The Fullest Empty Life:Why You’re Always Busy but Never Fulfilled
Chapter One-Opening
Welcome to The Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach exploring resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and the messy moments in between that shape who we become.
Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside.
Today we're talking about time. Not how to manage or optimize it. But how busyness became an identity, stillness became uncomfortable, and somewhere in between, we stopped actually living our days and just hoped to get through them. This is Episode 13: The Fullest Empty Life |Why You’re Always Busy but Never Fulfilled.
Chapter Two- Personal Reflection
Let’s start with what I’ve witnessed from behind the chair.
Busyness is something I know personally. I work full time in the salon, and on most nights and days off, I’m building my coaching business. I was thinking about this as I watched a salon client who was unable to be fully present during her appointment.
She booked a full appointment for highlights, color, haircut, and blow-dry- typically a 2+ hour appointment. From the moment she sat in my chair, her laptop was open, and her phone was face up on the station. Every few minutes, it would light up, and she’d lean forward to grab it —mid color, mid cut — and I’d have to readjust the cape or move my tray and body around the chair to get to where I needed to be. Each time she was on the phone, she would look up at me and mouth ‘sorry, one more minute.’
The minute never ended until the appointment was over.
When I finished, I had to ask her if she liked her hair. That’s how I knew she hadn’t looked in the mirror once. She finally glanced up, laughed this tired laugh, and said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I smiled and booked her next appointment, but I couldn’t shake it. She hadn’t relaxed for a single minute. A service she’d scheduled, paid for, and shown up for had become just another box checked off.
The silence she didn’t receive, I got. Not talking gave me something I didn’t expect. My mind went somewhere quieter. It was a break from being on all the time.
She came in for the rest, and I’m the one who walked away with it.
And it left me wondering how many of us are showing up for our own lives without ever really arriving.
Chapter Three- The Paradox — Busy as Armor
Those questions don’t have simple answers because the problem isn’t just personal. It’s cultural, and it runs a lot deeper than one busy client in a salon chair.
Cultural Diagnosis
We live in a culture that has conflated activity with meaning. The calendar is full; therefore, life is full. There’s a psychological concept worth naming here: Action Bias, the deeply human tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing, even when doing nothing is the smarter choice. Studies on soccer goalkeepers show they dive left or right on penalty kicks almost every time, even though statistically, staying in the center saves more goals.
We struggle with stillness. Not because we’re lazy or undisciplined, but because we’ve absorbed a cultural message that equates motion with worth. If you’re not moving, you’re not contributing. If you’re not contributing, what exactly are you? Stillness doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It can feel like failure.
I received that message loud and clear as a young girl. My parents were always moving. From morning until evening, they did what needed to be done before they even considered relaxing. If there was time left over, we went to the beach, the carnival, or played games together. They would even judge my brother’s and my latest Dance Fever routines. The message wasn’t spoken outright, but it was clear: don’t sit around. Move. Keep going.
The Status Angle
And here’s the thing: culture doesn’t just allow this. It rewards it.
Researcher Silvia Bellezza at Columbia found that Americans often view busyness as a status symbol. In parts of Italy, leisure can signal success — dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. My family came from Italy, but whatever sweetness existed was quickly soured by the hustle.
I’ve noticed this belief across cultures. Many immigrant families arrive in America carrying a powerful work ethic born from sacrifice. Once here, that sacrifice often merges with a uniquely American idea: that busyness equals worth. Before long, productivity becomes a measure not just of success, but of value.
Exhaustion becomes a flex. “I’m so busy” is worn almost like a badge of honor. We’ve made a virtue out of depletion. But beneath all of that cultural conditioning lies something much more personal. The psychological reality behind many overscheduled lives is avoidance.
Busyness As Anxiety Management
It’s experiential avoidance, to be exact — the way we fill every hour specifically to avoid contact with uncomfortable internal experiences. Grief. Loneliness. Uncertainty. The silent dread that you might not be living the life you want. A packed schedule keeps those feelings just far enough away that you never have to face them directly. For many people, busyness isn’t ambition; it’s a coping mechanism.
I experienced this firsthand when California mandated the closure of salons and spas for nearly six months during the pandemic. I went from constant human contact and days scheduled to the minute to what felt like solitary confinement, layered on top of grief from my mom’s passing just months before.
After three weeks, everything I had pushed down came rushing to the surface. The busyness was gone. There was nothing left to distract me.
And once the distraction disappeared, I could finally see what it was doing for me. It wasn’t just managing the grief. It was managing uncertainty, loneliness, and the need for control.
There’s another reason we stay busy that doesn’t get talked about enough: control.
In a world that feels increasingly unpredictable, crossing things off a list gives us a temporary sense of order. I did this. I finished that. I am on top of things. It doesn’t matter that the list never ends. The act of doing makes us feel like we have some say in how life unfolds.
And when life becomes genuinely uncertain — a diagnosis, a loss, a relationship falling apart — our lists often get longer. As long as we’re doing, we don’t have to sit with what we can’t control.
One of my friends always needs plans for the weekend. She’s told me that without something to look forward to, she feels down. Maybe she simply loves connection and fun. But it also might be avoidance. The unscheduled weekend isn’t just empty time. For some of us, it’s an invitation to feel things we’ve been outrunning all week.
And maybe that’s why I’ve always kept so many balls in the air. I built a salon from a four-wall dump into a beautiful, thriving business. Years later, I dismantled it and created a studio salon. I went to school full-time while working full-time.
I wanted everything those pursuits represented, and I earned every reward they gave me. But I also know that some of the motion served another purpose. There were feelings I didn’t fully know how to process, so I just kept moving instead.
The continual moving has a cost that goes deeper than exhaustion. It reaches all the way into who we think we are.
The Identity Piece
Think about when someone at a party asks, ‘So what do you do?’
Notice that we don’t ask ‘who are you?’ or ‘what do you love?’ We go straight to function.
Psychologists call this Role Identity Fusion — the merging of self-concept with productive function. When busyness becomes identity, stillness becomes an existential threat. It’s not just that you’re bored when you stop. It’s that you’re no longer sure who you are.
A few years ago, I started asking new clients, ‘What do you do when you’re not getting your hair done?’
You’d be surprised how many people pause, really pause. Some laugh nervously. Some say, ‘I don’t know’ with a kind of sad honesty. A few look confused.
That pause tells me everything. Somewhere along the way, many of us handed our identity over to what we produce.
Sit still long enough in this culture, and someone will read it as laziness. Or worse, as evidence that something is wrong with you. At its most insidious, doing nothing becomes unworthiness.
I know this one from the inside.
I don’t struggle with laziness. What I struggle with is stopping.
Most nights after work and on my days off, I’m building something — my coaching business, this podcast, the next project on the list. I’m almost always moving toward the next thing.
Sometimes I stop long enough to binge a series instead of starting any of it. I used to judge myself for that, but now I see it differently. It’s not laziness; it’s my nervous system finally waving a white flag. It’s avoidance showing up in a different costume. For people like me, stillness often has to sneak in through the back door.
I think about someone who figured this out long before I did.
I have a friend who is both an accomplished artist and musician. Years ago, another friend asked her why she only taught music lessons two days a week when she could easily teach more.
Her answer stopped the table.
She said she needed to set aside time to walk in nature, be with her family, and daydream. Just that. Daydream.
It was so honest and so confident that it made me realize something sad about myself. I had stopped doing all of those things. Looking up at clouds. Sitting still. Watching what I can only describe as Squirrel du Soleil —squirrels launching themselves through walnut trees as if they were performing for an audience.
My musician friend understood something intuitively that neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel later put into words.
In IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We), Siegel argues that we’re taught to see ourselves as isolated individuals defined by what we produce, achieve, and accomplish. But humans are more than a separate Me. We are also part of a larger We —connected to other people, our communities, and the world around us.
Why does that matter?
Because when every hour is devoted to productivity, we end up living only the ‘Me’ side of ourselves. The pauses, the daydreams, the walks, the moments that look unproductive on paper — that's where the ‘We’ side lives. It’s where we connect, reflect, and actually make meaning of our lives.
Busyness doesn't just exhaust us. It cuts us off from the fullest version of who we are.
And most of us don't even realize what we've given up.
So what exactly have we given up?
Let’s get specific.
Chapter 4- What Got Stolen —The Mind’s Hidden Work
The Default Mode Network
This is where neuroscience gets genuinely interesting.
When your brain isn’t focused on a task, it doesn’t shut down. It activates what’s called the Default Mode Network. This is where the brain processes emotions, consolidates memories, makes connections between ideas, and builds a coherent sense of self over time.
In other words, some of the most important work your brain does happens when it appears to be doing nothing.
When I was fifteen, I woke up one night and looked out the window at a full moon. I sat there long enough for my brain to quiet and begin moving in a different direction. Within ten minutes, I had written a sonnet. Not because I was trying to. Because I had stopped doing everything else, and my mind finally had room to go somewhere beautiful.
I don’t think I could do that today. Not because I’ve lost the ability, but because I’ve lost the conditions.
The fifteen-year-old who wrote the poem had something I’ve slowly given away: unstructured time with no agenda and no device telling her where to look next. That’s not nostalgia. It’s neuroscience. The Default Mode Network needs stillness to activate, and we’ve engineered stillness almost completely out of our lives.
It happened gradually, and we called every step of it progress.
What the Gaps Used to Give Us
Think about where you’ve had your best ideas. Most people don’t say ‘at my desk.’ They say the shower, a walk, a long drive, or just before sleep.
Those are Default Mode Network moments.
The architecture of daily life used to create these moments automatically. Waiting rooms with nothing to read. Commutes with no signal. Slow Sunday afternoons with nowhere to be. No one called those moments valuable, but they were doing something essential. They helped us process our experiences, tie loose ends, and let our minds wander far enough to come back with something worth keeping.
We gradually replaced those spaces with things that felt like upgrades. Waiting rooms now have Wi-Fi. Commutes stream podcasts and music. Sunday afternoons have endless entertainment.
Every gap filled, every pause covered.
And the brain that depended on those gaps stopped getting what it needed.
What Phones Actually Did
The smartphone didn’t just fill the remaining gaps. It made having gaps feel uncomfortable.
Apple’s Screen Time data found that Americans pick up their phones about 96 times a day. That’s once every ten minutes. Pew Research found most people check their phones within minutes of waking.
I’m guilty of it myself.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, reach for my phone, and immediately start listening to political podcasts. As you can imagine, that does wonders for relaxation.
I watch people at restaurants and family dinner tables with their phones sitting beside them, waiting for the next interruption. Eyes drift downward instead of toward each other. Conversations become fragmented, and attention gets divided across the table.
In my own life, I barely read books anymore. I used to love reading. Somewhere along the way, social media and streaming started occupying the space that books once filled. The same thing happened with music. Music used to be woven into every day of my life. I’ve made a conscious effort to bring it back, and I notice the difference immediately.
Reading and listening to music create exactly the kind of wandering mental space that feeds the Default Mode Network.
But the deeper issue isn’t distraction. It’s interruption.
Researcher Gloria Mark found that it can take more than twenty minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. Most of us interrupt ourselves constantly. We rarely experience sustained attention.
In fact, to write and record this podcast, I put my phone on airplane mode. Otherwise, it would never get finished.
The phone has made restlessness feel normal. We have become uncomfortable with our own inner experience. The phone becomes the relief valve, and every time we reach for it, we reinforce the idea that stillness is something to escape.
The Grief and Joy Piece
There's something even more tender underneath all of this.
The unscheduled moments aren't just where we have our best ideas. They're where we actually feel our lives.
Grief needs space to move through us. Joy requires us to slow down enough to register it. Some of the most important emotional experiences of being human — gratitude, wonder, love, mourning — happen in the pauses.
When we fill every pause, we don't just stay busy.
We stay slightly numb.
Brené Brown writes about this in Atlas of the Heart. She describes what she calls foreboding joy — the tendency to brace against good moments because fully feeling them feels vulnerable.
But the most important thing she says is: we cannot selectively numb emotion.
When we numb grief, loneliness, and fear, we also numb joy, gratitude, and connection. The busyness that protects us from feeling bad also prevents us from fully feeling good.
This is where Tricia Hersey's work becomes important.
Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, argues that rest is not a luxury or a reward for productivity. It’s a human need.
And what I love most about her definition of rest is that it isn’t limited to sleep.
Rest can be creativity. Laughter. Time with people you love. Seeking out beauty. Learning something simply because it interests you. Watching squirrels launch themselves through walnut trees on a Tuesday afternoon.
All of it counts.
All of it restores.
When I stop — really stop — it doesn't always feel like relief. Sometimes I feel lonely or sad. Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to look forward to.
I've sat with that long enough now to understand what it means.
It means the stillness is working.
Not because it feels good, but because it's finally allowing the feelings that motion was managing to come forward.
And as uncomfortable as that can be, it's also the only way through.
Rest isn't the absence of productivity.
It's the presence of yourself.
Chapter 5- The Reframe, Getting Back into Your Own Life
We need to completely invert the way we talk about wasting time. Because I don’t think most of us actually know what it means anymore.
Staring out a window is not a waste of time. Sitting outside listening to nature is not a waste of time. Playing with the dogs is not a waste of time. Putting on newly released music on a Friday evening and simply listening — not cooking to it, not cleaning to it, just listening — is not a waste of time.
These are the moments the Default Mode Network has been waiting for all week. These are the moments Tricia Hersey is talking about when she says rest is a human right. These are the moments Brené Brown means when she reminds us that we have to stop numbing long enough to actually feel our lives.
Scrolling, on the other hand — mindless, reflexive, filling-the-gap scrolling — is usually the real-time waste.
And I say usually because I want to be fair.
Sometimes I find a TED Talk that changes the way I think. Sometimes I fall down the rabbit hole of dog grooming videos that make me laugh. Sometimes I find a hair video that sparks creativity.
The difference isn’t the platform.
The difference is intention.
Did you choose it, or did you simply fall into it?
Presence, for me, can be as simple as standing in the shower and listening to the sound of the running water. It can be listening to my client — not just to the words, but to the tone underneath them. It can be noticing my mind has finally grown quiet. It can be eating something because it nourishes me, not out of emotion.
I’m still learning that last one.
Here’s the reframe: presence is the product.
Not the thing you produce while you’re present. The presence itself.
The difference between wasting time and spending it isn’t activity versus inactivity. It’s whether you are actually inside your own experience or running from it.
One leaves you emptier than you started.
The other gives you something back.
Being Mode vs. Doing Mode
We’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along.
A framework from Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy helps explain.
It’s the distinction between two mental modes: Doing mode and Being mode.
Doing mode is goal-oriented, future-focused, and constantly evaluating the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It’s the mode I’m in when I run my salon, build my business, record podcasts, answer emails, and get everything done on my work to-do list. It’s essential. Without it, nothing gets built, finished, or moved forward.
The problem isn’t Doing mode itself. The problem is that many of us have forgotten there’s another option.
The Being mode is different.
It’s present. Experiential. Not measuring, not evaluating, or planning.
It’s the shower. The music. My client’s voice. The squirrels launching themselves through the walnut trees while nature does the rest of the talking.
I notice Doing mode in my body before I notice it in my mind.
Almost every day I catch myself taking a deep breath — not intentionally, but because I realize I’ve been holding my breath, or breathing so shallowly that my body finally takes over and demands more.
That breath feels like my nervous system tapping me on the shoulder and saying,
“Hey, you’ve been gone for a while. Come back.”
Being mode feels good.
My mind gets quieter. My body relaxes. I settle.
And yet, I still default back to Doing mode the moment there’s something on the list.
Researchers Lyddy and Good describe two related experiences they call Entanglement and Disentanglement.
Entanglement happens when we become completely absorbed in Doing mode. The inner observer goes offline. We react, execute, and produce without noticing ourselves doing it.
Sound familiar? That’s most of us, most of the time.
Disentanglement is different.
You’re still doing the work. You’re still moving through the day. But a quieter layer of awareness remains present underneath it all. It’s basically two parallel layers of the mind.
You notice yourself.
You notice the breath.
You notice the moment.
The awareness is available to almost anyone. It’s not a personality type. It’s a practice. The more often you return to Being mode, the easier it becomes to access.
You don’t need an hour of meditation or a retreat in the mountains.
You simply need practice in tolerating the pause long enough for awareness to return.
That’s the whole practice.
Attention As a Resource
The philosopher William James wrote in 1890 that the ability to voluntarily bring back wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.
Today, we call that attentional control.
Like any resource, it can be depleted with overuse and replenished with rest.
When our attention is constantly fragmented by notifications, scrolling, podcasts, and interruptions, we slowly lose the ability to choose where our minds go.
Eventually, our attention belongs to whoever is competing for it most aggressively.
So, what do we do?
We don’t need to delete apps or become monks.
But we could try a small experiment.
Once this week, create a block of time with no agenda, no productivity goal, and no self-improvement project attached to it.
Go for a walk without listening to anything.
Sit with your coffee and do nothing else.
Let yourself be bored on purpose.
Then pay attention to what surfaces.
Coming Back to Yourself
Remember Siegel's MWe — the idea that Me and We were never meant to be separate?
The productive self. The scheduled self. The self whose worth seems tied to performance.
That isn’t the whole self. It’s only the part we’ve been trained to display.
The rest of you lives in the pauses. Siegel calls it integration. You can't integrate a self that never stops performing. The empty moment isn’t a threat; it’s where the rest of you lives.
I know sitting in stillness can feel frightening, but it won’t break you.
When I finally slowed down, the loneliness came forward. The grief came forward. The questions I'd been too busy to ask came forward.
It wasn't comfortable. But it didn't break me.
In fact, it gave me something back. Stillness takes courage. And like any muscle, it grows stronger with use. Eventually, you stop tolerating the stillness and begin to crave what it gives you.
I am worthy of rest. Not after the list is finished —now. Because the list is never finished.
I’m worthy now.
As I am.
And so are you.
You can't get back the time that's already gone. But you can step back into the time you still have.
Not to optimize it. Not to improve it. Simply to live inside it. To become the MWe you already are.
That's The Fullest Empty Life. And it was yours the whole time.
Thank you for listening to The Original Self Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated with you and you feel ready to explore your own growth, you can learn more about working with me in the episode notes of this podcast.
I’ll see you next time.
