How to Stop the Busy Work

If you've been following along from last week, you'll find this topic is the literal yang to last week's yin article.

Last week, I talked about when you can tell your feminine, yin energy is out of balance - when you're overconsuming content and stories and stagnating.

You're not creating anything new in your life.

The equal and opposite to having an "overgrowth" of feminine energy is the flip side of the coin - too much masculine energy!

How to Tell When Your Masculine Energy is Out of Whack

When your masculine, yang energy has grown out of balance, you can tell in a few ways - any of these sound familiar? You...

• are obsessed with your to-do list and feel a drive to "finish" things ASAP, even if that means finishing the latest season of your Netflix show or cleaning out your emails.
  

• feel guilty about taking a break and getting some much-needed downtime.
  

• "push through" fatigue, overwhelm, resentment, and / or anxiety by ignoring it and getting more "done."
  

• overbook your schedule and take on too many tasks to the point that there's nothing left for yourself.

If you answered "yes" to any of these, you have an "overgrowth" of masculine energy.

Balanced masculine energy looks like taking action and moving the needle towards your goals.

It means interacting with others in a high-quality way, with integrity and presence.

When you overdo it, your energy starts to get frenetic, frazzled, and fractured.

In our productivity-obsessed world, it can feel tough at times to slow down and let yourself stop "doing" all the time.

It can be difficult to simply "be" in the moment when you're running on overdrive.

Busy Work and Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)

For ambitious Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), this overstimulation can hit you harder, faster, and with reckless abandon because you take in so much information all the time.

HSPs take in more information, subtleties, and nuance than an average person from the same situation or set of info.

HSPs also tend to have very high standards for themselves because they can so easily see the ideal situation and pull patterns of experience to make it happen.

You high standards are a beautiful thing... that can easily go awry when you're being too tough on yourself and getting overstimulated with busywork.

How to Get Past the Busy Work Trap

You're stuck in a spiral of overdoing it, completing tasks that aren't getting you closer to your goals, and you're sick of it.

The way to break out of this hamster wheel is to end the cycle of activity for activity's sake and to focus on taking intentional actions.

Activity is NOT the same as intentional action.

Activity looks like answering emails and texts as soon as they come in, all day / every day.

Activity looks like sitting in front of your computer all day and not feeling like you've accomplished anything.

Intentional action means deciding on a step to take that moves you closer to your end goal and vision.

Intentional action means that you do smaller amounts of high-quality work that build over time, they don't just pile up like chores every day.

Intentional action means you REST and take time away, knowing that you've gotten done what you set out to do.

Ask yourself:

1. Is this task or to-do item something that comes up regularly, or is it a larger piece of a bigger goal?
   

2. What do I really need to do today in order to feel "complete" so I can leave work at work at the end of the day?
   

3. Who do I want to be today, and how would that person approach the day?

Awareness is the first step.

You CAN turn overgrown masculine energy into a powerhouse asset when you become aware of when it's out of sync with your feminine energy and take steps to balance them out.

What's one thing you can do today that's high-quality, moves you towards a bigger goal, and would help you feel "complete" and satisfied at the end of the day?

Big, warm vibes,

Steph