Why We Should Stop Saying We’re “Crazy Busy”

Photo by STIL on Unsplash

I’m not sure about you — but I believe that the term “crazy busy” has become a filler term. When someone asks you how your day, week or month was and you reply with “crazy busy”. What does that even mean?

I spent years working in the corporate world and the phrase “crazy busy” was a staple in many conversations. You walk into a meeting and you ask your colleagues how their week is going and you get the response “it’s been a crazy busy week”. Or, maybe you ask them about their weekend and you receive a similar response. Here’s the issue with this common phrase — it’s hindering how we are reacting to the stress or daily tasks in our life.

This term is hindering our ability to react to situations because it is putting your stress hormones in a mode that makes it less capable of actually just handling the busy. When we say we are crazy busy — we are giving our stress hormones the permission to rise and stay there, opposed to rising and coming back down to normal levels when we get a handle on our stressors. When these stress levels rise, your memory and judgement decline and your anger, stress and anxiety continue to rise — and stay elevated.

Our brains all process stress similarly but the difference is how we handle it.