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Whether you call it stress bragging or busy boasting, I’ll bet you recognise the phenomenon. You innocently ask your friend or colleague, “How are things?” And before you know it they’re downloading a plethora of work/personal/pleasure events that cram their every waking moment, all to great acclaim, or massive remuneration.
In the work arena it might be how frighteningly in demand their services are. For others it’s why every waking moment is tightly-packed with gallery openings, outdoor theatre, weekends away, childcare, holidays or a new regular body-maintenance hobby.
Stress bragging is for dazzling to-do lists, like accessing the necessities for a child’s gap excursion in Ulan Bator or Honiara. No-one focuses on quotidian domestic work and family responsibilities. I have a friend who no longer works and her children are all grown, but still manages to devote a huge chunk of any catch-up to the hi-spec renovation of her two houses, complaining all the while of the expense, time-suck and irritation.
But what does it all amount to? Is this just the latest form of one-upmanship? Or is the stress real, and if so is it harmful? Listening to it is often boring and sometimes unbelievable, but might it harm you too? Why do people do it, and do you ever join in?
I know that on occasion, when my family was younger and I was editor of one of the country’s biggest magazines, I probably did rather smugly whine about how many things I squeezed into each allegedly glamorous day (in truth, it wasn’t). Now I run a therapist-matching platform Welldoing and hear from therapists that many clients are caught in a cycle of “compare and despair,” worried they are failing when compared with others, even if they are not people they personally know. At the same time, it really is the case that many people’s working life is incredibly high-powered and stressful, so we can’t assume that all stress-bragging is attention-seeking.
Are you a stress-bragger?
First off, you need to understand that there is a difference between being busy and being stressed. As therapist Pippa Masters told me: “Stress is an internal response (your body produces cortisol, your thoughts start to race, your heartbeat quickens, you might get sweaty palms), whereas a busy diary is an external situation.”
Some people find that when work is a subject of conversation they fall into talking in long lists of goals, missions and achievements, while for others, it is social standing that they want to tell others about. If you are part of a strong mothers’ network, pressure on social networks can make publicising your family activities seem normal, though they may roll out of control.
Booker Prize winning novelist Eleanor Catton, whose most recent best-seller Birnam Wood skewers many of its characters for attention-seeking pretensions, left social media when she noticed that the algorithms of X, formerly known as Twitter, were pushing her into stress-bragging. “I found when I was on Twitter...that it was starting to infect the way that I thought and went about my day. There was this kind of internal advertiser that was always at work, looking around at everything and saying ‘Is this tweetable?’ and I just hated it.”
Understanding why you’re doing it
Probably the most obvious reason to stress-brag is for external validation. As psychotherapist Pippa Masters says: “We see our busy diary as a sign that we are important, valued, needed. Sometimes when we’re less busy, less productive, we can come up against a view about what that means about us. If we think a weekend with nothing in the diary makes us look like we’re not wanted, we’ll tell everyone about how busy we are.”
Masters who prior to re-training as a therapist worked as a solicitor at a law firm in central London, says another reason may be that we use our busy lives as a coping mechanism, in order to avoid being with any feelings we don’t want to face. “Anything which helps us numb our emotions or distract ourselves from difficult feelings can become compulsive, including over-working and keeping busy. In this case, it isn’t so much a brag as a statement of fact – we’re saying ‘I’m busy, and it feels safest to stay that way and to talk about it all the time, rather than talk about my deeper feelings’.”
A final option might be that in bragging about your busy-ness you are putting out a cry for help. You are overwhelmed by activity or work or responsibilities and when you try to stop, you find you can’t. As Masters says: “The way we live our lives can leave us with no space, no time for ourselves. Under-staffed workplaces, cost-of-living crisis, worrying about our kids, our own underlying mental health issues – the list of stressors is endless. When we have a moment to ourselves, we often fill those gaps with activity or over-stimulate ourselves with screens and social media, which don’t truly relax us.”
How stress bragging impacts your relationships
Depending on the reasons why you fill your conversation with details about overwork, constant activity and stress, the response of others will vary. If it is seen as grand-standing then you could be winning no favours. According to a 2024 study published in the journal Personnel Psychology, such behaviour often has negative interpersonal consequences in the workplace. As reported in Forbes, stress braggarts were seen as arrogant self-promoters, or – no better, perhaps – came across as bidding for sympathy or attention. “Over time, [others] may become desensitized to the stress braggart’s complaints and less empathetic to their situation. They might start to believe that the individual is exaggerating and being disingenuous.”
If you are actually overwhelmed by work, talking repeatedly to friends and colleagues about how stressed you are feeling isn’t likely to be great for office life either. Better to book an appointment with HR or your line manager, and try to improve your situation.
How can you stop yourself if you think you’re a stress bragger
Vincent Deary is a health psychologist and author of How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living. To head off burnout, which he describes as physically and mentally perilous, Deary first begs us to remember to be kind to ourselves. “People should take time to rest and recover before things get to breaking point. Also, you need to make sure that some of your energy is devoted to something that pays you back, gives you uplift, joy, spiritual nutrition – that’s really key.” Such behaviour is the opposite to bragging about how busy we are.
Instead of pummelling others with an account of our stress we should “uncouple our own sense of self-worth with productivity. If you think of what you value in someone you love, it’s rarely their productivity. More likely, it’s their kindness and empathy.”
Masters says that if validation is your reason for bragging you need to remind yourself of your own worth. “Your worth comes from your ‘being’ not from what you’re ‘doing’. If you really feel you can’t stop, then try to build up time spent alone with your thoughts and feelings, slowly and gradually. You could set a timer and start with five minutes having a cup of tea and looking out of the window, listening to music or having a long bath. It might feel uncomfortable at first, but stick with it.
“You might feel the sadness, loneliness, anxiety, anger or other emotions you’ve been bottling up, and that’s OK – feelings want to be felt and responded to with compassion. It might help to journal about how you’re feeling, or talk to a trusted friend. If it’s too much of a struggle, therapy can be a really supportive way to start to disentangle our feelings and learn to manage them in healthier ways.”
The key thing is to remember that we don’t have to tell everyone how busy we are, and – for most of us – we don’t have to be so busy. Consider your priorities, what really is important in your life, and try to let go of the loud noise and bluster that you may have, even accidentally, fallen into.