According to the science historian James Gleick, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, we are reaching ‘the biological, psychological and neurological limits of just how much we are capable of doing’. Gleick wrote that in 1999 in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, a book about the paradox of technology saving us time but also reducing it and intensifying our sense of haste – and that was years before the arrival of the iPhone, apps and social media.

If we were full-to-the-brim then, I’d dread to think what he thinks about our capacity now. But it is more than can be pinned on technological change alone; it’s become an ingrained state of Western culture where busyness and productivity are essential badges of honour – precious and important – while inactivity and inertia is a pitiable aspersion. How are you? Busy, we say, which is code for excellent and thriving. ‘Downtime’, a phrase that originally referred to the cessation of operations in engineering when tools had to be literally put down to be fixed or for next-phase planning, is now used disparagingly to describe fleeting, guilt-ridden moments of rest.

Consultants and lawyers schedule emails to be sent in the middle of the night to reassure bosses and clients that they are working. Articles list how long they will take to read in minutes so we can decide whether they will slot into our busy day. CEOs and influencers post about rising before dawn to cram yet more into their already heaving schedules. So-called ‘5-to-9 routines’ – completed before or after the regular 9-to-5 workday and an amalgamation of workouts, skincare regimes, cleaning and food preparation (trad wives getting up before dawn to make cereal from scratch) – became a thing online. Yet nothing is more tedious or exhausting than the ceaseless drive to make the most of every second we are given on this planet.

In one Time magazine article a productivity guru advised, ‘If I can save ten seconds on a process that happens ten times per day, that’s a minute and 40 seconds saved per day. Over the course of a year, that’s ten hours saved. If I can find ten similar opportunities, that’s 100 hours saved. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these opportunities in all our lives.’ Perhaps we could save the time spent reading this sort of ubiquitous ultra-productivity-focused advice and notch up a few weeks of blissful free time.

Our mental health would benefit from re-examining this blind devotion to speed and busyness. For a while scientists have been preoccupied with the psychological result of leaning into hustle culture. In 1985, American cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman coined the term ‘hurry-sickness’ which made links between behaviour patterns and heart disease. Hurry-sickness, as the name suggests, describes an intense sense of time urgency and can feed into disordered feelings of anxiety. A similar trait is sometimes called joyless striving, typified by being always on-the-go with multiple projects, pushing forwards in a continuous struggle to achieve, get more stuff and be seen. Our always-on culture and the breathless race to produce regular, never-ceasing content in order to maintain an audience has multiplied this ten-fold. It was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who said, ‘Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.’

As a species, we have a natural pace. Too often modern life has sped us up to the point of illness and we are preoccupied with numerical time over natural time. How often do you look at a clock to see if you feel tired or hungry rather than feel it in your body? In the film Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot, who plays the eponymous superhero, asks Chris Pine what a watch is. He explains it tells him when to eat, sleep, wake up and work. She looks incredulous.

‘You let this little thing tell you what to do?’

‘Yeah …’ he trails off.

A similarly anxiety-producing trait, lurking near to hurry-sickness and joyless striving, is perfectionism: those with it tend to disproportionately fear failure, getting things wrong, have impossibly high standards and are unduly self-critical. Perfectionism has been linked to depression, anxiety, insomnia, indigestion, chronic fatigue syndrome, burnout, anorexia, bulimia and OCD. According to research into child development from West Virginia University, 40 per cent of children and young people may now be perfectionists. It’s a shift that can be attributed to, in part, the comparison culture of social media, increasingly controlling parenting styles, and a rise in competitive individualism alongside an unstable job market, less affordable housing and opportunities. Yet, as we know deep down, absolute perfection is unattainable. It is a construct, an illusion of our own making, and searching unendingly for it negatively impacts self-esteem and confidence. Climbing down from perfectionism is certainly not easy and not something I will attempt to coach you through, but a couple of suggestions for this come up frequently:

• Deliberately lower your standards. See what happens when you put in 60 or 80 per cent effort – often results are near identical.
• Put a time limit on tasks. Finish something in 15 minutes instead of an hour and accept it being good enough, rather than perfect.
• Celebrate mistakes as an opportunity to learn. Elizabeth Day's How to Fail (a book and podcast) is great on the brilliance of failure, vulnerability and moments of weakness.

The repercussions of hurry sickness, joyless striving and perfectionism can be at times unwelcome and bizarre. As a society, we’ve become less able to do nothing. How would you feel standing outside and staring up at the sky? How long do you think you could manage it for? A series of studies by psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities put participants in a room alone for six to fifteen minutes with no distractions: no smartphone, writing instruments or reading materials. Regardless of age, education, income or amount of time they would usually spend on their phone, they all resoundingly hated it and struggled to concentrate on what they chose to think about, i.e. maintain focus on anything. Next, they were put in the same room with a device that could give them an electric shock that they had previously said they would pay to avoid. Many chose to zap themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. We’ve become addicted to stimulation. It may be a constantly repeated – and not a little irritating – maxim from therapy or wellness spheres, but we are human beings, not human doings. It’s possible that anxiety is one way by which your body is telling you to get a little better at just being. It was Winnie the Pooh who said, ‘Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.’

Another effect of all this human-doing is burnout, a psychological syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It’s not the same as anxiety, and anxiety is not always a symptom, but the two are closely linked. Burnout is coloured by physical and mental exhaustion, a massive depletion of energy, and feelings of being trapped or defeated. You might be subsumed by self-doubt and cynicism – and it’s significantly more than simply feeling stressed or overwhelmed. In 2024, Mental Health UK published a burnout report polling 2,000 working adults that found 91 per cent had experienced high or extreme stress in the past year and one in five needed to take time off work due to poor mental health as a result. We are, they concluded, becoming a ‘burnt-out nation’, struggling more and more to manage events unfolding around us.

How To Eat An Elephant: The life-changing power of managing anxiety, one bite at a time by India Sturgis (Thorsons, £16.99)