What often matters more than the activity we're doing at a moment in time is how we feel about it.

It's become such a cultural norm that people brag about it: "Oh yeah, you did that? I did this." Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about "I have the bigger house and car," and now it's much more about how much stuff you can cram into your calendar.

Busyness has become such a social value that we will even create it, we will create that sense of breathlessness because we think that's how we show status and importance. That is a really interesting and troubling finding. We've taken this notion of hard work to a crazy degree.

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.

What often matters more than the activity we're doing at a moment in time is how we feel about it.

As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative.