Feel Better by Doing Less

Does your life feel frantic?
Between jobs, kids, household responsibilities, dealing with parents, seeing friends, working out, meditating, walking every day, chauffeuring the children to activities, making sure that there is every tutor and lesson available, being in a relationship, and whatever other wonderful things your life is filled with, do you have a chance to breathe? Not BREATHE (breathing exercises, breath work, using breath to calm yourself) but just breathe. There is a good chance that the answer is no. And you feel stressed. At the same time, what would you give up?

With the advent of stress reduction clinics, and an understanding of the utility of mindfulness (Cresswell, 2017; Zhang et al., 2021) people are often told to use techniques such as meditating or practicing breathing exercises when they are feeling stressed. In my son’s heavily academic high school his class had to do an in-school unit on meditation and yoga in his high stress academic environment. His homework load left him with little time for sleep. Meditation and yoga are very much not his thing. However, they were universally assigned to all of the students, without regard to the fit for the individual. He wisely pointed out that, if he used time in school to work on homework, instead of the extra unit on yoga, he could sleep more and feel less stressed.

Presenting a combination of research findings and illustrative examples, Leidy Klotz (2021) advances the idea that humans usually solve problems by adding more into the mix. He notes that sometimes removing something is more effective. I think about Klotz’ work every time I hear that the answer to someone’s stress is to add meditation or yoga.

Don’t get me wrong. I find meditating calming and focusing. I practiced yoga for many years and see value in it both physically and mentally. I would not, by any means, say that there is no place for those activities. But they are activities that need to be added to a schedule, rather than addressing the potential primary issue of there already being too much to do. They can become pressures and “shoulds” or “have-tos.” What would be jettisoned from your schedule to include these? So what is another solution? Try doing less!

How does one do less? Here are some ideas.

Ten ideas for doing less and feeling more:

Limit the number of activities you and/or your children are doing. Some kids want to be busy and are really enjoying everything they are doing. If that is working, then don’t mess with it. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Some kids are busy and enjoying everything but also irritable and exhausted. For those kids, find a healthy balance with down-time built into their schedule.
Build down-time into your own schedule. For those of us who like being busy and do not want to miss opportunities, that can be hard. Nature abhors a vacuum and sometimes a schedule is like a vacuum – it just gets filled in. In order to keep that from happening some find it helpful to intentionally plan or block out down-time.
Determine whether there are points in your daily or weekly schedule that feel particularly frantic or frenetic and troubleshoot those times. Identify ways to reduce the items in your schedule during those pressure points.
Build in time to get chores done so that down-time can be just that. Otherwise down-time becomes time to straighten, clean out the attic, or do whatever else has been waiting on your list.
Think about what you do with your down-time. Don’t make this another chore or “should.” Some people naturally gravitate to a TV show or book or board game. Others might twiddle their thumbs thinking “OK. Now what? There is nothing on my schedule so what do I do?” You get to decide.
Think about whether you want to regularly have family time. This could be family dinners or Sunday afternoons or evenings. These rituals help with family relationships and also create sacred time that becomes hard to encroach upon. Rather than adding a new activity, this might involve simply being more intentional about ones you are already doing.
Worry less about whether your child will get into the “best” school. There is a lot of pressure to do more that comes with that worry. That is a worry that leads parents to push their children to, for example, do activities they might not be interested in or take on leadership roles for the sake of putting it on their application. Reducing the worry can reduce the impetus for taking on more activities and responsibility.
Reduce clutter in your life. Initially this takes time but once done it makes life easier and more efficient. We do not have to spend time finding our car keys if they are not under a pile of stuff. It can be all of the actual stuff we are surrounded by. However, it is not just the physical clutter around but it also comes in the form of social media, email, voicemail, and texts. It is the porous boundaries between work and home life. It is OK to limit responding to emails and voicemails. You can let people know that you might not respond to texts immediately. You can even purchase fewer things.
Think about whether any tasks can be outsourced or shared. If you have the money for it, you may be able to pay for some services that would save you time or stress. There are other creative ways to share responsibilities. For example, when my children were little there was another family we knew from daycare. One night a week we had dinner together. We switched houses each week and the hosting family provided dinner. It could be cooked or it could be takeout. It did not matter. Once every two weeks someone else made sure there was dinner in front of me.
Think about the activities that you do. Do you do them because you want to, you enjoy them, or they are good for you? If so, continue them. If they add more stress or you get very little out of them, even if there are positive aspects to them, think about whether they are worth continuing.

Not all of these ideas are for everyone. If one or two resonate with you, give them a try. And remember, in a world full of “more,” less really can be more.

For more ideas on managing family life, see our other blogs at www.aligningforgrowth.com and book Working with Parents in Child Psychotherapy.

Author biography: Johanna D. Sagarin and Elisa Bronfman are the authors of Working with Parents in Child Psychotherapy. Johanna Sagarin served as a vice-president in a community mental health agency for over 15 years and is now a professor of practice at Assumption University. Elisa Bronfman is a staff psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also the first author of AMBIANCE, a research tool used to assess parent-infant attachment. They both have thriving private practices.

References:

Cresswell, J. D. (2017) MIndfulness interventions, Annual Review of Psychology, 68, pp. 491-516

Klotz, L. (2021) Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Flatiron Books.

Zhang, D., Lee, E. KP., Mak, E. CW., Ho, CY., & Wong, S. YS. (2021) Mindfulness-based interventions: an overall review. British Medical Bulletin, 138, pp. 41–57