Pencil it in under ‘Not Happening'

Nothing good comes from doomscrolling, at least that's what I thought until my Instagram algorithm recently proved otherwise... 10:15 pm on a weeknight, lights off, just me and the ominous glow from my phone dimly lighting the room when I stumbled upon this post that left me feeling nothing short of CALLED OUT.

After reading this post, I put my phone down, paused, and thought:

Am I successful? By some standards, yes; by other standards, no.

Am I productive? When needed, which was often.

Anxious? Hell, yeah.

Apologetic? That, too.

But . . relaxed? 

Most mornings, I had enough time to get ready and put my face on, but never enough time to have breakfast. Diligent work meant skipping lunch without even realizing it. Wellness looked like getting off work at 3:01 pm and rushing to catch the 4 pm yoga class. Multitasking was my motto. As for my calendar? I could teach a Masterclass on Time Blocking, with even 15 minutes for folding laundry locked in.

Like many of us, this was the only way I knew how to keep up with the busyness of life. No, I was very much not relaxed.

What's the rush?

I was rushing. I had what nutritional biochemist Dr. Libby Weaver calls the Rushing Woman's Syndrome (self-diagnosis alert). She describes this syndrome as a symptom of our modern, fast-paced lifestyle, which has left our generation of women trying to do and be too many things for people. 

At first, I had a hard time identifying as "busy" or even acknowledging I was tired. After all, I wasn't an entrepreneur, mom, or top 30 under 30 Forbes candidate, and I ran my household very imperfectly, sporadically watering my plants and perpetually half-done laundry. But Weaver clarifies that it's not about what your circumstances are, whether it's full-time work or parenting; it's the attempt to "schedule our days to a max, trying to squeeze it all in" that's the real concern. 

With that framing, I had problematized everything into tasks to complete. Even a date or a call with a friend had been reduced to an item on my To-do list. However, the satisfaction of crossing an item off my list wasn't nearly enough to compensate for the lustre that life had lost. I had never made relaxation the goal, and I was beginning to realize that maybe that was a problem. I needed someone to call me out, even if by an insentient algorithm, to hear the faint call from within, an insistent beckoning for change. 

The Yin to My Yang

Sometimes, we create solutions; other times, we crash into them, not realizing it's what we need. And that's exactly how I stumbled into the solution that slowing down was the only way forward: by reluctantly attending a yin yoga class.

Drawing on Chinese philosophy's feminine principle of yin, yin yoga is unlike more active styles of yoga as it focuses on holding poses for an extended period and finding stillness in them to target deep connective tissues rather than just the muscles. It hinges on the idea that creating real, lasting change, whether in your body or mind, needs time and for you to slow down. 

In one of these classes, my yoga teacher and mentor, Jane Howell, said, "We slow down so we can catch up." Things really began to shift. Sinking into these deep stretches, I was catching up with myself—acknowledging all the places I held tension in my body and mind, digesting experiences I had never given myself the time to think twice about, and honouring all the parts of myself, especially the ones I was in such a rush to fix. 

We know that when we savour our meals, we get more out of them; when we breathe deeply, we feel better; and when we slow down the reps, we get stronger. Even though we know that slowing down can be incredibly powerful, we still rush, and I was caught in this same double belief of knowing better but unable to do better.

Urgent, Important, and Not Happening

It took a few weeks of sticking with yin yoga classes to begin applying the approach to other areas of my life, not just on the mat. Taking time to slow down brought a sober perspective on what really matters. I no longer wanted to schedule things in while scheduling life out. I wanted those moments in between - the moments of completion, celebration, and reflection. Moments you can't plan or predict. Moments of emptiness left to be shaped by the flow of life. So, I took a pen to my calendar and started an excavation. 

The Eisenhower Matrix, a common tool for organizing tasks by urgency and importance, had already failed me (or admittedly, I had failed it). So, I coined a new category: Not Happening.

While you can organize your task list into the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix to determine their priority, a new category of Not Happening opens the possibility of not putting certain tasks on your list to begin with. It's the category I needed to create to give myself both permission and a reminder to say no to things, consciously and frequently.

Of course, I had rearranged my schedule before, but usually to make time for something or someone else that I wanted to squeeze in. The intention was always to add something more to my life, not to create space, even if it was for nothing in particular. This was different. And it was hard.

Caveat: this wasn't some evasive trick to escape things I dreaded; laundry and watering plants remain on the list. This creation of space was about not conflating all open blocks in my calendar as opportunities to do something. I also like cultivating the discipline to preserve the sacred, slow, and seeming moments of stillness to observe "what's happening when nothing is happening," as yet another one of my teachers, Reanna Costa, likes to say. 

Yinning At Life

While things started falling under the "not happening" box, life began feeling more fulfilling than full. It's easy to say that the moral of the story, just like Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare, is that slow and steady wins the race. But there’s more to it: becoming a relaxed woman means stepping away from the ideology that life is a race at all. 

Pencilling things under Not Happening might not make it look like I'm "winning" at life. It does look like time to linger after a yoga class, a spontaneous cup of joe with someone new, and discovering a new favourite author after finally reading the book a good friend recommended.

I call this yinning at life: slowing down for things that matter and the things that don't, like a doomscroll that might change your life. I wish I could say I am no longer a rushing woman, but there's still a way to go. But now I know: the slower I go, the faster I'll get there.