July Q&A: When Busyness Becomes Your Shield

July Q&A: When Busyness Becomes Your Shield

Driven Women & Perfectionism • July 27, 2025

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Allison’s Calendar Was Packed Before She’d Even Had Her Coffee

She was already mapping her day at 5:47 a.m. — the presentation for the 9 a.m., the one-on-one with her direct report she’d been rescheduling for two weeks, the school pickup she’d need to leave early for, the email chain that had grown to forty-seven replies while she’d slept. She lay there cataloguing it all with something that almost felt like relief.

The moment she picked up her phone, she didn’t have to feel anything else.

Allison, 38, a product director at a Bay Area tech company, had come to see me after a health scare — not a dramatic one, but the kind her doctor described as a “warning shot.” She’d had no idea she was running that depleted. She’d been too busy to notice.

In our first session, she said something I hear constantly from driven, ambitious women: “I don’t think I have time to feel things. I’m not sure I’d even know how anymore.”

She didn’t say it with sadness. She said it like a fact. Like something she’d made peace with years ago, when the pace of her life had first outrun her emotional processing speed — and she’d decided, unconsciously, that maybe this was just who she was.

It isn’t. And it wasn’t. But the strategy had become so automatic, so thoroughly woven into her identity, that she’d stopped recognizing it as a choice.

That’s the particular sophistication of busyness as a shield. It doesn’t look like avoidance. It looks like competence. It looks like dedication. It looks like exactly what our culture rewards with promotions and admiration and the approving nod that says: “She’s got it all together.”

The questions you submitted for this month’s Q&A all circled the same territory. Why do I “power down” without warning and leave my kids asking if I’m okay? Why does my packed calendar feel safer than an open afternoon? Why does the guilt that floods in the moment I try to rest feel so much worse than the exhaustion? These aren’t questions about time management. They’re questions about survival strategies — strategies that made profound sense once, and that your nervous system hasn’t yet received permission to retire.

That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

What Is Busyness as Avoidance?

Busyness-as-avoidance is different from being genuinely productive, genuinely engaged with meaningful work, or genuinely stretched during a demanding season of life. That distinction matters.

Healthy busyness has an internal quality of choice. You know why you’re doing what you’re doing. You can stop. Rest doesn’t feel threatening. You can sit with a quiet Saturday afternoon without a low-level current of dread running underneath the stillness.

Busyness as avoidance has a compulsive, driven quality. The packed schedule isn’t chosen so much as it’s required. Required by a nervous system that has learned — through years of early relational experience — that feelings are dangerous, that vulnerability equals risk, and that constant forward motion equals safety.

In my work with clients, I see this pattern emerge most clearly in women with relational trauma backgrounds — women whose early caregiving relationships were marked by emotional unpredictability, neglect, criticism, or the kind of conditional love that communicated: your worth is earned through what you do, not who you are.

When a child grows up in that environment, stillness isn’t safe. Stillness is when the atmosphere shifts. Stillness is when the criticism comes. Stillness is when you notice how alone you really feel in the house that’s supposed to be your home. So the child learns to move. To achieve. To be helpful, competent, excellent. And the adult she becomes carries that lesson in her body, long after the original danger has passed.

That’s childhood emotional neglect‘s particular legacy: not dramatic trauma, but a quiet, persistent teaching that your emotional world is a problem to be managed, not a life to be lived.

What the Research Actually Says

The clinical and research community has been paying close attention to this phenomenon for decades — and the findings are both validating and sobering.

Brené Brown, PhD, research professor at the University of Houston and author of Daring Greatly, has studied the psychology of vulnerability and numbing behavior extensively. She’s been direct about what she sees: “Crazy-busy is a great armor,” she writes. “It’s a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us.” Brown identifies busyness as one of the most universal numbing strategies — a way of managing the unbearable discomfort of vulnerability by simply never stopping long enough to feel it.

Bryan E. Robinson, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and one of the world’s leading researchers on workaholism, has spent decades studying what he calls “work addiction” — a compulsive relationship with productivity that operates the same way any other addiction does. Robinson developed the Work Addiction Risk Test (WART), a clinical instrument used globally to identify and measure work addiction patterns. In his landmark book Chained to the Desk, Robinson identifies the hallmarks of work addiction that mirror what my clients describe almost word for word: an inability to relax, brownout periods (a kind of functional dissociation while working), perfectionism as a shield against self-inadequacy, and the use of work to manage underlying anxiety and shame.

Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma researcher and author of When the Body Says No, takes this further. Maté’s research demonstrates that the chronic suppression of emotional experience — keeping feelings at bay through constant occupation, overwork, or hyperproductivity — doesn’t make those feelings disappear. It drives them underground into the body, where they show up as chronic illness, immune dysregulation, and systemic depletion. “Avoiding the experience of emotion,” Maté writes, “in fact exposes people to greater and longer-lasting physiological stress.” The body, in other words, always keeps the ledger. It collects everything the busy mind refuses to process.

What all three of these researchers converge on is the same fundamental truth: busyness as avoidance isn’t a quirk or a personality trait. It’s a patterned response to emotional threat — one that carries real costs to your health, your relationships, and your capacity for genuine connection.

How Busyness as a Shield Shows Up in Driven Women

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is that busyness-as-avoidance rarely looks the way people expect it to. It doesn’t look like chaos or dysfunction. It looks like excellence.

It looks like the woman who gets more done before 8 a.m. than most people accomplish in a day — and who can’t explain the low hum of dread when she finally sits down. It looks like the partner who is endlessly thoughtful about everyone else’s needs and strangely opaque about her own. It looks like the woman who cries in the car on the way to work and is perfectly composed the moment she walks in the door. The efficiency of the shield is part of what makes it so hard to see.

Here’s what it looked like for Michelle, 44, a physician I worked with in therapy. Michelle had back-to-back patient appointments from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., a standing 6:30 call with her research collaborators, and evenings spent catching up on charts. She told herself she loved medicine — and she did. But she also recognized, slowly, that she’d structured her life so that there was genuinely not a single moment between waking and sleep in which she was alone with her own thoughts.

“I think I’m afraid of what I’d find,” she said one afternoon, about four months into our work together. “If I actually stopped, I think I’d realize how sad I am. And I don’t know what to do with that.”

That sentence stopped us both. Because it was so honest, and so accurate, and so perfectly articulated the logic of the shield: it works. It keeps the sadness at a functional distance. The problem isn’t that it fails. The problem is what it costs to maintain it — and what it prevents.

Other common ways this pattern shows up:

• The “power down” moment. You’re moving at full speed, managing everything, and then — without warning — you hit a wall. The lights go out. You can’t process one more thing. What’s actually happening is that your nervous system, finally overwhelmed by sustained suppression, has moved from sympathetic hyperactivation into a shutdown state. It’s not weakness. It’s a physiological response to a system that’s been running on emergency power for too long.
• Rest feels dangerous, not restorative. When you finally sit down, you don’t feel relief. You feel agitated. Guilty. Like you’re wasting time, falling behind, missing something. The stillness lets in the feelings the busyness was holding at bay — and your nervous system reads that as threat, not restoration.
• You’re present everywhere except inside yourself. You can be fully attentive to your team, your children, your partner — and completely inaccessible to your own inner experience. You’ve outsourced your awareness entirely to the external world. There’s nothing left for the internal one.
• Emotions arrive on a delay — or not at all. You don’t feel grief at a funeral; you feel it six weeks later in the grocery store. You don’t feel the weight of a difficult week until your body finally stops on a Saturday morning. The feelings are there. They’re just queued behind the schedule.

Recognizing these patterns in yourself isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a doorway. If any of this resonates, I’d invite you to take the relational patterns quiz — it can help you identify the specific core wounds beneath the busyness.

When the Body Gets Involved

The body doesn’t lie. It doesn’t have the cognitive sophistication to rationalize the way the mind does. While the mind is perfectly capable of constructing an elaborate and convincing story about why the pace is necessary, the body simply responds to what’s actually happening.

And what’s actually happening, when busyness functions as chronic emotional avoidance, is that the nervous system is running in sustained sympathetic activation — what we call “fight-or-flight” — without adequate recovery. The body is mobilized for threat. It stays mobilized. And eventually, the costs of that chronic mobilization become impossible to ignore.

What chronic nervous system dysregulation looks like in the body, for driven women using busyness as avoidance:

• Chronic tension in the neck, shoulders, and jaw — the body holding the weight of what the mind won’t process
• Sleep that doesn’t restore, or falling asleep only to wake at 3 a.m. with a racing mind
• Digestive issues that medical tests can’t fully explain — the gut, which houses its own neural network, responding to emotional suppression
• Immune vulnerability: frequent minor illnesses, slow healing, the body’s defenses eroded by chronic stress load
• Exhaustion that caffeine masks but doesn’t fix — a depletion that goes bone-deep, underneath the layers of the packed calendar

Gabor Maté, MD, spent decades documenting exactly this in clinical settings. His research points to a consistent pattern: women who suppress emotional experience in favor of constant productivity and caretaking face measurably higher rates of autoimmune conditions, chronic illness, and systemic depletion. The body absorbs what the mind refuses to acknowledge. It doesn’t stop keeping the ledger just because the calendar is full.

This isn’t about catastrophizing or diagnosing. It’s about recognizing that if your body is sending persistent signals — signals you’ve been overriding with another coffee, another deadline, another item on the list — those signals are worth paying attention to. They’re not weakness. They’re information. They’re your body saying: something needs to change at a level deeper than your schedule.

If you’re working with a therapist, this might be a moment to explore somatic approaches — body-based modalities like EMDR therapy or somatic experiencing, which work directly with the nervous system rather than asking the talking mind to solve a problem that lives below it.

The Both/And Reframe

Here’s where I want to offer something that I think is genuinely more useful than “busyness is bad and you need to slow down.”

The truth is more complicated than that — and more compassionate.

Your busyness worked. It isn’t arbitrary that you developed this strategy. It emerged because at some point in your life — probably quite early, probably in the context of relationships where emotional experience felt risky or unwelcome — constant motion was a genuinely adaptive response. It kept you functioning. It earned you approval. It gave you a sense of agency in an environment where you may have had very little. It helped you survive.

The Both/And here is this: Your busyness was a brilliant survival strategy and it’s now costing you things you can’t afford to lose.

Both things are true simultaneously. You don’t have to disavow the strategy or pathologize the part of you that built it. That part deserves compassion — the same compassion you’d extend to a child who learned to keep moving because stopping felt dangerous.

But you also get to recognize that you’re not that child anymore. You have resources now that she didn’t. You have the capacity to sit with discomfort in ways that once would have been overwhelming. You have, or can build, relationships safe enough to be vulnerable inside. The nervous system strategy that once kept you safe can be updated — not because it was wrong, but because you’ve outgrown the conditions that required it.

This is the pivot point in the work I do with clients like Megan, 41, a lawyer who came to me in her third year of partnership at a large firm. She’d built an extraordinary career. She’d done it by never stopping. She came to me not because the strategy was failing her professionally but because it was costing her everything that wasn’t work: her marriage, her friendships, her relationship with her own body, her capacity to be genuinely present with her children without feeling like she was wasting time.

“I thought I was supposed to be grateful,” she said. “I have everything I worked for. Why does it feel so hollow?”

That hollowness is the body’s way of naming what the strategy costs. Not because ambition is wrong, not because achievement is pathological, but because a life lived entirely in the doing — without access to the feeling, the being, the connecting — isn’t actually a full life. It’s a very impressive performance of one.

The work isn’t to abandon ambition. It’s to build enough internal safety that your ambition can finally be rooted in desire rather than fear. That’s the difference between driven and running. Both move fast. Only one of them knows where it actually wants to go.

If this resonates, executive coaching can be a powerful space to explore exactly this shift — how to build the internal foundation that makes external success feel like it actually belongs to you.

The Hidden Cost of Running on Full

There are specific, concrete things that chronic busyness-as-avoidance takes from you. Not in some abstract, philosophical sense — but in the texture of daily life, in your relationships, in your capacity for the things that actually matter to you.

It takes your relationships. Genuine intimacy requires presence — the willingness to be fully here, without agenda, without the mental list running in the background. When the nervous system is always oriented toward the next thing, the next task, the next achievement, it can’t drop into the kind of undefended presence that connection requires. You can be in the room without being actually there. And the people who love you feel that absence, even when they can’t name it.

It takes your body. As we’ve already established, chronic emotional suppression has measurable physiological costs. But there’s also a simpler version of this: you stop tasting your food. You stop feeling the sun on your face. You stop registering your own tiredness until you crash. You’re so focused on the doing that you lose the experiencing — and the body becomes a vehicle for production rather than a home.

It takes your sense of self. When you spend years orienting your life around achieving, producing, and managing, you can gradually lose access to the question: what do I actually want? Not what do I need to accomplish, not what do others expect of me — but what do I, personally, deeply want from this life? Many women I work with discover, when they first slow down, that they genuinely don’t know the answer. The busyness has been so thorough that it’s crowded out the self who might have an opinion.

It takes your capacity for healing. This is perhaps the most important cost of all. The emotional processing that relational trauma recovery requires cannot happen on the run. The nervous system needs downregulated states — moments of genuine rest, genuine safety, genuine stillness — in order to do the integration work that makes lasting change possible. If you’re always at speed, you’re keeping the healing at a permanent arm’s length. You’re managing the wound rather than mending it.

Marion Woodman, the Jungian analyst and writer whose work has profoundly shaped how I understand driven women’s psychology, described this dynamic with precision: “In devoting herself to the ideals which she has learned with the efficiency she has mastered, she flies in her frenzied tiny perfection around the very core of her downfall… she is exhausted.” The exhaustion isn’t incidental. It’s the result of a system running on willpower rather than genuine self-connection — a system that’s been running too long.

The Systemic Lens

We can’t talk about women and busyness as avoidance without being honest about the context these patterns live inside.

Busyness isn’t just an individual psychological strategy. It’s also a cultural mandate — and that mandate lands with particular force on women, and with even more force on women of color, working-class women, and women who’ve had to fight for every inch of their professional ground.

We live in a culture that systematically conflates productivity with worth. That tells women from childhood that their value is relational — tied to what they do for others, how well they manage the household, how effectively they hold the emotional center of everyone else’s lives — and simultaneously demands that they perform at full professional capacity. The “second shift” that sociologist Arlie Hochschild documented in her landmark research isn’t a relic. It’s still happening. Women still disproportionately carry the invisible labor of households, families, and social networks, often on top of demanding professional lives. The packed calendar isn’t just a nervous system strategy. It’s also a structural reality.

When Brené Brown names busyness as a universal numbing strategy, she’s pointing to something real. But it’s worth adding: we’re not all carrying the same weight. The woman who’s been told her entire life that her value is conditional on her output — whether that conditioning came from her family of origin or her profession or both — isn’t just choosing to be busy. She’s responding to a relentless cultural message that the moment she stops producing, she stops mattering.

That message is a lie. But it’s a culturally sustained lie, which means dismantling it requires more than a mindset shift. It requires grief — for all the years spent running from the fear that resting meant losing — and it requires community. It requires other women who understand, who are doing the same work, who can witness you in the moments when the shield comes down.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes: “When women’s lives are in stasis, or filled with ennui, it is always time for the wildish woman to emerge.” The prescription isn’t to be less driven. It’s to be driven by something real — by desire, by genuine values, by a life that’s actually yours — rather than by the fear that stopping means falling apart.

The systemic reality is that you’ve been handed a double bind: be excellent enough to survive, but not so much that you appear threatening. Be busy enough to prove your value, but not so overtaxed that you complain. Healing this pattern in yourself is political work as much as psychological work. It’s a refusal to keep running on a system that was designed to extract labor from women without acknowledging the cost.

This is also why community matters in healing. The Fixing the Foundations program was designed with this in mind — not as a solitary self-improvement project, but as a collective space where the work can be witnessed and supported by women who understand it from the inside.

How to Begin Setting Down the Shield

I want to be careful here, because the framing matters enormously. The goal isn’t to “do less” — at least not in the prescriptive, productivity-adjacent way that advice often gets offered to driven women. That’s just swapping one set of performance standards for another.

The actual goal is to develop enough nervous system safety that rest stops feeling dangerous. That stillness becomes something your body can tolerate, and eventually, actually welcome. That’s a different project entirely — and it’s a slower one.

Here’s what that work actually looks like in practice:

Name what the busyness is doing for you. Before you try to change anything, get honest about the function the pace is serving. What feelings does it keep you from having to face? What would be waiting for you if you stopped? You don’t have to fix those feelings yet. Just naming them — in a journal, in therapy, with a trusted friend — is the first act of bringing them into a tolerable reality.

Build micro-moments of intentional stillness. Not hour-long meditation retreats. Five minutes of sitting without a phone, without a task, without an agenda. Notice what arises. It will probably be uncomfortable. That discomfort is information — not something to fix immediately, but something to simply observe. You’re building the capacity to stay present with internal experience without fleeing from it.

Track the “power down” moments as data. When you hit the wall — when the lights go out and you can’t process one more thing — resist the impulse to interpret this as failure. Ask instead: what was I avoiding? What feelings were building in the background while I kept moving? These crashes are your nervous system’s way of demanding the integration it couldn’t get on the run.

Build safety in relationships. Busyness-as-avoidance often coexists with relational isolation — not loneliness exactly, but a kind of functional aloneness in which you’re surrounded by people who don’t actually know you. Part of healing is building relationships that can hold the version of you that isn’t performing. That takes time and discernment. It’s worth it. Safe relationships are actually the most direct route to nervous system regulation — more direct, in fact, than any solo practice.

Work with a trauma-informed therapist. The nervous system patterns underlying busyness-as-avoidance were shaped in relational contexts — in early bonds where emotional experience was unsafe. They’re most effectively healed in relational contexts, too: in the therapeutic relationship where you can practice being known, being vulnerable, and discovering that neither kills you. Trauma-informed therapy — especially modalities that work directly with the nervous system — can shorten that timeline considerably.

Healing this pattern isn’t linear. It isn’t a project with a completion date. It’s more like learning a new language — the language of your own interior life, a language your early experiences didn’t teach you and the culture actively discouraged. You’ll be awkward at first. You’ll revert. You’ll have weeks where the calendar fills back up and the shield goes right back on, and you won’t notice until you’re already exhausted.

That’s not failure. That’s the learning curve of something genuinely new.

What I know, after fifteen thousand clinical hours with driven, ambitious women: the ones who do this work — who choose, even imperfectly and slowly, to turn toward their own experience rather than run from it — consistently find their way into a life that finally feels like it belongs to them. Not smaller. Not less ambitious. Just more real. More theirs. And worth so much more than the shield ever was.

You don’t have to earn your way to rest. You don’t have to justify stillness with productivity. You’re allowed to stop — not as a reward for working hard enough, but because you’re a human being and rest is your birthright. Healing is possible. The path isn’t about dismantling your drive. It’s about finding what’s underneath it. And underneath most busyness, in my experience, there’s a woman who is exhausted, and tender, and has been working so hard for so long — and who deserves, more than anything else, to finally come home to herself.

If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this resonated, there’s more where it came from — you can connect with me directly or explore working together one-on-one.

The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…

Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. This quiz reveals the childhood patterns keeping you running — and why enough is never enough.

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Further Reading on Relational Trauma and Recovery

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 2015.

Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.

Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, 1997.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer