Don’t Worry, Be Busy: The Brain Benefits of Being Mentally Active

New Research Shows How an Active Mindset Can Improve Quality of Life

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If there’s one thing all Americans agree on these days is that we’re all too busy. We complain about our crowded schedules. We bemoan our commitments. We begrudge our long to-do lists.

Busyness, we all concur, is a regrettable trait.

But maybe we’re all wrong.

Busyness actually has actually drawn robust academic interest in recent years.

As Jonathan Gershuny of the Institute for Social & Economic Research began documenting as far back as 2005, busyness is a “badge of honor” in modern society. Using 50 years of time data gathered in the UK between 1961 through 2001, Gershuny found that “the growth in expressions of ‘feeling busy’ may be explained, not just by the growth of a new busy group, but also by the proposition that the assertion of ‘busyness’ now reflects an aspiration to high social status.”

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In other words, being busy is a sign of being important. By having places to go and people to meet, we give ourselves a certain stature that our actual lives might not otherwise confer upon us.

The only thing worse than being busy is being not busy. The shame!

But a new generation of scholars has gone even further. Being busy is actually good for you!

In the Synapse Project, Denise Park of the University of Dallas at Texas, Jennifer Lodi-Smith of Canisius, and four colleagues found that individuals that learned digital photography or quilting showed improvements in episodic memory. Another study, by Michelle Carlson at the Center for Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins and nine colleagues, showed that participants in an Experience Corps program who mentored elementary school students improved their memory and executive function.

But the biggest study to date, called “The Busier the Better: Greater Busyness Is Associated with Better Cognition,” Sara Festini of the University of Texas at Dallas, along with colleagues Ian McDonough and Denise Park, found that sustained engagement in mentally challenging activities results in “increased effortful engagement at work, home, and in leisure activities, which can have advantageous consequences on neural health and cognition.”

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Dr. Festini and her team identify at least four positive outcomes from busyness:

1. Busyness increases “the opportunity for new learning,” as a busy person is likely to be exposed to more information and more types of situations on a daily basis.

2. Busyness promotes “the development of neural scaffolding” and, as a result, facilitates cognitive growth.

3. Busyness instills “more efficient cognitive processing” because the busy person is compelled to come up with creative strategies for dealing with all the time management issues they face.

4. Busyness encourages “the reliance on memory strategies and aids that may assist performance” because the busy person has more activities in their life to keep track of.

Not all busyness is good, of course. Too much stress—and the burdens and activities that lead to that stress—can lead to exhaustion, impaired judgment, and decreased time spent on the people or activities that bring us meaning.

But even the expression of busyness has upsides. In a series of seven studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Jeehye Christine Kim of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and two colleagues, found that what she calls a busy mindset “ bolsters people’s sense of self-importance, which, in turn, can increase self-control.” Put more succinctly: A busy mindset makes you feel more responsible, which in turn leads you to act more responsibly.

If you’re too busy to have read this article and just skipped to the bottom, the chief takeaway here is that being busy is not all bad for you. It may even have some benefits, especially for your mind.

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But those benefits don’t excuse you from lording your busyness over your friends and family. At that point, you might as well be a busy body. And nobody likes one of those.

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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

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