Stand Out

INTRODUCTION

Life sure is messy. And, honourably, the messier it gets, the more we try to organise it, control it and make it manageable — which itself is busy work. When we're in this frame of mind, we wake up in the morning, world rushing at us, throw a coffee over our worries and rip in — continually driven by a belief that life wouldn't be this messy if we were more organised, fitter, smarter; if we just had it all together.

So we pile up our to-do list higher than a teenage boy's dinner plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Paradoxically, this puts us under even more pressure, and feeling more overwhelmed with all the things we have to do. The pressure of trying to keep it together while we stem the tide of messy becomes too much. But don't you dare drop any of those balls you're juggling!

Get busier. Try harder. That's the answer. Or is it?

Let's take a little sneaky peek at the results: we're overloaded, tired, stressed, tired, busy, tired, exhausted … did I say tired? And the impact of this is being felt across the board. In her book The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington (co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post) highlights that #tired has been used over 27 million times on Instagram, and if you type ‘why am I so …' into a Google search, the most common end to this sentence is ‘tired'. Globally, we're all desperate to find a way out of weary.

We need to face facts: we are stuffing up our lives by trying to work harder at working hard. This intent, seemingly ...