This past weekend, I attended two weddings in two different parts of California. My whirlwind trip involved planes, trains, and automobiles (and a whole lot of caffeine), and while it left me utterly exhausted, the fun I had easily outweighed my tiredness. Plus, there’s just something satisfying, even invigorating, about being that busy. I like having so much on my plate; it makes me feel like I’m living a productive and happy life. (That’s also why I enjoy to-do lists so much.) But why does a filled-up social calendar have that effect?
My friend and I started talking about the emotional effects of busyness the other night. She, like I do, tends to overbook herself into burnout—and, also like I do, she enjoys it, to an extent. In fact, almost everyone I know talks about being swamped with work, social obligations, and everything else that makes the world go ’round. We speak of it with pride, even though the consequences are stress and fatigue. So what makes busyness seem so rewarding?
The Benefits of a Full Plate
Not too long after my friend and I shared our busy schedules with each other, I read about a study published in a 2010 issue of Psychological Science that found a link between happiness and busyness. Researchers at the University of Chicago asked ninety-eight college students to perform tasks that tested their motivation and their emotional reactions to being busy. In the first experiment, participants filled out surveys, then walked to one of two locations: a room next door, or a room that was fifteen minutes away, round-trip. The researchers told the students they had fifteen minutes between that survey and the next task, so which location they chose was up to them. The students were also told that there was candy in each room, as a thank-you for participating.
Slight tweaks to this experiment revealed a surprising amount about the students, and about humans in general. When the students thought that each room’s candy was the same, more of them opted to take their completed surveys to the closer room and wait out the remaining minutes idly. Only thirty-two people took the fifteen-minute trek. But when researchers said that each room held different candy, the number of participants who walked farther increased to fifty-nine. Without incentive, the majority of students preferred laziness, but even a small motivation, like a different kind of candy, was enough to get them moving.
At the end of the fifteen-minute break, the students filled out another questionnaire, this one rating how they felt during that time. People who walked to the second location—and were therefore busier—felt significantly happier than the ones who stayed close. And that remained true even when the researchers required some to walk and others to go next door. Making the most of their time, even with a mundane task, was enough to improve their mood.
It’s a Slippery Slope from Busy to Buried
Humans don’t fare well without purpose. There’s a reason why long stretches of unemployment and depression often go hand in hand: we need responsibilities to feel important and necessary, at least from an evolutionary standpoint. (Survival of the fittest, anyone?) Our society in particular values busyness as a by-product of the much-lauded Puritan work ethic, to the point that we act busier than we really are. “When necessity recedes, the busyness does not stop. It continues not only because it is a habit but because it is a ‘good’ habit,” write the authors of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. “And since busyness is a public virtue, a boast as well as a complaint, since people want to be seen as virtuous even in those moments when their virtues are flagging, they sometimes present a façade of busyness to the world whether they are being productive or not.”
