In 2017, researchers at Columbia Business School published a finding that should give every overworked professional pause. Their studies, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, showed that busyness has replaced leisure as a status symbol in American culture. People perceived busy, overworked individuals as higher status than those with free time, associating packed schedules with scarcity, competence, and demand. In other words, society has built a culture that treats the absence of rest as proof of worth.
That finding might land differently for someone who's lived it. Picture a twenty-something working a warehouse job in Melbourne, shifting TVs, feeling like years of psychology studies had been a waste, and filling every waking hour with something. Reading, planning, applying for jobs, working extra shifts. Anything to avoid sitting still with a version of himself he didn't want to face: the guy who felt lost, anxious, and completely unsure of what he was doing with his life. It took years and a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy before the pattern became clear. It wasn't ambition. It was running. And psychology has a lot to say about why so many people do exactly the same thing.
The research confirms it: people don't stay busy because they're driven. They stay busy because stopping feels dangerous.
What "experiential avoidance" actually looks like
In clinical psychology, there's a concept called experiential avoidance, developed extensively by psychologist Steven Hayes as part of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It refers to the attempt to alter or escape uncomfortable internal experiences, things like difficult emotions, painful memories, or unwanted thoughts, even when doing so creates long-term harm.
The key insight is that experiential avoidance doesn't always look like what you'd expect. It's not just substance use or scrolling social media for hours. It can look like productivity. It can look like ambition. It can look like someone who never stops moving and gets praised for it constantly. As Hayes and his colleagues have noted, when a person's behaviour is driven primarily by avoiding internal discomfort rather than by their actual values, the avoidance itself becomes the problem. The busyness isn't serving a purpose. It's serving as a shield.
And here's the part that hits close to home for a lot of high achievers: the more competent you are, the better your avoidance strategy works. You get results. You get validation. Everyone tells you how impressive your work ethic is. Meanwhile, the thing you're avoiding stays exactly where you left it, untouched and growing.
We'd literally rather shock ourselves than sit with our thoughts
In 2014, a research team led by Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia published a now-famous set of studies in the journal Science. Across 11 experiments, they found that most participants did not enjoy spending even 6 to 15 minutes alone in a room with nothing to do but think. They found the experience so unpleasant that many chose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit in silence with their own thoughts.
Read that again. People would rather cause themselves physical pain than be alone with what's happening inside their own heads. That's not a quirky finding. That's a window into why so many people pack their lives with activity, noise, and obligations. Stillness isn't boring. Stillness is threatening, because stillness is where the things being avoided start to surface.
The defences underneath the doing
Psychoanalyst Kristen Beesley, writing in Psychology Today, has described chronic busyness as a defence mechanism. She identifies suppression, denial, and omnipotence as the psychological forces driving it. The constant movement and over-commitment actually protect the person from becoming aware of their emotions. Busyness, she argues, functions as a way to distract from uncomfortable, unpleasant, and painful feelings that would otherwise demand attention. This is important because it reframes something typically admired. People look at someone who never stops and think, "What drive. What discipline." But Beesley's clinical observation suggests the opposite might be true: for many chronically busy people, the busyness is not a sign of strength. It's a sign that something underneath hasn't been addressed. And if you've ever noticed yourself reaching for a task the moment an uncomfortable feeling surfaces, if you've ever opened your laptop not because you needed to work but because you needed to not feel something, you already know what this looks like from the inside. The instinct isn't to sit down and process it. The instinct is to find another project, make another list, solve another problem. Any problem except the one that lives inside you. This pattern shows up constantly — in countless people and across all walks of life.
What "sitting with yourself" actually requires
In Buddhism, there's a practice called "resting in awareness." It sounds peaceful when you read it on a meditation app. In reality, it's one of the hardest things a person can do. Because resting in awareness means letting whatever is there come forward, without fixing it, numbing it, or distracting yourself from it. It means meeting the version of yourself you've been outrunning.
Modern psychology aligns with this more than most people realize. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the framework Hayes developed, doesn't aim to eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings. It aims to change a person's relationship with them.
