Brigid Schulte

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time is a well-researched treatise into the all too familiar phenomenon of being overwhelmed. Brigid Schulte even gives the sensation its own noun, the Overwhelm, and dives into why the average person today is stressed, constantly busy, and feels like the world is moving too fast to keep up. She divides the sections into four, beginning with Work, appropriately first, as the average American spends most of their time at work, even show more sacrificing vacation time to eke more time at the office. Love is a look at relationships - more on married/committed couples than dating, though I'd be interested in knowing how people find the time to do that anymore - and finally, the most overlooked, Play. What do we do when we have leisure time? The fourth is a brief overview, including how to fight back against the Overwhelm in all three areas.

I think everyone has, at least at times, felt exactly what Schulte describes, but this book was pleasantly surprising. I was expecting more of the fourth section, another to-do list of how to get on top of things and stop feeling so stressed. Instead, the bulk of the book is spent delineating exactly how and why we got to this point, from people using how busy they are as a social marker to the cult of the "ideal worker", who never leaves the office, is always on call, and sacrifices every bit of a social life to put in face-time at the office.

She also points out some interesting phenomenon that, while familiar, I always had a hard time putting my finger on, including what she calls "time confetti" - having a few minutes here and there, rather than an uninterrupted stretch of leisure time. Or "time contamination", when we may be relaxing, but our mind is already five steps ahead, mentally making another to-do list and fretting over the here and now.

More than just pointing it out how we got here, however, she shows why it needs to stop. The ideal worker is not so ideal - studies have repeatedly shown that workers need breaks, otherwise they're not productive and lose creativity. Partners in relationships report feeling happier when they share the household and childcare work equally. Not playing actually causes our frontal cortex to shrink, and our amygdala, the fear center, to enlarge. These things are vital, and yet we all find ourselves thinking, "As soon as I get this done, then I'll relax."

As a rule, this book focuses more on mothers and families. We constantly hear parents telling people, "You don't know busy until you've had kids," which is true to a certain extent, but I feel a vital part of the overwhelm phenomenon is that everyone is pushing more and more things onto their to-do list; if you don't have kids, you'll find something else to put on there. Maybe you'll work longer hours, or you'll commit yourself to an organization.

The book also looks closely at the gender politics involved in the feeling. Women repeatedly feel more stressed than men, do more household chores, and have more "time confetti" and "time contamination" than men (though the gap is closing). While the focus may be on the gender divide, Schulte points out that this feeling is creeping up on everybody.

Interspersed with personal anecdotes, Overwhelmed is a well-researched, informative, and eye-opening look at current time crunch culture and what it's doing to us and our futures. show less

Hey, it’s another book about how lack of equality is terrible for men and women both, through the framing of time! Women experience more “contaminated time,” where we’re trying to do more than one thing at once and worrying about the next thing; uncontaminated time is a hallmark of successful, creative work, as well as of relaxation. Women in the US are working more hours at paid jobs while also increasing the amount of time we spend with our children, and men are spending more time show more with kids too while not doing any more housework, which contributes to women’s misery and stress. Work demands an “ideal worker” who has someone else doing his household management, and penalizes women especially for being mothers. Child care is generally crappy and/or expensive if it’s even available. Interpersonal conflicts between spouses/partners are really the result of the structures, as so often is the case.

Schulte takes a detour into the argument that in the EEA, mothers relied heavily on alloparents, who were people performing parental roles who might be more or less closely related to the mother—we are adapted to take a village to raise children, and mothers therefore need not be tied to their young children 24/7. Rather than being wired to be “motherly,” women, like men, are wired to have sex, and then babies evolved to be really adorable so that we wouldn’t leave them out in the open when they yelled for five hours straight. Men, too, experience spikes in oxytocin and prolactin and decreases in testosterone when they nurture—sometimes even when they’re around a pregnant mate—and the question is, as with the good and evil angels on your shoulder, which one spends the most time doing the feeding/caretaking. If the mother specializes, which she need not do, then she learns skills the father doesn’t, and much else follows. Comparative advantage is not ingrained; it is created by life experiences, and it should not be, given its other consequences.

Denmark is doing it right, though, through a mix of social policy and ideology: more than 80 percent of Danish mothers are employed, most full-time, and they have about as much pure leisure time as fathers do, and more than mothers and fathers in any other country studied. Danish quality of life is much higher on average, though it isn’t perfect (there’s a lot of binge drinking) and Denmark is smaller and more ethnically homogenous, making adopting its lessons here harder.

The gender disparity is nothing new: Thorstein Veblen in 1899 wrote in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, “Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women.” In the West, you could become a nun if you wanted time to yourself. Time isn’t just money; it’s power. show less

I echo other readers sentiments in that I want to give this to every woman I know. Not just working mothers, though they might relate more than any other group. Brigid Schulte looks at parenting in modern society and presents the possibility of a third alternative, to 1. Mom stays at home, 2 both parents work but mom shoulders most of home/kid burden.

She gives examples of couples where both partners contribute equally. Whether its two flexible schedules, opposite work days or some other show more arrangement, she illustrates the possibility of true shared parenting. I love how she focused on middle class families rather than the usual look at the elite high earners. Also, fascinating look at leisure and play and how it has historically never been something women pursue.

I loved the idea of bringing play back into one's life and was intrigued by the group * Mice at Play* a playgroup for women, in NYC. I, like many women in the book, have watched my husband make time for really playing with our kids and felt envious. Reading this gave me permission to do the same. I know my kids are enjoying a more mellow mama and I feel like I am providing a better example for my daughters. Its not easy to strike a balance with employers and society who make little room for families that want to find balance, but it can be done. show less

As someone who cares deeply about the time and money pressures on young families, I give this book my highest praise. I wish I had written it. Overwhelmed is meticulously researched and engagingly written. One of the strongest impressions that remains with me is the story of Barbara Brannen, a successful Denver executive with two kids. She became so stressed-out from working all the time that her health suffered dramatically, and she lost the use of her left arm. After that wake-up call and show more some surgery, Brannen began adding back simple pleasures like reading, playing the piano and kayaking. She realized that, as Schulte writes, "she'd fallen into doing all the things that her kids wanted or that her husband liked or that others expected of her - playdates, socializing, going to movies, or just waiting for vacation or holidays to come. She did enjoy the time, 'but I wanted to feel my heart sing'." I'm so grateful to Schulte for bringing these topics to the forefront for discussion. American moms are expected to do so much, and yet it's not healthy to put joy on hold for decades - not for moms nor for the children who are learning from their examples. show less