Drop the Load

Drop the Load

Are you doing too much?

The Practice:
Drop the load.

Why?

You may have seen the old Mickey Mouse movie in which he is working on a conveyor belt in a factory. More and more widgets come at him that he must handle, and he gets increasingly frazzled as he struggles to keep up.

Do you ever feel the same way? Think about all the dishes, emails, meetings, reports, drives, calls returned, laundry folded, children tucked into bed, friends comforted, errands run, etc., etc. Most of a person’s tasks, even all of them, could be individually rewarding and done for a good purpose, but taken as a whole they’re often too much. It’s certainly gotten this way for me.

Doing crowds out being, the urgent crowds out the important, and you go to bed after working hard all day feeling frustrated and maybe self-critical that you didn’t get more done. Meanwhile, the stress chemistry of your body has gotten jacked up since hurrying, multi-tasking, and feeling pressured trigger essentially the same hormonal and neural mechanisms that helped our ancestors run away from charging lions. At the heart of it all, there’s an unfreedom: you can feel chained to obligatory tasks.

What to do?

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How?

Take on Fewer Tasks
Of course, it’s good to make an effort, to hold up your end of the log. You honor your previous commitments. And sometimes new things come your way – some wonderful, some not – that do require a lot of work, like having children, finishing college, starting a business, or getting through an unexpected and serious illness.

But when you can – and this has become very important for me lately – be careful about adding new, discretionary items into the commitment’s hopper. Give yourself time to think. Be really really clear about all the little things that will come with this additional obligation, including new things you’ll have to think about or take time doing. Are the rewards of the new commitment really worth these costs?

Don’t be hypnotized by the rewards of the new thing. Wisdom is choosing greater happiness over a lesser one. Sometimes you have to give up the lesser rewards of the new thing for the greater rewards of allowing some new space to clear in your life.

Put a Fence around Doing
As a young man, I worked briefly in a factory loading cases of soft drinks onto pallets for trucks. It was hard physical labor, but at the end of the shift when we clocked out it was definitively over – what a relief. Similarly, set a time each day when you are truly done: no more emails, no more housework, no more projects. You made an effort today, you did what you could, and now you’re clocked out.

A related way to approach this is in terms of the saying, “first put the big rocks in your bucket.” In other words, make time commitments to what you value more that will push what you value less to the margins. If you value exercise, commit to a class at the gym or reschedule dinner to give you time for a run when you get home from work. If you value meditation or prayer in the morning, get to bed half an hour sooner so you can get up half an hour earlier to do your practice. Imagine looking back on your life: will you care that you got all those To Do’s done or care that you did the things that mattered most to you?

Shift Your Relationship to Tasks
Getting stuff done sometimes seems like the secular religion of the developed world, especially in America, where we routinely make sacrifices at the altar of doingness. I’m this way myself: my main compulsion/addiction is crossing off items on my To-Do list. Instead, try to see task-doing in a freer and more disenchanted way.

Watch your mind and its sense of “must” when it comes to tasks. Keep returning to the feeling that you are choosing to do the task, not driven to it. Remind yourself – when it’s true – that you actually don’t have to do a particular task. Try to calm down any sense of drivenness or urgency. Slow down a little. Try to do tasks from the “green zone” in which you experience that your fundamental needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection are already basically being met.

See the ways that your attention narrows down on the next thing to do and the one after that. Try to stay aware of the big picture, that things as a whole are fine, that this particular task in front of you is just a tiny tile in a huge mosaic. It’s not worth getting tense or intense about.

When you do finish a task, take a moment to register it. Let an appropriate sense of completion and satisfaction land before rushing on to the next thing. Keep in mind the ways that a mundane task is linked to larger things. Changing a diaper is linked to loving and protecting a child; driving to work is linked to providing for oneself and others.

Recognize That Tasks Are “Empty”
And, if it’s meaningful to you, you can try something I’ve been exploring lately. Be aware of the experience of doing a task – the sights and sounds and emotions while washing dishes say – and then notice how the experience is made up of many parts that constantly change and blend into each other. While the plate in your hand is substantial – you can hold onto it – your experience of the plate is not: the sensations and images of the plate are insubstantial; you can’t hold onto them. Your experience of the plate – and everything else, too – is “empty” of independent substantiality.

When you look at task-doing this way – not so much as things happening “out there” but as experiences happening “in here” – and you can see the multi-part, fleeting, insubstantial, and “empty” nature of these experiences, something shifts. You feel freer inside, less bound to tasks, and more relaxed and open. When seen as empty – not meaningless and not nonexistent, but insubstantial and ephemeral – the anticipated pleasures of getting stuff done aren’t as compelling and the anticipated pains of not doing aren’t as worrisome. You still get a lot done, but in a more peaceful way.

Know Someone Who Could Benefit from Doing Less?

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Dr. Ramani Durvasula is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and expert on the impact of toxic narcissism. She is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.

The focus of Dr. Ramani’s clinical, academic, and consultative work is the etiology and impact of narcissism and high-conflict, entitled, antagonistic personality styles on human relationships, mental health, and societal expectations. She has spoken on these issues to clinicians, educators, and researchers around the world.

She is the author of Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist, and Don't You Know Who I Am? How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. Her work has been featured at SxSW, TEDx, and on a wide range of media platforms including Red Table Talk, the Today Show, Oxygen, Investigation Discovery, and Bravo, and she is a featured expert on the digital media mental health platform MedCircle. Dr. Durvasula’s research on personality disorders has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and she is a Consulting Editor of the scientific journal Behavioral Medicine.

Dr. Stephen Porges is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He is a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and has been president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences, which represents approximately twenty-thousand biobehavioral scientists. He’s led a number of other organizations and received a wide variety of professional awards.

In 1994 he proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that links the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system to social behavior and emphasizes the importance of physiological states in the expression of behavioral problems and psychiatric disorders. The theory is leading to innovative treatments based on insights into the mechanisms mediating symptoms observed in several behavioral, psychiatric, and physical disorders, and has had a major impact on the field of psychology.

Dr. Porges has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers across a wide array of disciplines. He’s also the author of several books including The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation.

Dr. Bruce Perry is the Principal of the Neurosequential Network, Senior Fellow of The ChildTrauma Academy, and a Professor (Adjunct) in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago and the School of Allied Health at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. From 1993 to 2001 he was the Thomas S. Trammell Research Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital.

He’s one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of trauma in childhood, and his work on the impact of abuse, neglect, and trauma on the developing brain has impacted clinical practice, programs, and policy across the world. His work has been instrumental in describing how traumatic events in childhood change the biology of the brain.

Dr. Perry's most recent book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, was released earlier this year. Dr. Perry is also the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children, and Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered. Additionally, he’s authored more than 300 journal articles and book chapters and has been the recipient of a variety of professional awards.

Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith is a child clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma and issues of race. She earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and then received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She performed postdoctoral work at the University of California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. She has combined her love of teaching and advocacy by serving as a professor and by directing mental health programs for children experiencing trauma, homelessness, or foster care.

Dr. Briscoe-Smith is also a senior fellow of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and is both a professor and the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Wright Institute. She provides consultation and training to nonprofits and schools on how to support trauma-informed practices and cultural accountability.

Sharon Salzberg is a world-renowned teacher and New York Times bestselling author. She is widely considered one of the most influential individuals in bringing mindfulness practices to the West, and co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts alongside Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Sharon has been a student of Dipa Ma, Anagarika Munindra, and Sayadaw U Pandita alongside other masters.

Sharon has authored 10 books, and is the host of the fantastic Metta Hour podcast. She was a contributing editor of Oprah’s O Magazine, had her work featured in Time and on NPR, and contributed to panels alongside the Dalai Lama.

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