, the steam basically lifts the shell from the egg white, and so you just pull them off, and then you get a nice soft egg white and a beautiful yolk that can be hard or soft boiled. That's David Spara. The reason for my call was not to talk about eggs. It was to talk about busyness. Busy with a why. David's a leading clinical psychologist, but he admits he's got a problem, maybe even an addiction, to busyness. He wrote an article for Vox that included this grim assessment. I'm a robot programmed to obliterate my tediousness. During the day, I direct a research laboratory, write papers, and teach classes as a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Come 4.30 p.m., I run a kid limousine service, shuttling between various activities, preparing dinner, helping with homework, and the union EP. Scurry through these activities, often missing the moments of joy embedded in everyday life, and tie some sort of nightly electrical shortage, then crash out on the couch. I reboot in the morning and do it all over again. I'm addicted to busyness. On this podcast, we look at the art and science of living a full life. And busyness is something I've been thinking a lot about. For many people, I know it keeps stealing time from what we really care about. So I've been asking behavioral scientists exactly why busyness is so compelling and what we can do about it. We'll hear more from David Sparra in a moment. First though, I want to introduce Dan Arelli. He's the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. He's also the founder of the delightfully named Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. And when we think about busyness, the first thing to notice he says is the way our environment is designed, at work and at home. When you ask people how many of you have right now rotting fruits and vegetables in your refrigerator, almost everybody admits that they have it. I just took mine out to the compost this morning. There you go. And it's a sad funeral, right? You take all this stuff that you paid lots of money on and you had good plans for and then all of a sudden you check on them and it's too late. That's true. It's so true. It's so sad. And the reason, of course, is that it's a bad design. Where do we put the fruits and vegetables in a low drawer that is opaque? Now, you could stand there in front of the refrigerator and say, let me examine all my options, including bending down and opening this drawer. And it's not a lot of effort, but it's a little bit too much. So because of that, we open the refrigerator and whatever comes at eye level are the things that come to mind and those are the things that we eat. So I think that what we need to do is we need to figure out how do we design better environments? It's true for the kitchen, but it's also true for the work environment. For me, one of the biggest lessons in social science over the last 40, 50 years has been that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in. You put people in one environment, they make one type of decisions, you put them in a different kind of environment, they make a different type of decision. And because of that, human freedom is not in our kind of ability to make decisions. It's in our ability to put ourselves into environments that would lead to better outcomes. You know, what I'd love to do now is listen together to a bit of the conversation that I had with David Sabara, who's struggling with busyness and feeling addicted to busyness. So let's listen to his story and then I'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay. I don't know, I spent a long time in the last couple of months trying to figure out what's wrong with me. I have a terrific life. I have a wonderful job, a great career. You know, I feel like a happy marriage or kids are doing fine. You know, I have every, all the blessings in the world and I feel grateful for them. I just sort of go around feeling mildly miserable all the time. And I felt like I was just running from one activity to the next and I really have tried to hack this up and figure out what exactly is going on here. And also really trying to provide for myself a lot of what I talk about. I'm a clinical psychologist by training and I have a psychotherapy practice and I talk with people who are trying to figure these kinds of things out all the time and sort of step back and look at it in a way that I might sort of advise my clients to do in my practice. And that's how I ended up on thinking about realizing, coming to the conclusion that I am perhaps addicted to busyness. Everything that you described sounds pretty great. It is pretty great. It is pretty great if you can sort of drop an anchor into your experience of it, but it's just sort of, the peace to me is getting like mind-numbingly fast and we're trying to also find time to buy a new car in our family and my son keeps saying, you know, all you have to do is like go in there and figure, you know, we know which car. I've been, you know, just going there. I can't even think for a minute like about doing that. And so just for me, the worst part of it all is the sense of being frayed, like the fabric being frayed or being frenzied. Frayed is maybe like, I don't have the bandwidth for anymore. I'm nearly exhausted. And frenzied is like I have this monkey mind that is like jumping from one thing to the next and I can't focus. I can't think clearly. I just feel exhausted by the way I'm turning over things because the next thing is coming to the next thing is coming to the next thing. So Dan, what do you make of that? He talks about feeling addicted to being busy and frenzied and frayed and he doesn't have much bandwidth. Yeah. So it's actually a combination of many, many forces and some of them are wonderful. Right? So the first thing is that life gives us lots and lots of opportunities. Imagine you were a farmer 200 years ago. You got up in the morning. What are your options? Basically go and work the field and you're going to work the field. You know, you can take a bathroom break, but you can eat a little bit. But that's about it. Now we have a tremendous amount of things that we could choose between. This freedom is amazing, but it also means that we often accept too many things from the beginning. So what we have and I'm terrible at this as well is it's very hard to say no. So what happens is we say yes too often and now we have too many things on our plate. And it has kind of two elements to it. The first one is we have too many things on our plates, but it's also stressful because now we need to manage multiple things at the same time and we spend some time on the management of which one do we do and which one do we don't. And I don't know about you, but when I try to meditate, like, you know, I try from time to time, I close my eyes. In seven to 10 seconds, I get my to-do list. Which basically come and say, okay, what's on my to-do list? Which one of things I need to make sure I'm not dropping? And what we have is we have a cost that is a part of this management system of, say, I have 25 projects, which one do I need to make progress on? You know, let's listen again to David Sabara and hear some of the ways he sees contemporary culture driving these behaviors and some of the strategies he's tried to overcome his own addiction to busyness. Everything seems to be about more and more and, you know, it's published more. It's pursue more opportunities, take advantage of more. I think the inertia of that kind of mindset just takes on a life of its own. And you have to be extremely deliberate to redirect the ship and to really sort of say, hang on a second, what is my ideal day? What is my North Star in terms of, like, how I want to live my life? Where are the moments and the times when I have been the happiest? I'm not necessarily unhappy. I don't want to paint that picture. I'm not struggling with a major depression. I'm not experiencing massive debilitating anxiety. It's malaise and wondering, you know, what else is there for me and how can I do this better? And I think that's an important time to take stock. So if you're feeling this malaise, you know, this kind of desire to, like you said, drop an anchor into your experience, you know, it certainly seems that busyness has become, you know, if not a badge of honor, it's certainly a way of life for many people. And, you know, is it a personal thing that we all are just now addicted to it? Is it technology? I think technology is a big part of the, you know, the frenetic sense that we have constantly checking in and updating and being plugged in. And that creates this sort of vigilance that people have about missing out and foreclosed opportunities. And so we're amped up. People are amped up and they're revved up. And so that's a big part of it. I also think that we are, you know, we live in a competitive time and there's competition to succeed and to do more with fewer resources, right? So people are really going after what is available for them. And then there's a contagion of busyness that becomes the social norm without even realizing it's like the air that we start breathing. That's a very hard force for people to recognize because it's like asking fish about the water they're swimming. You can't even see it, right? And that's, I think, why it took me so long to really recognize that. The idea that a psychology travels through a network is not a new idea, right? So loominess, you know, there's evidence to suggest, I'm not saying it definitely is, but there's the idea that loominess is contagious in a network. Depression certainly is. If your friends are friends or lonely, then you yourself are more likely to be lonely. And you can, you know, we can say there's this contagion. So these social forces at social properties are fairly well known and, you know, that's how these things get conveyed in the culture. I spent some time with a researcher at North Dakota State University who's been gathering holiday cards for decades. And it's amazing you go through the archive and every year you just become more and more breathless at how much stuff people are doing and how they're bragging about it. And these are people like from the Midwest. So it's kind of everywhere now. How do you stop that? How do you get out of that network or how do you change the contagion to something a little bit more positive? It takes, you know, getting knocked on the head by a little three-pound object to sort of wake you up out of your stupor and say, well, what is there that I'm breathing? I've been reading all kinds of interesting stuff. You know, the SAS Pico Air has a nice book on stillness and quiet. There is a book on busyness already. And, you know, there's a whole community of people. The slow food movement has a, you know, the slow lifestyle movement has a long history. So talk about how you're trying to overcome this addiction. What is your recovery plan? What are you doing to overcome being busy all the time? Well, I think I'm trying to be more deliberate in my choices and that's something all of us can do right away, right? And focus on saying no more and... But more sort of trying to focus very clearly on my values and make sure that I'm living in a way that is consistent with those values. And I think the antidote or the prescription here, however you choose to think about it, is all of us sort of just taking a pause on this and saying, you know, what are my values and is there a discrepancy between the guide, the principles I want to guide my life and the way I am actually living on a day-to-day basis. And I really just tried to create physical space to have more downtime, starting to walk more and be outside because I was losing touch with the sort of experience of being outside and moving my body through space. And, you know, I ride a bike quite a lot and I exercise a reasonable amount, but just sort of being outside other times and I really just focused on going for more walks and sometimes I listen to books or podcasts but sometimes I just walk and I, you know, will park my car maybe a half a mile, a mile away from campus and hoof it in for 20 minutes and it just creates space to just let your mind be restored by nature and be creative. And to me, that's made a huge amount of difference. Just that. Just that. That sounds so hopeful and it sounds so doable. Like, and we Americans are such overachievers that people are going to like start, you know, like walking miles and miles a day just to try to calm down. Well, we should. We really should because, you know, I'm involved in this very interesting series of programs with our College of Public Health and I was sort of learning about the ways in which they've tried to implement diabetes prevention programs and one of the things that they said is across a lot of the interventions that they've tried, the one lasting, sustainable thing for people has been walking groups. Wow. Creating groups in which you are moving together with other people and you have a time to connect, you have a time to, you know, get and give social support and those kind of things but you're also moving your body. This is very, this is very sustainable. So Dan, so what do you think? Moving your body, creating space, is that part of the answer to busyness? There's lots of evidence that getting into walking groups is very helpful and the reason, of course, that walking is good and spending time socially is good but also having pre-commitment to other people is very important. Right? When David just makes promises to himself, those promises are likely to go the way that all promises to ourselves go but when we make promise to meet a friend in the street corner, you might not care about your own health but you do care about your promise to a friend and you're going to show up but of course it doesn't really deal with the problem because the only thing it does is it says let's take an hour and make sure that in that hour we're not tempted. It's better than nothing because it has to be more productive when we're at our desk. It changes the environment that you're in to an environment that doesn't give you temptation and you're pre-committing to that environment and so on but it doesn't mean that he's going to say oh you know I used to work 18 hours a day now I have an hour of walking let me commit to things that only fill 17 hours. So I think it's kind of a patch. I think that the right approach is to figure out how to say no and how to do the things first that's very important to us. One of the tricks by the way we give people is to say when somebody asks you for something new to do imagine that they ask you to do it this week or next week. Now if you say oh look at my week right now you asked me to come and spend a day in Washington if I would cancel other things to do that then go ahead and accept it for April 20th 2018 but if you say no no it doesn't fit with my priorities now it will probably not fit in the year and a half from now either. So think about kind of what do we pile on our plate and how do we stop that I think is one thing and you know there's a really interesting question of what are we trying to maximize if at the end of each day you would ask yourself was this a good day what are the kind of things that you would do and the kind of things you would do are probably the kind of things that would give you the short term satisfaction oh I made the list like rusting off I answered all my emails what about the end of your life how many people at the end of life would say you know what I got to inbox zero 752 times oh that's so depressing I know the things that give you happiness at the end of life are very different and we don't have to go all the way there we could do the end of the year the end of the month maybe even the end of the week so what happens is that when we take too many things on the kind of things that give us short term satisfaction are not the kind of things that give us long term satisfaction there's a word I really love called cancellation it's the elation you feel when something is canceled when somebody asks you to do something to go to a meeting to participate in something ask yourself how elated would you be if half an hour before that meeting it was canceled and if you experience this elation just don't commit to it from the beginning because it means you don't really want to do it so don't get into those situations sometimes that sounds easier said than done it is one reason why saying no is so tough is that sometimes you say yes to things that you know you shouldn't but then they end up being wonderful that's true I went to give a talk to some VC company in San Francisco I said okay it was in some hotel 8pm in San Francisco and I'm driving why did I say yes like what compelled me at that moment to say yes and I get there and I sat with myself like what got me to say yes and I give my little talk and after that we sit and I have a drink with a guy next to me turns out he's Brazilian and he asked me what can I do to get you to come to Brazil this was a couple of years ago I said you know the World Cup is in two months I'll ask for a game and I'll be there and a week later I have tickets to the last four games and it was an experience of a lifetime I got to go to games I got to go with some of his friends I got to go with him to some of those things it was really a wonderful thing and from time to time those random things turned out and it turned out well and I personally feel that I'm kind of sometimes gambling with my time and that's where the danger lies right that's where the danger lies let's listen to the last part of my conversation with David Sabara he'd written this beautiful scene where he was tickling his five-year-old daughter and he described that as the best half-hour of his year so far I asked him how he got to that moment of connection this brings the addiction analogy full circle so with my daughter I talked about just sort of creating space for play just sort of sitting waiting to see what happens and looking for things to unfold that are not planned and not structured you know I think the idea of scheduling unscheduled time is really a good idea it's like I'm going to make sure that every night at seven thirty or after we do some you know the chores before the kids go to bed I'm just going to locate myself on the couch and just see what happens and you know often quite before I give my daughter a bath or something and she likes to do trust falls into me and for me to tickle her and make faces at her and all the good parenting stuff right and just going through the motions constantly we miss a lot of this and I mean I think from the outside a lot of people who would see me say hey you know you're connected to your kids that's lovely that's a beautiful thing but I wasn't like I was constantly like there's a routine and there are these twenty tasks and let's get through the routine and you get to bed so then I can you know be on the couch and see who wrote me some emails since the last time I checked an hour ago and um it's so sad and it's so true yeah and to me the beautiful thing with my daughter is like she's young enough that she wants to be you know she wants me to be wrestling with her she wants me to be tickling her hold her in an airplane position and those kinds of things and you know I'm not there's no way I'm gonna fifteen years from now feel like I missed that I'm just not that is a value so can I live close but last night I had been out from ten forty five in the morning and got home around seven thirty right so I'd been doing in my clinical practice and then going to give this talk so I hadn't checked in on email and there were seventy emails I got a day and I you know whatever that's life but I felt this absolute urge to dispense with them I felt like an urge like an addictive urge I could not feel better more relaxed more satiated and calmer until I clean my inbox and my son was making this he's almost nine he was making this awesome Lego thing it's like a tiny house out of Legos he's building and he's putting it on wheels like but he's building it and he's trying to finish it and he's showing it to me and I'm standing there and I'm thinking he's gotta go to bed so I can do the emails and he's like I'm so close and he kept perseverating on it and I was like you have to go to bed and I was like what is this about man you know I don't know if the analogy to an addiction is act but if it is then we're talking about riding a wave of a craving I was compelled to go to do the work because that was I needed to get rid of this noxious feeling of all the emails so I could do something right so the key idea is that you just let that feeling pass without reacting to it but you have to first try to notice it and see what it is and be able to describe it and then I just like I just sat down Indian style and I was like show me what you have here tell me about it and I don't know how well other people are doing that maybe a lot of people are doing that really well but my sense is that we are missing those opportunities because if it's not running to do email it's running to do Facebook just standing there and your son's doing it and you're like oh you know like like like like maybe maybe it's just me but the ability to just sit and say you tell me what you're doing here this is really interesting it's inspired by this TV show about tiny houses and people living this thing oh my god he's got like a bed in there and it's like you know foot wide and it's pretty cool so Dan you know here you've got a situation where you've got these 70 emails you can't think straight until you clear them out of your inbox even at the point where you've got this wonderful scene with your child in front of you doing creative and all you can think of is try to get the kid out into bed so that you can answer these emails what is going on what is wrong with us yeah so first of all you know I listen to this I say only 70 that sounds like an easy day but again if you think about how email was designed it was designed to give you a sense of what things have not been dealt with and to make it feel that they are waiting for you sitting on your plate and whether you do them or not the fact is that when you think you could be doing it it's already taking a toll and if you know that things are piling on your plate and there's some things that might require your immediate attention but we don't separate them they all look just the same right so you know when mail comes to our house it's very easy to separate catalogs which we don't need to look at from bills that we need to deal with on a monthly basis from personal letters you know we don't get that many personal letters anymore but if you think about it the form tells you a lot about what it is with email it all looks the same right so you say to yourself oh there must be some things here that are really crucial so what we've done is we've taken this pipe of information of digital information and we deliver everything from it but by delivering everything from it we elevate the importance of lots of things in a way that is completely inappropriate so I think he's right that we have created that but I'll tell you one thing I did as I travel the world from time to time I get to meet chief rabbis I'm Israeli and Jewish I'm kind of curious about Judaism and I always ask one question I say if you were recommending to me one commandment to keep which one would it be give me one what should I try and what do you think is the commandment that they all recommend you tell me keep the Sabbath interesting and they all said the same reason they say keep the Sabbath it seems like you're making yourself less productive it says take take a day off and instead of working and you know progressing don't do anything toward your actual goal but instead what it does is it gives you a chance to reflect on life and they say if you take this time and you reflect on life you'll actually make higher progress it's kind of interesting because it fits some of the research and social science of what's called depletion that if you keep on working very hard all the time you get mentally exhausted and kind of having some time to reflect on life and think about what you want to do might actually be very useful I talked to the chief rabbi in South Africa about this and he wakes me up very early the next day I think the guy has too much energy but he wakes me up very early in the morning he said let's get all the Jews in South Africa to celebrate the Sabbath and we start talking about what do we know about getting people to adopt a new habit and the final decision we made was not to build up for it but to start with one day a year of people doing the full thing and the reason if people have to think whether they want to spend time with their family beyond their iPhone even having their thought is going to diminish the capacity and their enjoyment of what they're doing what people need to have is the idea that there is no email it's just not possible and if you're a religious Jew of course it really helps if you think God really cares about whether you read email on the Sabbath or not but if you do and it's out of the system it's not tempting there's actually a really amazing piece of research showing that when you take Orthodox Jews and you check how tempted are they to smoke on the Sabbath they're not tempted if you tell them don't smoke they're craving the nicotine on the Sabbath they're not there's a higher order need that says smoking is just not an option here and we studied this what happened on the Sabbath that we tried out and what happened is that that was the feeling that people got that all of a sudden they were fully engaged because it's not just that they were not checking email they knew that it was outside of the rules and it's kind of an interesting thing what kind of rules should we create for modern society so that we don't tempt ourselves to misbehave I love that thought Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us my pleasure, thanks a lot Dan Arelli he's written three books on decision making and irrational behavior two of them New York Times bestsellers Dan's a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University at Duke he also leads one of the most amusingly named research centers on campus the center for advanced hindsight we also heard this episode from David Sabara he's a professor in the psychology department at the University of Arizona where he directs the laboratory for social connectedness and health David's recent article for Vox titled I trained myself to be less busy and it dramatically improved my life for more resources on working healthier visit us online at newamerica.org click on the link for Better Life Lab Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate thanks so much for joining me for our podcast about the art and science of living a full life it's a collaboration with ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation our podcast is produced by David Shulman if you enjoyed this episode here's one more item for your to-do list take a moment to review Better Life Lab on Apple Podcasts it really does make a difference in getting the word out from New America's Better Life Lab I'm Bridget Shulte