The Cost of Never Stopping: Where Did All the Time Go?

Some Days you just want to be able to Stop and Think

How many times have you heard someone say, “Where does the time go?” or “I can't believe it's August already”? We talk about time as though something has happened to it, as though the years are moving faster, the weeks have somehow become shorter, and there simply aren't as many hours in a day as there used to be. Of course, there are. We have exactly the same twenty-four hours that we had in 1986, 1996, or 2006, and yet for many of us those hours feel very different. Maybe what has changed isn't time at all. Maybe what has changed is how much of our time is now occupied.

There are numbers behind that feeling. Statistics Canada has been measuring how pressed Canadians feel for time since the early 1990s, and in 1992, about 15% of Canadians reported high levels of time pressure. By 2022, that had risen to 24.2% — almost one in four Canadians and the highest level recorded during those three decades. Something has clearly changed, but I think it would be too easy to explain it by saying everyone works harder or moves faster than they used to. Our lives have changed in ways that are much more subtle than that, and because many of those changes arrived one at a time, wrapped in convenience and usefulness, we may not have noticed what they were gradually replacing.

Think back thirty or forty years. There were natural spaces built into an ordinary day when there wasn't very much you could do. If you were waiting at the doctor's office, you waited. If you were driving somewhere, nobody could text you, email you, or send you a notification while you were on the way. If you left work at the end of the day, most people became considerably harder for work to reach. Those weren't scheduled wellness breaks; nobody called them self-care, and nobody thought they were doing something particularly good for themselves. They were simply small pieces of unoccupied time that existed because there wasn't always something available to fill them.

Then, little by little, we became more connected. Computers came home, email became normal, cellphones became commonplace, and eventually smartphones put communication, work, shopping, news, entertainment, and an almost endless supply of information into something small enough to carry everywhere we went. Most of those developments gave us something genuinely useful, and many saved us enormous amounts of time, but something interesting happened to much of the time we saved:

We didn't leave it empty. We found something else to put into it.

That may be one of the biggest differences between being busy today and being busy thirty or forty years ago. We haven't only filled the large pieces of our day; we have become remarkably good at filling the spaces between them. A few minutes waiting for an appointment can become a chance to check email, standing in line can become an opportunity to look at the news, and sitting down after supper can still include answering messages while watching television. None of these things seems particularly demanding on its own, which may be exactly why the change has been so difficult to see. One little piece at a time, the spaces between one thing and the next have been disappearing.

The Canadian numbers show something else happening over this same period that I think is worth paying attention to. In 1986, 47.9% of Canadians saw their friends regularly. By 2022, that number had fallen to 19.3%. Even among those who did see friends, the average amount of time spent together fell from five hours to 3.8 hours. At the same time, the proportion of Canadians worrying that they weren't spending enough time with family and friends rose from 33.7% in 1992 to 46.3% in 2022. Those numbers don't prove that technology caused us to become busier, and they certainly don't prove that life was automatically better forty years ago, but they do tell us that something significant has changed in the way we experience our time. We feel more pressed for it, we spend less of it with friends, and nearly half of us worry that we aren't giving enough of it to the people in our lives.

So when we say that time seems to be going faster, maybe what we are really noticing isn't the speed of time at all. Maybe we are noticing the disappearance of the spaces between things. When almost every available piece of the day can be filled with another task, another message, another piece of information or another demand for our attention, the days can begin to feel like one continuous stream rather than a series of things with spaces between them.

And that brings us to a different question than “Where does the time go?”

What does it cost us when we never really stop?

Being Still Is Not the Same as Stopping

When we talk about being busy, most of us still picture someone running from one thing to another with too much to do and not enough time to do it, but I think we need to broaden that picture because some of the busiest people I see aren't moving at all. They may be sitting on the sofa, lying in bed or riding in the passenger seat of a car while their minds are taking in information, responding, anticipating, deciding, and changing direction over and over again. We have become very good at resting our bodies without necessarily resting anything else, and that makes it much harder to recognize just how occupied we actually are.

What Has Happened to Boredom?

Children may show us this change more clearly than anyone. I certainly don't want to romanticize the 1980s and pretend children spent every waking hour climbing trees and using their imaginations, because they didn't. We watched television, played games and complained endlessly that there was nothing to do, but that last part is important because sometimes there really was nothing to do. The television show ended, the game was over, you went for a drive with your parents and looked out the window, you waited for supper, and you sat through the boring parts of an ordinary day because there wasn't always something available to rescue you from them.

That has changed enormously. A child can now leave a full day of school and immediately have something else waiting to occupy their attention. A game, video, tablet, or phone can fill the ride home, the wait for supper, and the time before bed, and from the outside it can look as though that child has had several hours of downtime because they haven't been doing homework, chores or organized activities. But if their attention has been continually engaged, entertained, and redirected during those hours, how much of that time was actually unoccupied? How much of that time was spent physically and mentally resting?

This becomes even more interesting when we look at what researchers are learning about the kind of entertainment children consume. In one fascinating experiment, four-year-olds spent only nine minutes either watching a very fast, fantastical cartoon, watching a slower educational program, or drawing with crayons. Afterwards, the children who had watched the fast-paced program had more difficulty with tasks involving working memory, self-control, and problem-solving.

Nine minutes.

That doesn't mean cartoons are bad, nor does it mean nine minutes of an exciting program damages a child, and I think we lose the usefulness of research like this when we turn it into another frightening rule for parents. What it does tell us is something far more interesting: sitting still does not necessarily mean a young brain isn't working very hard. A child watching rapidly changing images, anticipating rewards, and responding to constant sound and movement is having a very different mental experience from a child drawing, building something, throwing a ball for the dog, or staring out the car window complaining that the drive is taking forever. Both activities fill time, but they don't necessarily fill the brain in the same way.

Maybe that is why the Canadian screen-time numbers are worth noticing without becoming frightened by them. Among Canadian youth aged 12 to 17, fewer than three in ten are now staying within the recommended maximum of two hours of recreational screen time a day. Screens are part of our children's world; they're useful for many things, and they're not going away, so I don't think the answer is to declare war on them. The question I find much more interesting is whether there are still parts of a child's ordinary day when nothing is competing for their attention, because we may have become so efficient at eliminating boredom that we have also eliminated many of the spaces in which children once had no choice but to figure out what came next for themselves.

We Haven't Done Much Better as Adults

Of course, it would be very convenient to focus on the children and their phones, except that we adults have created our own version of exactly the same thing. We finish the workday, make supper, and finally sit down at eight o'clock saying, “I haven't stopped all day,” but our attention may continue travelling from the television to a message, to tomorrow's weather, to something we suddenly remember we need to do. Our feet are finally up, and physically, we may not be doing very much at all, but that doesn't necessarily mean the demands of the day have ended.

Even eating, which once created several natural stopping places throughout the day, is increasingly fitted around everything else. We eat at desks, in cars, and in front of screens, sometimes barely remembering the meal because our attention was somewhere else while we ate it. There is interesting research that we have heard for a long time now showing that distracted eating can even affect how much we eat later, which gives us another reason to think about the difference between actually experiencing a meal and merely getting food into ourselves while we continue doing something else.

There is another distinction here that I think is important, because not everything we watch or listen to asks the same thing of us. There can be a very different feeling after watching a beautiful documentary that leaves us curious about another country, learning how something works, or listening to something that makes us laugh, compared with spending an evening immersed in frightening news, violence, arguments, or a suspense program deliberately designed to keep us anticipating what happens next. I don't think we need to label one experience good and the other bad, and I certainly don't think we need another set of rules telling us what we're allowed to watch. I think we need to recognize that sitting in the same chair for the same two hours does not automatically make those two experiences the same kind of rest.

We have even found ways to fill many of the activities that once gave our minds some space while our bodies were moving. We finally get outside for a walk, and before our shoes are tied, we're looking for the earbuds because there is a podcast to catch up on, someone we can call while we're walking or something we wanted to listen to. Those can all be wonderful things, and I love learning too, but if we fill the walk, the drive, the meal, and the evening, we eventually have to wonder where the spaces went.

This is why I don't think we can measure how busy someone is simply by looking at how much they accomplish in a day anymore.

There is physical busyness when our bodies are moving and working;

There is mental busyness when information, decisions, and thoughts keep coming;

There is emotional busyness when what we are seeing, hearing, and dealing with continually asks us to react. Very often now, we can experience all three during the same day, and really, it is nothing unusual to experience all three at the same time.

So instead of asking whether we had enough time to sit down today, there may be a more useful question:

Was there actually a point in the day when nothing was asking anything of me?

Because if the answer, day after day, is no, then we are no longer talking only about having a busy life. We are talking about a body and mind that rarely get to stop responding, and eventually that has a cost.

Guess who is going to pay the price for all of this?

Our bodies are actually very good at dealing with stress. We were designed to respond when something needs our attention, when there is a problem to solve, a deadline to meet, or a situation that requires us to act. Heart rate can increase, blood pressure can rise, muscles prepare to move, and hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol help make energy available so that we can deal with what is happening. In the short term, this is an incredibly useful system. The problem isn't that we have a stress response. The problem begins when we keep asking the body to respond, over and over again, without enough opportunity to come down from it. The opposite of that is when the body is in the stress-Fight-or-Flight mode, and all we continue to do is sit or lie down.

Researchers have a name for some of the accumulated wear and tear that can develop when the body has to continually adapt: allostatic load. If we compare it to a car, imagine driving all day in heavy city traffic — accelerating, braking, idling, accelerating again and braking again, hour after hour. The car was built to do every one of those things, but every acceleration requires fuel, every stop uses the brakes, the engine continues producing heat while you sit in traffic, and all of those individual demands create wear across several systems. It isn't that accelerating or braking is bad; it is that continually responding to changing demands has a physical cost. The car gets to rest and cool down when you turn it off. When do you rest?

Our bodies are obviously much more complicated than cars, but this is what makes allostatic load so interesting. Researchers aren't looking at one bad stress hormone or one organ suddenly giving up because we had a difficult week. They are looking at what repeated adaptation can begin to look like across the cardiovascular, hormonal, metabolic, and immune systems over time. The body keeps making the adjustments we need in order to function, but making those adjustments isn't free.

And the demands that create those adjustments don't have to be frightening or catastrophic. Running late is a demand. Trying to remember several things while somebody is asking you a question is a demand. A deadline is a demand. None of those things is an emergency, and one difficult Tuesday isn't going to ruin our health, but when the body is repeatedly being asked to adjust, we begin to see the effects across multiple systems rather than in one isolated place. Blood pressure and heart rate are part of that picture; cortisol and other stress hormones are part of it; blood sugar and fats are involved, and inflammatory and immune activity can be affected as well.

This is where I think the conversation becomes particularly important; people are telling us about how they feel. They are exhausted. They aren't sleeping well. Their neck and shoulders hurt. Their digestion is unpredictable. They struggle with their weight. They feel as though their hormones are all over the place; they can't concentrate the way they used to, and many tell us they just don't seem to have the resilience they once had. Chronic busyness certainly isn't the explanation for every one of those things, but it is equally difficult to keep treating chronic stress as though it somehow exists separately from the rest of the body.

The body doesn't have a stress department, a hormone department, a heart department, a digestive department, and an immune department that never speak to one another. They are communicating all the time.

And that may be one of the biggest aha moments in this entire conversation. When we live as though stress is something happening only in our thoughts, we can miss the fact that the body has been participating in the conversation all along.

Our Body May Be Sitting, But It Can Still Be Working Hard

Our muscles give us a very good example because they are affected in both directions in our modern way of living. Stress prepares muscles for action, and most of us have experienced this without needing anyone to explain it. The shoulders creep upward, the jaw tightens, the neck becomes rigid, and sometimes we don't even realize how much tension we are holding until we suddenly notice how sore we are. Now add the other side of modern busyness: while our minds have become increasingly occupied, many of our bodies have become increasingly still.

We can spend hours sitting at a computer, sit again while driving home, and then recover from our exhausting day by sitting in front of another screen. So we can have this strange situation in which the body is not moving very much, yet certain muscles are holding tension for long periods while the regular muscular contractions and changes in circulation that come with movement are happening less often.

This connects directly with what we explored in our last Wellness Letter in Movement Matters. Movement isn't valuable only because it burns calories or counts as exercise. Moving our bodies changes blood flow, takes joints and muscles through different positions, and prevents us from holding exactly the same posture hour after hour. When stress-related muscle tension is layered on top of prolonged sitting and too little movement, it becomes much easier to understand why so many necks, shoulders, backs and hips are complaining.

There is another layer to this as well, because stress and inflammation aren't completely separate conversations. Chronic psychological stress can influence inflammatory signalling and immune regulation, while physical inactivity and metabolic health have their own relationships with chronic low-grade inflammation. That does not mean every aching shoulder is caused by inflammation or that every inflammatory problem is caused by stress, but it does mean that when we look at the whole person — sitting too long, moving too little, sleeping poorly and carrying ongoing stress — we shouldn't be surprised to discover that these things can interact rather than remaining neatly in their own boxes.

And I think this brings us back to one of the most important things we are beginning to see throughout this article:

A person can be exhausted from a day in which their body did too little while their mind was asked to do too much.

Those two things can exist at exactly the same time.

And Then There Is the Gut

Digestion gives us another very good example of how connected all of these systems really are. We tend to think that digestion begins when food reaches the stomach and then proceeds automatically while we get on with everything else, but the digestive tract is in constant communication with the brain, hormones, the immune system, and the enormous community of microorganisms living in the gut, . Stress can change appetite, affect how quickly or slowly things move through the digestive tract, and change how sensitive we are to what is happening there, which helps explain why one person under stress may lose their appetite completely while another can't stop eating, or why the stomach can suddenly feel tied in a knot before an important conversation has even begun.

Researchers are also looking closely at the relationship between psychological stress and the intestinal barrier, the carefully controlled boundary that helps determine what passes from the intestine into the body. You may have heard this discussed as “leaky gut”; in research, it is generally described as increased intestinal permeability. There are good biological reasons to investigate that connection, although the evidence isn't strong enough to say that everyday stress automatically creates a leaky gut in an otherwise healthy person. The effect stress can have on the acidity of the stomach has a big impact. We also know that the digestive system does not operate independently of what is happening throughout the rest of us, and when we continually talk about digestion as though food is the only thing that matters, we leave out an important part of the picture.

Think about how we actually ask our digestive systems to work now. We may rush through breakfast while getting ready, eat lunch while continuing to work or grab something in the car, then finally sit down to our largest meal after a day in which we have barely stopped. Sadly, most of those quick meals did not supply the body with the nutrient density it needed to do the repairs it needed to do. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing carbohydrates, protein, fiber, probiotics, supplements, and which foods we should or shouldn't be eating, because those things certainly have value. But there is another question sitting right beside them that we don't ask nearly as often:

What condition am I in when I ask my body to receive this food?

That question doesn't replace the importance of what's on the plate. It adds something we have been leaving out. If eating has become another activity we squeeze between two other activities, then even one of the most basic things we do to care for ourselves has become part of the busyness.

Tired All Day, Awake at Night

Then we reach sleep, and this is where the circle can become painfully obvious. Sleep difficulties have become common enough that sleep trackers, sleeping medications, insomnia, snoring, and CPAP machines are now part of ordinary conversation. These aren't all the same problem, and they certainly don't all have the same cause. Obstructive sleep apnea, for example, is a physical breathing disorder with several risk factors, including obesity, and shouldn't be confused with lying awake because the mind will not settle. But the fact that sleep has become such a large wellness conversation should make us curious about what is happening around it.

Look at the strange pattern many of us have created. We wake up tired and use caffeine and stimulation to get ourselves moving, ask our brains and bodies to respond to demands throughout the day, carry information and entertainment well into the evening, and then expect ourselves to switch everything off because the clock says it is bedtime. We can spend sixteen hours telling ourselves, Keep going, pay attention, answer this, remember that, get this finished, and then become frustrated when lying down doesn't immediately produce sleep.

When sleep doesn't come easily or isn't restorative, we begin the following morning already behind and ask the body to do another full day with less recovery. Poor sleep itself then becomes another physical stressor. Repeated inadequate sleep can affect concentration, mood and appetite and is associated with changes involving blood pressure, glucose regulation, immune and inflammatory activity and metabolic health. So what began as “I've been really busy lately” can become something much more circular: ongoing demands can interfere with good sleep, while inadequate sleep can leave us less equipped to handle the next day's demands.

Round and round we go, and because we still get up, make breakfast, go to work, look after people and accomplish what has to be accomplished, it can appear that everything is working.

Which brings us to something I think is even more important than the individual symptoms.

When Did Feeling This Way Become Normal?

Human beings have always had difficult periods. We become tired, overwhelmed, sore, worried, and irritable, and none of that automatically means something has gone terribly wrong. What concerns me more is how long we can live with those things before we stop recognizing them as information.

We say, “I'm just tired,” because we've been tired for years. We say, “My neck is always like that,” because we can't remember the last time it wasn't. Poor sleep becomes the way we sleep, digestive discomfort becomes something we work around, and difficulty concentrating becomes something we dismiss as age or having too much on our minds. One change at a time, we adjust our expectations of how we are supposed to feel until what would once have caught our attention has become an ordinary Tuesday.

And this is where that concept of allostatic load becomes much more meaningful to me, because the body is adjusting too. It keeps making changes that allow us to meet what we are asking of it, and it can be remarkably successful at doing that for a very long time. We can still get up. We can still work. We can still take care of the children, answer the emails, make supper, look after the house, and show up again tomorrow.

Are we thriving, or merely coping and not recognizing it?

I think that is one of the pieces we have missed in this entire conversation about being busy. We tend to imagine that if our lifestyle were really taking a toll on us, something dramatic would happen that would make it obvious. There would be a moment when the body announced, This is too much, and unfortunately it does to some people, but the cost of never stopping doesn't necessarily arrive that way. It can arrive as a hundred smaller changes that gradually become part of everyday life — the tension we carry, the sleep we no longer expect to be good, the digestion we work around, the exhaustion we push through, and the concentration we think we're simply losing with age.

And because each change happens a little at a time, we accommodate it. We buy a different pillow for the neck, find something to help us sleep, drink another coffee when we're exhausted and adjust our meals around the digestion that isn't behaving the way we'd like. Some of those things may be useful and necessary, but there is still a larger question worth asking:

Are we only managing each individual complaint, or are we also looking at the life in which all of these complaints are happening?

That is a very different question.

Because maybe the body isn't failing to keep up with us at all.

Maybe it has been keeping up remarkably well, and we haven't noticed how much we have been asking it to compensate for.

Putting the Spaces Back

After looking at all of this, it would be easy to turn the answer into another project. We could schedule an hour of relaxation every afternoon, download something that reminds us to breathe, create another morning routine and add several more things to the list of what a healthy person is supposed to do. But if we have spent thirty or forty years gradually filling the empty spaces in our days, I don't think the answer is to make wellness one more thing that has to fit into an already crowded schedule.

Most of us have jobs, families, homes, animals, responsibilities and people who depend on us, and none of those things disappear because we've decided we need less stress. So maybe we start somewhere much smaller.

We put some of the spaces back.

Not by finding more time, because there isn't any more time to find, but by noticing some of the minutes that already exist and deciding that they don't automatically have to be filled. Five minutes waiting for an appointment doesn't always have to belong to the phone. A drive doesn't always need another piece of information coming through the speakers. A meal doesn't have to share our attention with a screen, and a walk doesn't automatically need something playing in our ears.

The goal isn't to become less interested in the world. Curiosity, learning, conversation, entertainment, and technology add enormous value to our lives, and I certainly wouldn't want to give them up. The goal is to stop making every available minute responsible for giving us something.

An empty space doesn't have to accomplish anything extraordinary to have value. It doesn't have to lower cortisol by a particular percentage, turn us into calmer people or qualify as meditation. For those few minutes, we are doing something much more basic: we aren't adding another demand.

That sounds almost too small to matter until we remember how we got here in the first place.

We didn't lose all of the spaces in one enormous decision.

We filled them five minutes at a time.

Maybe that is how we begin putting some of them back.

What Do I Need Right Now?

There is an important distinction we need to make before we start putting those spaces back, because I don't want this article to become another rule telling us that every spare five minutes should now be spent doing nothing. In our last Wellness Letter, when we talked about how much less we are moving, we suggested using the few minutes while the kettle boils to do some simple movements at the kitchen counter. I still think that's a wonderful use of those minutes, particularly for someone who has been sitting at a desk for the last three hours.

But what if you haven't been sitting for the last three hours? What if you have spent them dealing with people, answering questions, driving through traffic, making decisions, and taking in more information than you can comfortably process? On that particular afternoon, standing at the window and watching the kettle boil may give you something you need far more than squeezing another accomplishment into those five minutes.

Neither choice is automatically healthier than the other.

The value is in knowing which one you need.

That may sound obvious, but I think it takes us into a much bigger conversation about the way we approach wellness now. We have become very good at learning what we are supposed to do. We know we're supposed to move our bodies, eat good food, drink enough water, get enough sleep, manage our stress, and make time for the people we love, and there is nothing wrong with any of that advice. The problem begins when caring for ourselves becomes another routine we perform on autopilot without stopping to ask what is actually missing.

At three o'clock, the routine doesn't always have to be: make the herbal tea, do the exercises while the kettle boils, check the messages, finish the list, and move on to the next thing. It can be three o'clock, and we notice I've barely moved today and my body needs to stretch. On another day, it might be that I’ve been moving all day and my head is full; I don’t need another thing coming at me for the next five minutes. The same person, standing beside the same kettle at the same time of day, can need two completely different things because we don’t arrive at every moment in the same condition.

That brings us to a question I think may be far more useful than asking, “What healthy thing am I supposed to do now?

What have I had too much of today — and what haven't I had enough of?

If we really stop and think about that question, it opens quite a door. Maybe we've had too much sitting and not enough movement, too much noise and not enough space, too much time alone and not enough connection, or too many people asking things of us and not enough time when nobody needs an answer. We don't need twenty possibilities or a questionnaire to figure this out. We need enough space to notice what our own day has actually contained and what seems to be missing from it.

And I think this is where our conversation about never stopping becomes bigger than taking breaks, because we are living in a time when we are receiving an extraordinary amount of information about how we should live. Every day, someone is telling us what we should eat, when we should eat it, how we should exercise, how we should sleep, what we should avoid, what we should add, and which routine is finally going to make us feel better. Much of that information may be excellent information, but it is very often presented as though "This is the answer", when the more important question may be whether it is an answer to anything that is actually happening in your life.

Someone tells us that getting up at five o'clock changed their life, so we consider getting up at five. Someone else tells us we need more exercise, another tells us we need more rest, and another explains why we should spend more time alone while somebody else is telling us that social connection is one of the most important things we can do for our health. The confusing part is that several of those people may be right. Their information can be sound, their experience can be genuine, and what they're recommending may have helped them tremendously.

But their life isn't ours, their body isn't ours, and their day isn't the one we just lived.

This doesn't mean we stop learning, stop listening to knowledgeable people or decide that whatever we feel like doing must automatically be right. Good information is incredibly valuable because it helps us understand our choices, but information should help us make decisions; it shouldn't replace our ability to make them. When we are continually occupied, continually consuming and continually being told what the next healthy thing is that we should be doing, it becomes very easy to follow without first asking whether what we're following has any relevance to what we actually need.

Maybe that is why the question, What have I had too much of today — and what haven't I had enough of? matters so much. It asks us to gather some information from ourselves before automatically reaching for information from somewhere else. Once we begin doing that, it also becomes much easier to say no to things that may be perfectly good but have no particular value for us right now.

We can listen to the podcast because we're genuinely interested in it rather than because silence feels strange. We can take the walk because our body needs movement rather than because our watch says we haven't reached our steps. We can sit outside for ten minutes because our day has been full of people and information, rather than turning those ten minutes into another opportunity to accomplish something.

And sometimes we can decide that the advice we're hearing doesn't have anything to do with us today.

That isn't rejecting good information.

It is learning how to use it.

Give Children Some of That Space Back Too

I think we can give some of this back to children as well without making screens the enemy or turning boredom into another parenting project. Children don't need every car ride entertained, every wait filled, or an activity produced the moment they announce that they're bored. Sometimes there can simply be nothing next, and that gives a child something that is becoming increasingly unusual: a period in which their attention isn't being directed for them.

They may complain about it. We certainly did. But when nobody immediately rushes in to solve the boredom, children have an opportunity to look around, find something, talk, invent, imagine, or notice something they hadn't noticed before. We don't have to entertain children every minute in order to give them a good childhood, and we don't have to turn every empty space into something educational or productive either. Sometimes the space itself can remain empty long enough for the child to decide what to do with it.

Maybe This Is Where We Begin

After everything we've explored in this article, I don't think the answer is another complicated plan for managing stress. If never stopping happened partly because we gradually became accustomed to filling almost every available piece of our lives, then maybe changing it begins by becoming conscious of when we're doing that and asking whether what we're adding has any value to us in that moment.

So I wouldn't start by trying to overhaul your day. I would start by noticing it.

Notice what has been asking for your attention.

Notice how long you've been sitting or how long you've been running.

Notice whether you've spent the day alone or haven't had five minutes to yourself.

Notice whether you're reaching for something because you actually want it or because you have become uncomfortable when nothing is happening.

And somewhere in there, ask yourself:

What have I had too much of today — and what haven't I had enough of?

The answer won't always be rest. Sometimes the answer will be movement, laughter, conversation, fresh air, food, stimulation, solitude or something interesting to think about. On another day, the answer may genuinely be five minutes in which absolutely nothing needs to happen.

The point isn't to find the perfect answer and turn that into another routine.

The point is that we asked ourselves that question constantly.

Because after spending years allowing work, technology, schedules, information, and other people's needs to occupy so much of our available space, becoming aware of what we actually need may be one of the most useful ways we can begin taking some of that space back.

Maybe time hasn't sped up after all.

Maybe we have simply become very good at filling it.

And if that's true, we don't necessarily need more hours in the day.

We may just need to become a little more deliberate about what deserves the hours we already have.