Optimal Busyness: The Secret of Happy-Busy People

✅ Today's Tuesday • 📖 5 mins read

— By Dr. Sandip Roy.

Those who know the “sweet spot” of busyness are the happiest.

Pew Research found that 60% of Americans feel too busy to enjoy life. This feeling is even stronger among parents, with 74% of those with kids under 18 saying they are too busy to find joy (Van Kessel, 2024. How Americans feel about the satisfactions and stresses of modern life).

But the opposite, just being idle, doesn’t solve the problem. When we have nothing to do, we are marred by feelings of boredom, loneliness, overthinking, worry, and even hopelessness.

In contrast, when we’re busier, we can be happier.

But for busyness to make us happy, certain conditions must be met. Luckily, researchers have identified a “sweet spot” of busyness.

Read on to discover how busy people are winning at the happiness game.

Optimal Busyness: The Science of Happy-Busy People

• Being idle for long can sap joy. Most people fear being idle and crave activity.
• But true joy comes from finding meaningful work. Purpose is essential for staying busy.
• When a person feels engaged and productive, without rushing, they tend to be happier and excel in cognitive tasks.

A study published in Psychological Science found that students who chose to keep busy by walking farther to drop off a survey felt happier than those who remained idle. So, even seemingly trivial tasks can boost happiness when they keep us engaged.

Another study from PMC found greater busyness linked to better cognitive performance. Busier people had faster processing speeds, better memory, better reasoning, and more knowledge than less busy people.

And this study found that people who felt they had no time to waste but described themselves as “almost never” feeling rushed reported being 12-25% happier than those who often felt rushed. In fact, 53% of these unrushed people called themselves “very happy.”

So, the key seems to be “Optimal Busyness.”

This is a state where one feels productive, elated, and positively energized without feeling overwhelmed. This busy person is time-poor, with no time for things outside their work commitments.

The secret of happy-busy people could be that they do not dwell on an issue for a long time. They do not let one problem control a large part of their life. Instead, they move on and work on a new project.

Optimal busyness: An enjoyable flow of time where one feels productive, elated, and positively energized while being time-poor.

Are those who keep busy for the sake of being busy, happier?

People dread idleness, as they find boredom unpleasant and like to have varied experiences. So, they get busy to keep themselves happier.

But people need a reason to be busy. This need to justify busyness may stem from our evolutionary tendency to conserve energy between intense activities (Hsee & Yang, 2010).

Now, this reason to be busy is best served when we choose activities that bring us joy and purpose, and which are neither too easy nor too hard (to allow the flow state). This is the optimal busyness.

However, even this kind of busyness must have breaks. We all need time for both purposeful busyness and quiet moments to “stop and smell the roses.”

Ultimately, busy people are happiest when they engage in activities they love, striking a balance between being neither too easy nor too hard. And punctuate this with periods of rest and leisure.

“Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” — John Lennon

Are people who are always busy generally happy?

In modern times, being busy has become a bragging point and a powerful status symbol.

But people who always carry their work wherever they go, telling people how busy they are and have so little spare time, are usually not happy.

These people are often addicted to work (workaholics). Like any addiction, they struggle to stay away from their work.

They are unhappy and anxious when not working. They often neglect their family obligations and self-care. On vacation, they yearn to get back to work. Many of them don’t even take paid holidays.

This workaholism (a term coined by psychologist Wayne Oates in 1971 to describe “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly”) is unhealthy and dysfunctional for the individual as well as society.

These people seem to suffer from “excessive busyness,” which is a state of overwhelm and time-famine.

They race from year to year, nose deep in work, until they hit an existential crisis and are forced to question their past, think hard about their mortality, and the meaning of their life.

Coming out of the crisis, they realize that work is not everything in human life. They stop being incredibly busy thereafter and tend to treat work as a source of happiness along with sustenance. 

Final Words

Do not confuse keeping busy with being happy. Keeping busy to avoid boredom can leave you unfulfilled or stressed.

The key is to find meaningful work and balance it with rest and leisure. This helps you achieve short-term joy and long-term fulfillment.

Don’t postpone your happiness. Telling yourself, “I’ll be happy when this is over,” only leads to unhappiness.

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√ Also Read: How To Overcome Burnout Without Quitting Your Job

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