When did being busy become the default answer to the question ‘How are you?’ When did full calendars and back-to-back schedules become signs that a life is going well, rather than warning signs that something has gone seriously wrong?
And how many people reading this cannot remember the last time they sat still without reaching for a screen, a task, or a reason to keep moving?
Busyness has become the ambient condition of modern life—so common that we have stopped questioning it. But the body has not stopped responding to it, and neither has the soul.
To unpack the hidden cost of our ever-busy lives, we’ll cover:
- What chronic busyness is actually doing to your body
- What it is doing to your soul
- The Jesus model: full but never hurried
- This Week
- Bottomline
Let us start with what the research says, because the cost of hurry is not abstract.
What chronic busyness is actually doing to your body
Chronic work stress and busyness have been directly linked to metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions including high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, excess abdominal fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels, each of which raises the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.[1]
A large-scale study published in The Lancet tracking over 200,000 people found that high work stress raised the risk of coronary heart disease by 23%.[2]
These are not the consequences of one hard week. They are the accumulated effect of a pace of life that the body was never designed to sustain. Cortisol, the stress hormone that rises when we are under pressure, is helpful in short bursts. Kept elevated by an unrelenting schedule, it disrupts sleep, suppresses immune function, impairs digestion, and gradually erodes the body’s capacity to recover.
The physical symptoms of chronic busyness are easy to misread. Fatigue attributed to aging. Headaches attributed to screens. Digestive problems attributed to diet. Sleep issues attributed to work-related stress. These are not separate problems. They are often the same problem: a nervous system that has not been allowed to rest long enough to repair.
The body carries the weight of a hurried life. But so does something less visible.
What it is doing to your soul
John Mark Comer, in his book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, opens with a question he received from a mentor: ‘What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?’ The answer, from philosopher Dallas Willard, was this:
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”
– Dallas Willard, quoted in John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (2019)
Comer’s central argument is that hurry and love are fundamentally incompatible, and that busyness does to the soul exactly what sin does: it cuts you off from God, from other people, and from yourself.[3]
This is not poetry. It is a description of Comer on what most people already experience: the prayers that feel rushed, the relationships that run on the surface, the sense of going through spiritual motions without any depth behind them.
Busyness crowds out the conditions in which faith actually grows: stillness, attention, unhurried time in the Word, genuine presence with the people around you. A person who is always moving does not have the interior space to hear God, love well, or even notice what they actually feel. Hurry is not neutral. It shapes the kind of person you are becoming.
Which raises the obvious counterargument: Jesus had crowds, demands, and urgent needs constantly pressing on him. And yet He had time to rest and reflect.
The Jesus model: full but never hurried
Read through the Gospels with this question in mind: when was Jesus in a hurry?
People interrupted him constantly. Demands were non-stop. The needs around him were genuinely urgent. And yet the accounts consistently show a man who moved through his days with a settled, unhurried presence, who made time to withdraw, to pray, to be still, who was interrupted and responded with full attention rather than distracted efficiency.
“To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace.”
– Walter Adams, spiritual director
The Sabbath was not an afterthought in Jesus’ practice. It was embedded in his rhythm as a non-negotiable. The pattern of withdrawal, rest, and re-engagement was not occasional. It was structural. Jesus did not rush his way through a meaningful life. He built margin into the week, and that margin was the ground from which everything else grew.
Mark 6:31 captures it plainly when Jesus says to his disciples: “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” The invitation to rest was not a concession to weakness. It was the wisdom of a life that understood how human beings are actually made.
So what does slowing down look like in the week ahead, practically and honestly?
This Week
Ruthlessly eliminating hurry does not mean doing less. It means doing what you do with more presence.
Here are four places to start:
- Audit your schedule honestly. Look at your week and identify one commitment that is filling your time without filling your life. Not every obligation is a calling. Some are habits, some are fear of missing out, some are people-pleasing. One honest reduction is more useful than ten intentions.
- Build one non-negotiable margin into each day. Fifteen to thirty minutes with no task attached. No scrolling, no catching up, no productivity. Morning prayer, a walk, sitting with your Bible, simply being. Guard it with the same seriousness you give a meeting.
- Practise finishing one thing before starting the next. Hurry often lives in the gap between tasks, the constant partial attention that means nothing gets your full presence. Choose one task, close everything else, and complete it. The nervous system recognises the difference.
- Treat Sabbath as a practice, not an ideal. One day a week that is genuinely different, slower, freed from productivity. It will feel uncomfortable at first, because the habit of hurrying is deep. That discomfort is not a sign that it is not working. It is a sign, it is.
Bottomline
Busyness is not a virtue. It is not evidence that a life is full or a faith is serious. Research shows it is a health risk. Scripture shows it is a spiritual one. And John Mark Comer argues, compellingly, that it may be the defining enemy of the kind of interior life that genuine love, joy, and peace require.
The solution, as Willard said, is ruthless. Not occasional margin when things slow down on their own, because they rarely do. A deliberate, consistent, unapologetic decision to protect the pace that makes a human life actually liveable.
“The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.”
– John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
Citations
- Chandola T, Brunner E, Marmot M. Chronic stress at work and the metabolic syndrome: prospective study. BMJ. 2006;332(7540):521-525. View on PubMed
- Kivimäki M, et al. Work stress as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Lancet. 2012;380(9852):1491-1497. View on PubMed
- Comer JM. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Colorado Springs: WaterBrook; 2019. View on Google Books
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