A One Word New Year Challenge

If you asked someone this week how their holidays were, there’s a good chance the person answering the question answered with one simple word: busy. In a season filled with family, friends, giving, receiving, eating, drinking, playing and resting, it’s become our most common response.

It’s more than just a knee-jerk response. North Americans are addicted to busy. If we aren’t run off our feet and swamped with our to-do lists, we just aren’t doing enough, it seems.

We see the outcome of this constant “busy-ness” in clinic everyday–worn out adrenal glands leading to low energy, increased weight, poor sleep and crappy moods.

The Italians have a saying: dolce far niente. It means the sweetness of doing nothing, and with this saying goes the cultural believe that doing nothing IS doing something. It has value and is to be cherished. In Italy, the answer to the question, How was your Christmas? might be more often met with descriptions of beautiful food and lovely visits.

So here is the challenge: Resolve that for the month of January you refrain from using the word busy. You don’t have to do less–just remove one word from your vocabulary for a month.

We’d like to take credit for the idea, but as with many great ideas, we got it off of some other smarty-pants on the internet.

Happy New Year everyone!