Stop your over-responsibility addiction

I know you have no time, but the responsible thing to do is to read this

Harvey Jackins taught me it’s OK to be temporarily over-responsible about stopping over-responsibility. So, I was allowed to write this. And hereby, I obligate fellow addicts to read these 3000 words that may save their lives.

But in an emergency, don’t say you’re too busy committing yourself to lower your rigid responsibility habit. Run to your crying baby; if in the middle of crossing the street, you see a truck storming in your direction, run. But outside emergencies and critical work (neurosurgeon, air controller, baby sitter) for some people, less would be more.

Who are The Addicted?

First question: Who exactly should become more laid-back and mellow? Most grownups seem chronically over-responsible or under-responsible. People under sixty might misidentify themselves. So, who is which?

Classically, someone who matured into someone whose comfort and needs always fall away against any work that must be done will feel so guilty about not chipping in once per decade. Based on that one exception, she could mislabel herself as not taking enough responsibility ever.

If your partner (in life, at work) or a family member is a freeloader, finding it oh so convenient that you worry for everyone so they don’t need to, start becoming more like them, and tell them to become more like you if you want the relationship to last. To break old habits may take years.

Typically, someone who matured into someone whose comfort is always more important than work that needs to be done will be so impressed with himself for lifting a finger once per decade. Based on that one exception, he could misidentify himself as chronically over-responsible. Ask your close ones if you’re a workaholic. If they call you diligent, that’s flattery.

I have one request for people who really suffer from guilty feelings put on them by these busybodies. Please tell your responsibility-ridden friends that they must read the below (and act on it), or you’re going to mention this refusal at their untimely funeral to scare other reckless work maniacs.

Are you always the last one you take care of? Is every second of your day planned with no time to waste? Do you chronically not sleep and nap enough? Do you only rest so you can work and dread entertainment and vacations or, at least, consider them wasted time? Do you condemn yourself for not doing enough? Do friends think you work too hard? Do you reason that thinking and concentrating is not really work and should not make you tired? Are you a slave driver to yourself? When body parts hurt you from your exaggerated work ethic and hours, do you call them bad or appreciate the warning? When you are ‘procrastinating,’ do you stress yourself more, or do you check why and make changes accordingly? Do you not really love your life but are unable to escape your regime? Do you tell those around you not to worry because you’ve got them covered? Are your relationships too much a of one-way street, and are you too much of a people pleaser to set appropriate boundaries? Do you feel guilty for saying No? My mother used to say, ‘Even prostitutes [the lowest on the social ladder] say No. [So, you can too.]’ Do you take responsibility and blame yourself for how others choose to feel? Can’t you grasp how people sleep soundly at night without helping a bit? Ask your loved ones if you’re a workaholic. If they call you lazy, they hate you or do not really love you.

‘I’m not over-responsible. I just lack time.’ In Amsterdam, I had a non-Jewish colleague who once asked me, ‘Why do Jews always run? You also have 24 hours per day.’ He was right. And answering, ‘Yes, but we know the value of each minute,’ was just too unfriendly to be the whole story. (Overachieving is to survive danger, and we don’t blame the victim.)

Did you rationalize acting the workhorse by saying that you care and are generous and humble? You can be all of that while taking yourselves into account. Even better so because, if you don’t count, can you be giving?

Do you want to defeat death because you have so much to do? You are right, death is a disgrace, but not because you have so much to do still.

Did you ever joke that you love being lazy but lack the time for it? Do you remember when you still played or went on trips? What happened?

Taking duties seriously is not the problem. The issue is with overdoing it, always delivering, never cutting down, and not delegating enough.

Don’t think it all depends on you. You’re not Atlas. By giving it enough time and effort, anything good can be done, but not necessarily by you alone.

As babies, we seem to set out feeling responsible for all of the Universe. That’s how we then conclude we must be guilty when things go wrong. Whenever there is suffering around kids, tell them, ‘It’s not your fault.’ They may learn from grownups to worry, but it’s the wrong thing to copy.

Are you a part-time workaholic? Some alcoholics rationalize they’re not so deep in because they’re (almost) always sober for taking responsibility. But that doesn’t mean that their drinking spells don’t hurt. And when life gets hard (and, sooner or later, that always happens), the addiction will spread.

Bouts of overworking always take much more recovery time than you would have spent if you had worked in humane amounts. (Just as high rises need to be spread out more than terraced houses. So, how many extra people could you house on the same ground and keep it pleasant?)

Too many Shoulds and guilty feelings can make us workaholics in thought. I once heard this true story. Someone in the back of a car said, every time the driver drove less than elegantly, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ A fellow traveler asked her, ‘Do you always feel guilty that you say ‘I’m sorry’ all the time?’ To which she said, ‘Oh, do I do that? Oh, I’m sorry,’ answering the question.

Preachers

Preachers and moralists advocate being responsible, ignoring your narrow self-interest, and prioritizing the greater good. However, that’s not always a good ideal for everyone, by default. As Hillel said, ‘If I don’t care about myself, who should?’ Only after that comes, ‘If I only care about myself, for what do I live? And if not now, when?’ Ignoring one’s own needs makes for much burnout, especially among young activists. And as it says on planes, ‘When oxygen levels fall, masks will come down. If you travel with small children, put on your own mask first.’ You’re not so useful to your kids when you pass out before helping them. You’re not a complete hedonist (Heaven forbid!) when you just take care of yourself too. Unfortunately, often, exactly the wrong people take their calls to heart, those already compulsively altruistic.

Marshall Rosenberg went so far as to advise us always to be an egocentric egoist because, each time you help others at the expense of yourself, you build up resentment. And check that you always receive by others’ free will because eventually, recipients of forced charity will pay dearly.

That overstatement works for clarity of teaching, but not as practical advice. In practice, I think that most people, by once reaching out beyond themselves for a change, may suffer a little more than they already do.

Marshall told about a two-day workshop where he counseled a woman about her hatred for cooking. ‘I have cooked for my husband and two sons for decades every day, and I hated it day after day.’ Others could cook; there’s McDonald’s; there is bread and peanut butter, etc.

The next evening her two grown sons (still living at home) showed up. After introducing themselves, Marshall asked how they felt about their mother’s refusal to cook last night. They answered as if from one mouth: ‘Thank G^d!’ It’s not easy to see your mother suffer for so long.

There are lots of ideas why humans would be altruistic, but I like none of them. I think that giving of ourselves is a perfect expression of who we are. Hands like to receive but also to give, shape, and connect. So, those of us constantly in giving mode should realize that, if we were truly responsible, we would also figure out when to receive and give to ourselves too.

Countless people (women!) prove that what often is said is untrue, that if we don’t receive, we can’t give. But if we want the whole world to be in better shape, there is no responsible reason to exclude ourselves.

Partnering with G^d

For believers in G^d, I may add that in reality, we do nothing. He does everything. He doesn’t need us. He’s like the parent taking the shopping out of the car, saying to a child, ‘Do you want to help? Please carry the carrots.’ The carrots get carried proudly. But the help is for the sake of the child to feel good, not because they are too heavy.

We’re not that small anymore, and we must feel useful even for no reason. G^d does it all, and we may stop making ourselves look so competent and responsible. Only, G^d may sometimes follow our efforts with results and then reward our efforts because sweat is sweat.

But don’t pretend that if we did nothing, nothing would get done. At best, we’re invited to join Him to repair the world. And when we exaggerate, it looks as if we don’t trust He’ll do His Fair Share, G^d forbid.

G^d teaches by example, telling us even He ‘rested’ after creating our world. It wasn’t all finished, but for then, it was good enough. Of course, He didn’t need to rest. He wanted to teach us sometimes to drop it.

The Jewish Sages tell us there will always be more to do than you could finish. Instead of running non-stop, admit you will never finish all the work.

Slowing Down Gives Options

Feelings may be wrong. You can feel hungry from loneliness and angry from powerlessness. People may feel inferior, superior, sick, or healthy, which is not always true. One may feel guilty, responsible, obligated, or stuck just from one’s life story, while one is, in reality, free to choose.

Maybe others, circumstances and a lack of support and information may have led you to become a workaholic. But you can break this habit as soon as you realize that, in the end, you alone are now doing this to yourself.

Maimonides says that if you grew crooked in one direction, you first need to bend in the opposite direction to end up in the balanced middle. Thus, overachievers, initially, must become too idle. That’s not a problem. They already feel lazy when they deliver relaxed and responsible work.

It is not ideal, not to call it incorrect, to depict our life’s goals as things we must do, that are forced upon us, and not of our free will. Better is to live by our wishes, choices, deepest convictions, and happy hearts. More people would follow our example. Live by Wants, not by Shoulds.

When we finally dare to stop keeping ourselves so busy every waking second, the next question is, what to do instead? Well, there is a lot.

For starters, try to stretch and yawn. For that, you need to relax.

Smokers who stop for some weeks will find that foods start to be tasty again. Likewise, recovered workaholics might discover all kinds of feelings. By overworking, were we seeking the comfort of being numb? Did a fear of discomfort help us stay busybodies, just as that paralyzes underachievers? What distresses surface when we stop? Insecurity, desperation, shyness?

A next step is thinking if we should act on sensations of dissatisfaction like feeling hungry, drained, lonely, stressed, stiff, pain, sad, etc.

And what to do with old hurts that may surface masquerading as anger, jealousy, addictions, etc.?

We get a chance to waste time—and admit that, when we were too busy, we also wasted time. What did you secretly indulge in to keep up your inhumane workload? Was that a reward for so much unseen work? Work should have its own gratification. We should spend the after-time on smart ways to relax and take care of ourselves and not on some shady reward.

Being responsible may be gratifying. But not all the time being occupied might make space for having fun and a better appreciation of life.

We might take better care of our health, potentially changing from a sprinter activist into a marathon runner activist, so no one needs to say, ‘He worked so hard as if he knew he would not get so old,’ confusing cause and effect. It’s so negligent not to sustain our health. Do you want more time? Slow down. Easy does it. Like a Dutch saying goes, ‘Runners run to their death.’ [Hardlopers zijn doodlopers.] Less is more!

We might sound more convincing when we contradict Capitalism and Nazism, that the value of workers does not lie in what they produce.

We might attract people to activism who previously would not consider joining us in our grueling lives.

We might discover others to connect to. How many people did you cancel because they didn’t share your work addiction? They could teach you to be less worked up. ‘Each case of workaholism is a scream for intimacy.’

Do we really want to dedicate our lives to the work we are so passionate about? Is this what I want to be known for? Is this what makes me jump out of bed in the morning? Is this the smartest and most ethical way for me to contribute? Always being obligated was easy because there was no need to choose. But free time demands making choices. We might want to wrack our brains to find the best answers to these probing questions.

Dare to Repair

There is a fair chance that you nurtured one child or student to the same rigidity. You help them best to break free by setting an example.

Have hobbies. They generally may be pure work. But when you don’t have to do it, also not secretly, it can be fun. So, don’t let Shoulds spoil it.

As with stopping any addiction successfully, there are two questions we should ask ourselves.

1. Are we not replacing one addiction with another not to deal with discomfort? Cry, yawn, sleep, eat, and do self-care whenever you need.

2. What related addictions might we have to stop? May I guess? Look:

Is there perfectionism, to never be pleased, as if every tiny mistake or lack of perfection would be fatal or spoil it all? There is nothing desirable in perfectionism. It is a hyper-focus on certain projects while neglecting the rest of your responsibilities and life, including completing the thing you are obsessing about before the deadline and grace. One published author told and asked me, ‘Stop polishing the polish. How is your book coming along?’ Are you a general extremist, so that you are unaware of ‘good enough’?

Do you have a lot of passion for your work? Sometimes, we need to do things we don’t feel like doing. We can always improve a tiny bit in doing the ‘unimportant stuff’ until it starts showing or ask for help. Some satisfaction only shows up after some time. We can develop the discipline, patience, and trust to overcome any demand for instant gratification. This is different from an overzealous pursuit of work, which, at times, we hated too, but we felt forced to push to continue or finish because ‘we had to.’

Do you expect to be honored for your hard work? Don’t you know that everyone deserves respect for who they are, more than for what they do? Did you learn to receive and expect to be seen, embraced, and valued for who you are? Do you act as if you would be more entitled than others?

Do you pride yourself on being an efficiency freak? So, you accomplished a lot, but only once you slow down will you know what you were missing.

Do you multiprocess all the time, even outside emergencies? That means not fully being present and appreciating the here and now. Could you be a ‘scatterbrain,’ have ADD, or/and be hyperactive? That’s not a fault. The dull human mind is malfunctioning. But it could make it harder to let go.

Are you a control freak? It’s fine to want to control yourself and to train your students, kids, and animals. Yet, it is a bridge too far (abusive) when you try to control others—or G^d or the Universe—or all of your life. NB: Control freaks and perfectionists might live in a total mess because their fixation on ‘never good enough’ makes that, often, nothing gets done.

Are you a stoic, ignoring your feelings in general that may warn you it’s time to drink, eat, exercise, connect, sleep, and rest? Did you overwork to numb distresses like guilt feelings, sadness, loneliness, fear, etc.?

Did you use drugs to keep up your unnatural lifestyle? Think of cutting down or out caffeine, nicotine, refined sugar, amphetamine, etc.

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I hope you will suffer at least as much from reading this as I suffered from writing it—after which I hope we will see the fruits of our joint bravery.

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