Is time scarcity hurting your sleep too?
Photo by Tyler Casey from Unsplash
I just wrapped another round of sleep sessions with a group of awesome, ambitious and tired women.
One of the biggest challenges that stood out for these women around sleep was - time scarcity - the awareness that time is one of the “scarce” human resources—one that can't be restored, unlike money.
It's the anxiety behind the constant, low-level sense of dread that we'll never finish all our tasks. And that there is never ever enough time to do what we want to.
“Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources (time) feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.”
Exhausting, right?
When I’m in time scarcity mode it’s a feeling of never actually sinking into anything deeply: my body, my feet on the floor, my breath, the meal I’m preparing - because a piece of me is chewing on not the not enough-ness of time. Or is a least thinking about what has to happen next.
It’s basic overwhelm and it steals any sense of precious presence, where the juiciness of existence is.
Of course, none of it is our fault and we all experience it.
We all want a quick fix for sleep problems but we need to also explore how this feeling of lack shows up in our lives - how it lives in our bodies, shapes our perspective, and guide our choices – and SLEEP. When we really dig into this, we can change our sleep in more sustainable ways.
Some time-scarce thoughts around sleep:
I don’t have enough time for myself during the day so I procrastinate sleep to relax and do other enjoyable things.
I go to bed worrying I’m not going to get enough sleep.
I wake up feeling like I didn’t get enough sleep.
And then there is the overarching effect of constantly feeling the scarcity of time in general, which can hijack our nervous system and turn our sleep system upside down so that we feel exhausted during the day and buzzy at night. This is one I hear from women most often.
There is no breezy fix to time scarcity but, there are practices we can craft and hone to change how we think about it and time.
Here are some practices to alleviate time scarcity:
Reframing core thinking around timing: Measure the quality of how you feel while you are doing something, instead of what you accomplish during your time. This helps us shift how we think about time – not as a thing to be measured in minutes but in feeling and quality. This helps us be more intentional about how we spend time and be more present through our senses while we are in time. It's a kind of magic and it works.
Spend spare time focusing on flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow (along with heaps of research) shows that deep focus or concentration requires the honing of skills and produces a sense of control and satisfaction which gives us a recharge and changes the perception of time. This is different than what we get from watching TV, scrolling or doing something passive (although, that can be important too sometimes). Flow does not have to be something hard – it can be puzzling, knitting, sketching… Whatever it is, it changes our brains, our energy, focus, and our relationship with time – for the better.
Help others (and have fun). I can be a bit of a time hoarder when I feel a time squeeze. I’m not alone on this one. But research shows that spending time with others (sharing our time) is actually an antidote to time scarcity. We experience an abundance of time when we feel like we’ve done valuable things with our time already. It makes time more elastic. Can you pinpoint an experience when this has happened to you?
Approaching time with an enough-ness mindset. I am enough. I’ve done enough. It’s good enough. I’ve slept enough. There is only so much you can do. This mindset shift is especially good for alleviating perfectionism.
As I continue to work with more midlife women who are saddled with "too much"…. this topic is a hot one. We want to be looking at this piece as we explore ways to think about being sustainably resourced, moving forward.
If you know anyone who feels the time squeeze and might enjoy this read – please share!
If you have any time-expanding favourites or tinker with any of these ideas, let me know! I’m right there beside you, experimenting away.
