I can’t tell you how many of the clients I see in my therapy practice express feeling stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted, anxious, depleted, and burnt out. This seems to be the condition of many Americans.
We exist in a culture that lives to work, rather than works to live. We wear “busyness” as a badge of honor and struggle to set boundaries around work during our “off” hours. We also place high demands on ourselves as parents—so much so that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently declared that parental stress is a public health emergency. According to research by the American Psychological Association, 48 percent of parents report feeling overwhelming stress on a daily basis compared to 26 percent of other adults.
The lives of our children don’t look much better. Unstructured time has become a rarity, replaced by school, homework, sports, and extracurricular activities that require complex time and schedule management. Simultaneously, and........