There are new studies showing that young men and men with more progressive views of what a father should be - which is not just a helper and fun parent, but actually a partner - are beginning to feel more work-life conflict than mothers are. They're trying to do what women have been doing for 30 years, and they're having a very stressful time of it - a harder time at work because we still expect men to be on 24-7, working 40 years straight.

I was afraid that I would find out that I didn't work hard, that I wasn't a very good mother. I was feeling so inadequate in everything I did. I was afraid that I was going to come out being this crazy, disorganized, neurotic person. So it was revelatory that I worked more than 50 hours a week and I still spent a tonne of time with my kids. It was like, "Why do I feel one way when the reality is so different?"

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.

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.

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.

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

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