BLOG

Busyness is not a virtue, nor is it a sign of productivity. And nowadays it’s also not a guaranteed sign of success either. In London, I used to work with a retail CEO who regularly reminded me that if anyone said they were very busy or too busy, it was a sign they hadn’t yet learned how to delegate or prioritize their work. Nearly 15 years later I was hearing something similar from a partner in a law firm who suggested, that if a peer said they were very busy or busy, they possibly hadn’t trained their juniors well enough. Now, these were both successful people in their own right, in very different industries, and yet they both viewed busyness as a skills gap. Not much has changed!

If you respond with ‘busy’ when asked how you are doing, then you may be taking on too much. Admittedly busy can also be a phase but in my experience once busy arrives it rarely leaves of its own accord. And when you have too much to do, it has the potential to...

As humans we have become less connected to nature and as a result risk losing our essential health buffer.

When you have a busy work week and a family to care of, any opportunity to take care of yourself is precious. One of the easiest ways to do this is to step out into nature and let it do the rest.

How it works

When something happens and we perceive it as a threat, or we are asked to do more than we perceive we're capable of then we experience stress, i.e. a mismatch between what we can and have been asked to do. Once we have this thought our sympathetic nervous system, the ‘fight or flight’ branch of our autonomic nervous system, is activated. When we experience nature, our parasympathetic nervous system is activated, ‘the rest and digest’ branch of the autonomic nervous system, and its activation counteracts the already activated sympathetic nervous system. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated more than our sympathetic nervous...

If you are someone that always seems to be stressed out, and constantly looking for more to add to your to-do list instead of managing well what you already have on it, then you might be an addict.

Admittedly there are two sides to the impact of stress; there’s a good side which can help you to achieve your best work, support you to learn new skills and pay attention to the details when it matters. However the other side of stress, the less helpful side, is that in large doses it can make you feel overwhelmed, miserable and erode your self-confidence. However, this less helpful side of stress is often linked to having perfectionist tendencies, not wanting to miss out and the belief that it will get better with the more you accomplish.

It’s important to recognise that it is human to take breaks and that everyone needs them.

It might seem silly to be addicted to something that can affect you so negatively however our relationship to stress is adaptive...