How to Break the Busy Badge

In our society, we wear busyness like a badge of honor. How many conversations go like this:

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m so busy!”

“I know, right? Me too!”

Ever have conversations where you try to out-busy the other person? Where whoever is the most busy wins? Somehow, I think we’re missing something here.

Busyness, without whitespace, is a thief. It keeps you from knowing yourself.

We hear our heart best in the quiet spaces. In the unscheduled whitespace. But too often, our busy life slams our day, leaving no whitespace at all.

And do we sometimes want it that way? Is it less painful to be busy than to hear our own heart? If we refuse to slow down and hear what our heart is trying so desperately to tell us, it often, eventually, lands in our body as disease. It’s like our heart is saying, “Do you hear me now?”

The Balance in the Nuance

I’m not shaming busyness. I’m busy too. Being productive is a good thing. My purpose here isn’t, along with all of us being so busy, to dump a bunch of guilt on top of that. In fact, in the restaurant of life, how many of us already feel like we’ve ordered a main course of busyness with a side of guilt?

But there’s a big myth around busyness I want to bust.

Myth: “Being busy means I’m important and valuable.”

We often get our value from feeling important. From being busy. It’s like we earn our value from how much we do. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I did a post diving deeper into why we aren’t defined by our actions here, but for our purposes here, suffice it to say that God doesn’t see us that way.

Our value to him is not based on what we do or don’t do. Thank God.

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:8

He loves us based on who he created us to be. And nothing we do or don’t do can ever change that, including how busy we are. Our value is inherited from God, not earned by what we do.

“When I just get there, then I’ll rest.” No, you won’t.

So often, we lie to ourselves:

“When I just finish this deadline, then I’ll take a break.” But then here comes the next project.
“After this semester, things will calm down.” But each semester just gets more intense as the classes get more advanced.
“If I can just get that promotion, then I’ll have more family time.” We got the promotion because we were so productive. But now, in the elevated role, we’re expected to be even more productive. So we have less family time, not more.

Yes, there are seasons in life. Certain seasons are, realistically, necessarily more busy than others.

But if we’re living in the constant promise of, “When I hit the next milestone, then I’ll rest,” but we never do, we’re living in a loop that needs to be broken.

Has being too busy become our normal? So when we get a less busy season, we fill the void with busy noise instead of taking the God-given season to rest, re-center, and breathe.

“When work is an idol, rest will feel like sin.” – Gunner Gundersen

What are we using busyness to hide from?

The beauty of busyness is that it’s socially acceptable. We can use busyness as an excuse to hide from just about anything.

Especially when our heart is trying to get our attention. Our heart often speaks quietly, and often not in words. Our heart learned to communicate long before our mouth did. It’s easy to drown out our heart’s whispers with loud busyness.

But hearing our heart, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is where the healing is. That’s where the growth is. And, ultimately, that’s where life is.

4 Steps to Break the Busy Badge

So what do we do? Here are 4 steps to break the busy badge:

Notice. The whole point of this post is helping us notice our busyness, and dare to ask the question, “Is it possible I’m doing too much? Is this really the life I want?”
Face the Fear. Go on a season of digging into implicit motivations. Investigate what would happen if we pulled back on certain activities that are running us ragged. Does our heart panic because we’ll no longer be needed, important, or valuable? That’s revealing an area in us that God wants to heal.
Share. With safe community, share what you’re struggling with in this. Ask your spouse. Ask safe friends; friends who challenge you without judging you, not just friends who always tell you what you want to hear.
Experiment. Try stuff. Pull back from an activity or responsibility for 6 months, without filling the void with something else. See how that goes. What do you notice afterward? What’s changed inside you? How does it feel to have whitespace?

The journey is worth it.

Your Turn

Does this resonate? What is your journey with busyness? What has being too busy cost you? How do you determine what to do and what not to do? Tell us your story in the comments.

Are you ready to hear your heart?

Are you medicating pain with busyness? God has healing for you. But you have to face it; healing doesn’t happen by accident. Reach out to Dave and Janet here for an inner healing session. We use a method called The Immanuel Approach, a facilitated safe, gentle way to experience a connection with Jesus, get unstuck, and receive the healing he has for you.