Overwhelmed - Softcover

This is an accidental book, and surely friends who knew me growing up - and waited as I burst into places late, trailing shoes and socks or a toothbrush - guffawed heartily when they heard I was working on a book about time. It all started with a phone call. I was part of a group of journalists at the Washington Post asked to research why fewer and fewer women under the age of 50 were reading the newspaper. The journalists, all of us women, most of us caretakers of some kind - mothers, guardians for nieces and nephews, daughters of aging parents - figured women were just too busy. After all, we sometimes found it hard to find the uninterrupted time to read the very newspaper we worked for in the swirl of morning craziness. My assignment was to find the time study data to prove how busy women are. Knowing nothing about time research, I googled, "busy women time" and up popped someone by the name of John Robinson, one of the first and most eminent time-use researchers in the world. I called him up, expecting to find easy validation. Instead, he told me women like me had 30 hours of leisure time every week. And thus the journey began.

"Once, my sister, Claire told me that when you smile, it releases some chemical in the brain and calms anxiety. I have tried smiling. At 4 A.M. In bed. In the dark."
Overwhelmed is a book about time pressure and modern life. And it comes at the perfect moment: Amid debates about the toll of work and life demands on parents and our addiction to the daily grind, Overwhelmed is just what we need to address our questions about work, love, and play. Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and a harried mother of two, began her journey to rediscover leisure when she realized her life was becoming "like the dream I keep having about trying to run a race wearing ski boots." She goes from the depths of the "time confetti" of her days to an understanding of what the ancient Greeks knew was the point of living a good life: having time to refresh the soul in leisure. What Schulte finds is illuminating, perplexing, and maddening, but ultimately hopeful. Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time is a book with answers.
Taking the baton from such pathbreakers as Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift, and Juliet Schor's The Overworked American, Schulte details not only the intensifying pressures on women, and increasingly on men, but also how feeling overwhelmed is affecting our health and even the size of our brains. At times, the author becomes her own subject, as when she sits in a Paris auditorium crammed with scholars, jet-lagged and hungry, and dozes off--until a speaker lamenting the toll of "role overload" on working parents snaps her awake.
She visits Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the renowned anthropologist, who presents hard evidence that women are not "wired" for child care--so a "natural" family arrangement might actually include heavy involvement on the father's part. It's a model that's taken root not only among the hunter-gatherer tribes in the Kalahari Desert that Hrdy has studied, but also in Denmark, the world's happiest country, where it's possible to work short, productive, flexible hours and still be successful, committed workers and attentive parents--and have time for leisure. Overwhelmed is both a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds and a blueprint for how to put the pieces back together. What Schulte offers us is a revelatory, at times hilarious, and at heart optimistic view of how we can begin to find time for the things that matter most, and live more fulfilled lives.