A gift, like a good friend drawing a personal road map out of the crazy busy swirl of our overloaded lives.

The more armed we are with information about the seduction of technology, the more we can build systems to better deal with it. I had no idea that I got a hit of dopamine, which is the pleasure hormone that also governs addiction, every time that little email bing goes off.

Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts.

We live in a really crazy time when there is information coming at you, and there are so many demands on your time. It really comes down to choosing your own priorities and forgiving yourself a lot and checking your own expectations.

I think that was probably one of the biggest revelations, is leisure is really in the eyes of the beholder...

If you had the perception that you are very stressed out then your grey matter was fully 20 per cent smaller in volume than people who did not have that same feeling. This is the grey matter in your prefrontal cortex: It controls thinking, learning, planning, decision-making. That matters because when we are feeling more stressed, that is when we are at our most vulnerable in our inability to think our way out of it.

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting.