"When we are busy, we are numbed out to this sense of inadequacy that we all know is real. Deep, deep, deep down."
~ Kenna Millea

• What does it actually look like to be addicted to the hustle and not even realize it?

• How does staying perpetually busy become a coping strategy for the deeper questions we are afraid to sit with?

• What if the solution to your busyness is not better time management, but a ruthless commitment to doing less?

In episode 103 of This Whole Life, Pat and Kenna Millea get honest about their own addiction to hustle. Drawing on John Mark Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, they explore why so many of us, including two licensed therapists who know better, cannot seem to slow down, and what our busyness is really covering up.

They dig into the spiritual roots of hurry, why John Mark Comer calls it the greatest threat to the interior life, and how the Catholic social tradition has been telling us for over a century that work was made for man, not the other way around. Kenna shares a moment from her own therapy that reframed everything: the possibility that her anxiety has been masking depression all along, and that staying busy is the most productive-looking way to avoid sitting with the hard questions of the human experience. Pat gets equally honest about the cost of hurry in his own fatherhood, admitting that far too often he is yelling at his kids not because of what they are doing, but because he is in a hurry and their seven-year-old slowness is incompatible with his schedule.

They close with four practical S's from Comer's book: silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. The challenge is to pick just one and try it for a week.

This episode is for anyone who has answered "how are you doing?" with "so busy" and quietly wondered why that answer feels both true and empty at the same time.