I was at the dentist because I had a cracked tooth that I had long put off fixing, partly because my schedule was already brimming over, and mostly because I didn’t really want to have the procedure anyway. After months of stalling, I had finally scheduled the appointment and resolutely blocked out my calendar for the entire afternoon. I was anticipating that afternoon with dread, but I was in for a surprise.
Let me say unequivocally that the dentist’s office was the last place I wanted to be, and certainly the last place I would ever think of as a refuge. But as I reclined in the dentist’s chair, unable to do anything but lay there in a mild stupor thanks to the anesthetics and a pair of busy hands moving around my mouth, I realized with some irony that this was the closest thing I’d had to a vacation in months: no computers, no phone calls, no emails, no smartphones.
Like most parents I know, my day starts early, then careens from a hasty breakfast to packing lunches to dropping off the kids and then on to work. After work, it’s time to pick up the kids, make dinner, supervise bath time, get the kids into bed and then spend an hour or two catching up on work or other tasks that didn’t get done during the day. Before I know it, it’s 10 or 11 p.m. and time to get ready to start all over again the next morning.
I feel very fortunate to have a career and family, demanding as they can be at times. It’s just that I often feel, like many parents, that I barely have time to myself. As a psychologist, I counsel my patients on the importance of having a good self-care routine, but like them, I sometimes find it hard to follow through on this goal consistently. Life gets in the way.
So I was surprised to find an oasis of calm in a most unlikely place: the dentist’s chair.
There was nothing much to do but just be there. Multitasking was out of the question. The most I could do was listen to music or audiobooks. (I chose “Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh, and cranked up the volume as far as it would go so that his soothing voice in my earphones drowned out the whine of the dentist’s drill.)
This realization that I could unplug for several hours for a dental procedure made me ask myself the obvious question: Why not set aside time for myself more often, and in more pleasant circumstances? Why did there have to be a near emergency to take the afternoon off?
To put it more bluntly: If I could lie in a dentist’s chair for several hours, why not a lounge chair?
I notice this same pattern with many of my patients. Everyone today feels busier than ever, and parents especially so. According to the results of a 2013 Pew Research survey, 40 percent of working mothers and 34 percent of working fathers said they always felt rushed, compared with 20 percent of adults without children. Clearly, we parents need a break.
But when it comes to taking time off, we seem ambivalent. Even when we have earned paid vacation time, over half of us don’t use it, and when we’re on vacation, 61 percent of us still work, according to a 2014 survey conducted by Harris Poll.
Time away from our work and other responsibilities may seem like a luxury that we can’t always afford, but consider this: A long-term study found that women who skipped vacations were 50 percent more likely to have heart attacks than women who took time off. For men, the figure was 30 percent.
We run from one thing to the next, rarely stopping to pause or catch our breath unless there is an emergency, illness or something else that simply forces us to stop or slow down. When we repeat this pattern day after day, as many of us do, we are missing out on what life has to offer. We become human doings instead of human beings.
Maintaining this fast-paced, routinized existence is why so many of us feel that, as the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short. To slow down and savor the life that we have requires that we do just that: slow down. To make time for ourselves, our families and our personal priorities beyond the everyday demands of life requires that we have a plan. We must schedule an appointment with ourselves.
Research consistently shows that to have the greatest chance of success in meeting our goals, we have to have a specific plan. If our goal is to have more personal time or more family time, then we must have a specific plan for making that happen, and part of that plan is scheduling the time. That means actually putting it in our calendar, not just thinking about it.
We all have so many demands on our time. If we wait until we have a free moment for ourselves, that moment may never come.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/when-it-takes-a-dentists-chair-to-disconnect/
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