Do you feel guilty when your day isn’t jam-packed? Are you constantly looking for ways to fill the hours and struggling to sit still?
Being busy is a good thing – some of the time. It’s good for your brain, helping you stay mentally and physically active. But how busy is too busy? And when does it become a problem?
In this blog, we’ll talk you through the link between constant busyness, trauma, and mental health. Plus, we’ll offer a few ways to slow down in your day-to-day life, and help you understand when it might be time to ask for help.
The connection between experienced trauma, busyness, and mental health
Everyone gets busy from time to time. But sometimes, we use staying busy as a coping mechanism. The busier we are, the easier it is to avoid dealing with uncomfortable feelings or emotions or coming to terms with traumatic events from the past.
And sometimes a little distraction can help you heal. For example, after a breakup or death among your family or friends, sometimes staying busy helps you recover from the loss and move on.
But how healthy is this method when it comes to dealing with issues like depression, anxiety, and trauma? In these cases, staying busy isn’t actually helping you – if anything, it’s harming you.
Related: Should I ignore my negative feelings?
What are trauma responses?
The truth is, you don’t need a post traumatic stress disorder diagnosis to have a trauma response.
Trauma responses are automatic, often involuntary responses to threat or harm, and are the body’s way of protecting itself from perceived danger. Sometimes, even after the “danger” passes, the painful memories can cause our bodies to stay stuck in this response. The 4 main trauma responses are:
- Fight: Confronting the threat or danger head-on.
- Flight: Running from the threat or danger.
- Freeze: Shutting down or failing to respond.
- Fawn: Appeasing others to stay safe.
If you’ve gone through a traumatic event in the past, you’ve probably experienced one of these responses. Unresolved trauma can continue to show up in the form of chronic stress, feeling anxious, emotional numbness, nightmares, and flashbacks.
Found yourself wondering, “Why do I need to be busy all the time?” This is one of the modern-day forms of the “flight” response – a psychological escape from perceived emotional danger.
Keeping busy as a coping mechanism
These days, it’s easier than ever to fill up your day with activity – from work (or overwork), scrolling socials, and going to social events to booking back-to-back travel anytime things start to calm down. So it’s easy to see how constant busyness has become such a common way to avoid dealing with poor mental health, deep-rooted trauma, or negative emotions.
Here are some of the common reasons people try to keep busy:
- Distracts from uncomfortable emotions: When you’re always on the go, there’s no time to feel the overwhelming emotions or unresolved trauma that lie beneath the surface. In fact, it masks your struggles – when someone asks why you look worn-down or upset, you can place the blame on your hectic schedule.
- Self-worth is tied to productivity: You might feel like taking a break makes you lazy; that if you slow things down, you might miss out or fall behind. While productivity is good, hyper-productivity can be toxic if your self-esteem and sense of your own worth are linked to your accomplishments.
- Societal pressures: There’s enormous pressure to do more, learn more, make more, be more productive. To visit more places, make more friends, get good at a million new hobbies. But despite what society says, you don’t have to push yourself to be busy all the time – especially at the risk of harming your mental well-being and happiness.
If you’ve been filling your days to the brim with activity – ask yourself why. Understanding what you might be avoiding – what your body might be trying to protect you from – is the first step in making a positive change in your life.
The dangers of always staying busy
While staying busy might make you feel productive some of the time, there’s a price to pay for keeping yourself too busy.
- Mental exhaustion: Eventually, your mental load will be too heavy, your energy stretched too thin, and you’ll be overwhelmed with stress, anxiety, and burnout.
- Emotional toll: Ignoring anxiety, depression, or trauma doesn’t make it go away. Without facing it head-on, you may also experience emotional numbness, flashbacks, and difficulty concentrating – to name a few.
- Physical strain: Just like our minds, our bodies aren’t designed for constant action. You need time to let your body rest and recover. If you don’t, you can expect to feel rundown, more susceptible to picking up colds and flus, and over time, your body may shut down from total exhaustion.
To overcome the constant need to be busy and put your mental and physical well-being first, you’ll need to create new boundaries for yourself, prioritizing downtime.
Finding ways to slow down
Constant busyness might distract you from discomfort, but it’s not a healthy coping skill. If you’re ready to slow down, re-center, and reconnect with your whole self again, here are some of our favorite ways to do just that:
- Make time for rest: Before you book up your next week, set aside some time to simply be. Resist the temptation to grab your phone and distract yourself with social media, and note what happens when you start to slow down. Some discomfort may arise at first, but allow those feelings to come and go in their own time, and there’s often peace on the other side.
- Practice mindfulness: Take some time to sit quietly, breathe deeply, slow your mind, and calm your nervous system. The goal isn’t to ‘zen’ your feelings away – it’s to allow your thoughts and feelings to flow naturally, without resisting or avoiding them. You may find they pass peacefully on their own.
- Practice slow living: Savor the quiet and find joy in the little things. Slow living is a mindful approach to finding balance in our everyday lives, prioritizing downtime as much as productivity. A slow-living mindset is about staying present in the now and making conscious, thoughtful decisions.
- Seek therapy: When it comes to lingering trauma and other unresolved issues, you can only distract yourself with busyness for so long. A therapist or mental health professional can help you get to the root of the problem and help you through the healing process. Imagine the freedom you’ll feel when you can choose to slow down without your trauma responses keeping you restless.
Try out some of these tips for slowing down and see what difference they can make in your life.
Find the right support with Western Tidewater
You don’t have to stay in “flight”-mode, filling up every spare minute of your day to keep your emotions at bay. If you’re dealing with unresolved trauma or other mental health challenges, we can help.
We offer comprehensive mental health counseling services for anyone struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, and more.
It’s not too late to process trauma, develop healthy ways to cope with your emotions, and give your mind and body the care it deserves. Reach out to the team to make an appointment with a counselor and start your healing journey today.
