Overwhelmed: Work, Love And Play When No One Has The Time

By Brigid Schulte

9Without a doubt, being a working mother in the twenty-first century is one of the most stressful jobs on earth. Juggling kids, a relationship, a demanding career, ceaseless to-do lists coupled with modern technologies that have us on alert and on-call 24/7, as well as an incessant guilt about all that we have left undone, leaves us with insufficient time to fully relax and replenish our souls.

In Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte, an award-winning staff writer for The Washington Post and working mother of two, looks at the importance of making real time for leisure in order to have a happier, healthier and in fact, more productive life – and how we are living worlds away from this balanced ideal, by overlapping and blurring the lines between work and the other fundamental parts of our lives.

Through her travels and first-hand experience, along with countless interviews with sociologists, neuroscientists, working parents, progressive employers, and analyzing and comparing cultural norms and workplace policies in North America and abroad, Schulte provides us with in-depth insights about why we should strive for internal satisfaction in favour of unattainable perfection, and what we should both embrace (what’s truly important) and release from our lives (what’s not), in order to make our way out of the overwhelm and simply let this happen.