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.

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

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

The big message is that we need to reimagine and re-engineer how we work - what does work mean and how do we measure what's good? The second thing we need to reimagine is our relationships - who does what and why? One of the biggest things that has helped me and my husband is coming up with a common set of standards about what it takes to run our house, what is a fair way to divide tasks, and how are we going to keep each other accountable?

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.