The Business Of Happiness · Tarryn MacCarthy

#410 - Why There Isn’t Enough Time In The Day

April 8, 2026·28 min·2 clips

Dr. McCarthy left work early for the first time, sat in her orange Jeep at 4:30pm, and immediately burst into tears because she had no idea what to do.

The day is not the whole problem. The host starts with women doctors and dentists who feel disconnected, overwhelmed, exhausted, unclear, or disillusioned by the lives they are living. She does not treat that as ordinary scheduling stress. She moves under the complaint, toward chronic fight-or-flight and the way it changes the feel of time. Time speeds up. When cortisol and adrenaline keep firing through the month, the year, and even the decade, she says executive function is harder to reach. Clarity gets foggy. Appreciation for the life right in front of you can slip out of view. Then she gets into the stories that make busyness feel almost required. If you stop showing up at full capacity, will everything fall apart? Will people be let down? Will love and appreciation disappear with your output? That fear gives busyness a strange kind of safety. It also becomes a way to define yourself, because asking who you are without the doing can feel worse than staying overbooked. She brings it back to her own experiment with not being busy for an hour and a half, after a life packed with work, kids, business, hobbies, workouts, and scheduled days. The invitation is plain: test whether life really collapses when you slow down. Maybe rest is part of getting your best self back. The people who need you need you rested too.

As heard by us

A direct reset for clinicians who have mistaken constant motion for responsibility.

This episode looks at how chronic busyness can take over the body, cloud judgment, and distort time, especially for high-achieving clinicians who have learned to treat stress as normal. Dr.

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Press play if your day keeps shrinking no matter how early you start.

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