The Government Called Our Lives "Already Busy." It Wasn't Wrong.
Before you're fully awake, you're already calculating.
Not planning. Calculating. What's unfinished. What's coming. Whether the day can hold what's in it. You haven't moved yet and you're already behind.
That's not an unusual morning. That's most mornings. And if it's been like that long enough, it doesn't feel like a problem anymore. It feels like modern life.
Earlier this month, the BC government announced it was ending Daylight Saving Time. In the process, it accidentally said something fairly revealing about how most of us are living.
The reason Premier Eby gave: the twice-yearly clock shift causes "significant chaos on already busy lives."
Already busy. That word is doing a lot of work. The assumption folded inside it is that BC families are operating so close to capacity that one hour of disruption, just sixty minutes, twice a year, is no longer acceptable or sustainable. No matter where you stand on the policy decision, the reasoning says a lot.
A Life With No Margin Doesn't Announce Itself
A life like this presents as productivity. It performs as capability. It feels, after a while, like there's no other way to be.
The sociologist Hartmut Rosa has a phrase for it: frenetic standstill. All motion, no progress. And from the inside, that's often exactly what feels like.
Then something small happens: the school calls, the meeting runs long, the car needs something, someone gets sick, and it isn't small anymore. It's the thing that tips the week. Because there was nothing in reserve to absorb it.
That's what "already busy" actually looks like. That's what the province is describing.
Nobody Engineers This
This kind of life, kind of, assembles itself, one reasonable decision at a time.
The job was a good opportunity. The commitment was temporary. The standard was just the standard you'd always held. Your identity, capable, dependable, the person who handles things, was constructed over years and started to become a kind of house you lived inside without quite noticing.
I've watched this happen in three fairly different settings.
Before becoming a counsellor, I was a lawyer, then a pastor, then I spent several years working at recovery centres in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Each place has something important to teach about what sustained pressure does to people.
In law, the depletion was part of being ambitious. In ministry, it was called a calling. In the DTES, it had been running long enough to find its own solution, in a bottle, a pipe, whatever created distance from what the body was trying to say.The settings had almost nothing in common. The exhaustion underneath was recognisable every time.
What Burnout Often Looks Like
By the time people come to counselling for burnout, the pattern often includes some version of this:
Exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix
Irritability with people they care about
Difficulty shutting their mind off, especially at night
A sense that life is happening faster than they can keep up with it
The quiet suspicion that something important has been lost along the way
These symptoms don't always feel like burnout from the inside. They can feel like a bad week that became a bad month, or like something that needs more discipline to fix. Many people come to therapy for burnout after years of operating in this "already busy" state, not realising there was a name for it, or that burnout recovery was something counselling could actually help with.
Tired and Empty Are Different Problems
There's a distinction worth making at this point, because it changes what you actually need.
Tired and empty can feel similar from the inside. Both flatten you. Both make the things that should matter feel far away. But one of them responds to rest. The other doesn't.
James Clear drew this distinction in one of his newsletters, and it's stayed with me: there's a difference between feeling tired and feeling empty. One probably needs sleep. The other may need purpose. The question isn't only whether you're low on energy. It's whether you're low on meaning.
This matters because burnout isn't always about doing too much. Sometimes it's about doing a great deal of the wrong things for a long time. Rest helps with the first. It doesn't touch the second.
Three Questions the Clocks Can't Answer
Removing one friction point from an already-full life doesn't change the life. Neither does a better time management system or a long weekend, though both of those can help for a while.
What tends to actually matter is asking some slower, harder questions. The kind you've probably been too busy to get to.
Does your life have any room in it? Not room to fit more in, but room for error. Room for rest that doesn't have to be earned. Room for something unexpected that isn't immediately a disaster. If the honest answer is no, that's not a scheduling problem. It's structural, and it's worth understanding what's held it in place.
No margin doesn't only mean you can't absorb the hard things. It means you can't say yes to the unexpected good ones either. Someone interesting crosses your path and you're too depleted to follow the thread. A door opens and you're already behind on something else. The life you're living crowds out the life you might be living, not dramatically, just steadily, one missed moment at a time.
How did you get here, and what is it costing? At some point most people stop choosing their lives and start managing them. The yes happened incrementally, gradually then all at once, to borrow a phrase, and there was never a single moment that felt like the one to object to. But you can still ask: what am I carrying, and why? What would I have to believe is true about myself to put something down?
Is this the life you actually want, and is it sustainable? Not the one that made sense five years ago. Not the one other people needed you to have, or the one that accumulated while you were looking the other way. The one you'd choose now, with full information, if choosing were still on the table.
This last question tends to arrive through exhaustion rather than reflection, not because people plan it that way, but because eventually the body stops cooperating. It's a more useful question to ask before that happens. But it's not too late after.
If "Already Busy" describes you
These aren't questions that tend to resolve themselves quietly on a walk or in a journal, though both of those are good. They're the kind that usually benefit from being asked out loud, with someone paying attention.
Counselling for burnout and overwork is often where people start to see their lives more clearly again, not because the answers are handed over, but because there's finally space to look. If you're recognising yourself in this piece, you're not the only one. And you don't have to sort it out alone.
I work with adults in Vancouver, in person on Seymour Street and online across BC, who are navigating exactly this kind of chapter. You'd be more than welcome to get in touch too.
You can book a free 20-minute conversation here, or reach out at info@lloydleecounselling.ca.
The Premier's word was already. Already busy. Already full. Already at capacity before the disruption even arrives.
If that word landed somewhere, it might be worth finding out where.
FAQ
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The signs aren't always dramatic. Exhaustion that rest doesn't fix. Losing interest in things that once mattered. Difficulty setting limits without guilt. A growing sense that you're going through the motions of a life that used to feel more like yours. Burnout recovery often begins with simply naming what's been happening, and so a conversation is a reasonable place to start.
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Burnout counselling is individual therapy focused on understanding and recovering from chronic exhaustion, over-functioning, and the quiet loss of meaning that often accompanies prolonged overwork. It involves exploring not just the symptoms but the patterns underneath them: what you're carrying, how it got there, and what a more sustainable life might actually look like. If you're looking for a burnout counsellor in Vancouver or online across BC, this is a good place to start.
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Yes. Sessions for burnout, overwork, anxiety, and life transitions are available in person in Vancouver and online for adults across British Columbia.