Coping with Burnout: Insights from Being With Busyness

Burnout, anxiety and overwhelm are all friends in the world of Inside Out. OK, burnout is more akin to Bill & Ted and overwhelm would undergo a Pixar name-change, but all of the characteristics that they represent are present in that world. Being With Busyness: Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout is by Brother Phap Huu & Jo Confino. It’s a self-help book on coping with the stressors that everyone has. My stress points are different than yours and usually revolve around people who look like me but are roughly 30 years younger. Does Being With Busyness shed new light on the issues that make us all a bit freaky?

There are peaks and valleys within Being With Busyness, some of the stories will resonate with the casual Zen curious, while some might remind readers of the annoyances they’re trying to leave behind. The book is written by the co-hosts of The Way Out Is In, a podcast whose goal mirrors the subtitle of the book. The podcast wades deeper into the Buddhist, Zen pool than Being With Busyness, but if you’re specific or vague enough then the book will suit your needs.

Brother Phap Huu is a Buddhist monk in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village in France. Jo Confino worked at The Guardian for more than two decades, is a sustainability expert and leadership coach. Together they host the podcast and are co-authors of the book. It’s presented in a similar fashion as other entry-level Buddhist or Zen book in that the chapters are bite-sized nuggets. The longest chapters are five pages long and there aren’t too many in that category. Most of them are three to four pages and balance the mix between traditional Zen parables, real-life business stories and examples from Huu’s time at the monastery. Each chapter or aspect of the chapter is proceeded by

The thing that left us lukewarm about Being With Busyness were some parts of the book authored by Confino. There were a couple of instances, that happened in quick succession, where he used the set-up; “I met this person at a sustainability conference in (Rome, Indonesia or some other exotic place)” and then goes on to complete the story about how that person should’ve dealt with it. It’s quite ironic or telling, that those instances irked me because they were about vanity, the perks of ‘feeling’ like a VIP and regulating what you can control.

Those stories only occur in one or two of the multiple dozen that he contributes to and one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch. Being With Busyness is a self-help, Zen-motivation style book that emphasizes more on directly stating contemporary examples. The alternative is spending more time on Buddhist stories, and briefly stating or even alluding to how readers can relate it to their lives. On a personal level I prefer the later, but that’s why self-help books cater to different audiences. If you’re looking for a Buddhist, Zen, self-care book on being more relaxed-and want it through a contemporary lens, this is your jam. If you want something that infers more than it implies you might want to exhale and keep on looking.

Being With Busyness: Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout is by Brother Phap Huu & Jo Confino and is available on Parallax Press.

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