Busyness As A Coping Strategy

“Feeling the need to be busy all the time is a trauma response and fear-based distraction from what you’d be forced to acknowledge and feel if you slowed down.”

Tutu Mora

Are you always on the go, moving from one task to another?

Do you find it challenging or even agitating to sit still for very long?

You are not alone. This is very common.

Why? First off, our culture encourages us to go, go, go, perform, achieve, and push, no matter the cost to our health and well-being.

We are conditioned from a young age to achieve bigger and better goals, and we are taught that our “success” in life is measured by how well we do this.

Unprocessed Trauma

We all have trauma, plain and simple. We live in a culture that values profits over the well-being of humans, animals, and nature, and we are pressured to perform at any cost to survive. We do not live in a situation that makes it easy to thrive when we all deserve nothing less than thriving on every level. This is a sad state of affairs, and there are degrees of trauma that differ from person to person. Some grew up in abusive and neglectful situations and may have Complex PTSD, some may have PTSD from negative experiences and chronic high stress, and all of us have at least some trauma, much of it unprocessed.

All of us respond differently to trauma, and part of what determines how we respond is how intense the trauma was and how long it went on. In addition, there is a lot of stigma around trauma and PTSD, which for many results in deep feelings of shame and a tendency to self-isolate when we need help the most.

It is a normal response to not want to face the challenging experiences that happened in our past. These things are often excruciating, and once we have lived through something terrible, we tend to want it to be over and done for good. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

Unprocessed trauma gets stored in the body. When we don’t do the inner work to “unpack” and process our trauma, it affects us in ways we cannot always recognize. Unprocessed trauma can detrimentally affect our mental, emotional, and physical health, our relationships, and our work, and it limits our ability to thrive.

Busyness As A Trauma Response

While our cultural conditioning certainly plays a part in our tendencies toward busyness, it is not the main cause. The most common reason for over-busyness is that it is a trauma response. When you’re super busy and on the move, you can more easily avoid the distressing emotions and physical sensations that are an intrinsic part of trauma and PTSD. Busyness is a great way to drown out feelings of anxiety and fear that may be lurking under the surface, and you may know on some level that if you stop or even slow down those uncomfortable emotions and physical sensations will rise to the surface. This is part of why you keep going even when you’re exhausted.

It’s important to acknowledge the effectiveness of busyness as a survival strategy. Put simply, it works, and it works well. If you’re always on the move in some way, you can stay ahead of the activation and challenging emotions that you may be afraid to face. Typically these types of coping strategies start when you are young, and for a while, they work well, and you may not feel the negative effects until later in life. It is important to honor the place that such strategies played in your life since they quite literally helped you to survive. You can acknowledge and honor the effectiveness of it and know that it is time to create new strategies that support who and where you are now.

Part of the trouble with busyness as a coping strategy is that you have to KEEP moving to stay ahead of the backlog of emotions and sensations that you haven’t felt safe enough to feel. Ultimately, this kind of constant busyness comes at a high cost that may look like chronic fatigue or other physical issues. Another manifestation of repressed emotions is that all of the piled-up emotions and issues you have been working so hard to escape may very likely blow up in your face one day…it’s like a volcano, ready to blow anytime. Because the content you are trying to escape has nowhere to go but to endlessly cycle in your system, you can only contain the energy of all of that activation in your system for so long until it rises to the surface on its own. Once that happens, it can be overwhelming and shocking to your nervous system.

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathic witness.”

Peter Levine

What Happens When We Stop Moving

We keep on the move to avoid the distressing emotions and physical sensations that are such a part of trauma, and there is more that we are seeking to avoid. Since we don’t understand what they are, we may fear the sensations we feel and automatically think that we’re doing something wrong or that something is wrong with us when they arise. This can be a result of a harsh inner critic who is always on the lookout for ways to keep us in check. Instead of comforting us, the inner critic may turn on us when we need support the most, attacking us and telling us horror stories about what may be happening to us and what we did wrong to make it happen. This is victim-blaming turned inward.

In addition, even if it’s not part of the emotional content that naturally arises for us when we slow down, we may experience intense feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic when we slow down. These powerful sensations sometimes hijack our systems, taking over and putting us in a place of high activation that makes it challenging if not impossible to reason that we are safe in the current moment and circumstances that we find ourselves in.

What You Can Do

It takes time to change patterns of behavior, especially if they are coping strategies related to trauma. Some things you can start to do now:

• slow down - it may be more challenging to stop completely, but slowing down may feel like an accessible start, and slowing down helps to create some space in your system as well as a sense of safety

• cultivate self-compassion - Be kind to yourself. Self-compassion is an excellent antidote to fear and it counters the voice of the inner critic

• shorten your to-do list - prioritize the items on your to-do list and only do the things that truly need to be done

• drop perfectionism - You do not need to be perfect…you are wonderful as you are. Allow yourself to be human.

• prioritize well-being - put yourself and your well-being ahead of your to-do list

We all need the support of a compassionate witness when healing from trauma…none of us can do it alone.

Please reach out if I can support you in your journey of healing.