I noticed it first at the dinner table.
My phone was in my hand, the TV was on, I was eating, and someone was talking to me, and I was—technically—responding.
But I wasn’t actually there.
Some part of me had slipped sideways into the comfortable blur of doing several things at once, and I hadn’t noticed until the person talking to me stopped and said: Are you even listening?
I said yes. I wasn’t.
What I understood later, sitting with the shame of that, was that the multitasking hadn’t really been about efficiency.
There hadn’t been anything urgent on my phone.
The TV wasn’t important.
I’d just been… uncomfortable.
Something in the conversation had started to move toward a topic I didn’t feel like sitting in, and my hands had found the phone before my brain had made any kind of decision.
It was automatic. That’s the part that stayed with me.
Because automatic means it’s been happening for a while.
Long enough to be a reflex.
Long enough that I’d stopped noticing the gap between what I was feeling and what I was doing about it.
Therapists see this constantly—not the occasional distraction, but the person who is never fully in one thing.
Who always has something else running. For whom stillness, and the feelings that tend to surface in stillness, is something to be quietly, efficiently avoided.
Here’s what that pattern tends to look like.
The multitasking is working—just not the way they think
Not all busyness is avoidance. Some people are genuinely productive in parallel, genuinely energized by having multiple things going at once.
But there’s a different kind of busyness—the kind that has an anxious quality to it, that fills every gap, that reaches for the next task before the current one is finished. The kind where the stillness at the end of the day doesn’t feel like rest but like something is about to surface.
That busyness has a function. It’s keeping something at a manageable distance. Grief that hasn’t been processed. Anxiety about something they haven’t been ready to look at directly. The low hum of dissatisfaction they’d have to do something about if they acknowledged it. As long as they’re busy—truly, constantly busy—those things don’t get enough air to become something they’d have to address.
The efficiency is real. But it’s doing double duty.
Staying in motion means the uncomfortable stuff never quite catches up
There’s a specific quality to the kind of multitasking that’s really about avoidance, and it’s the opposite of what it looks like on the surface.
From the outside, it looks like productivity. Someone who is always doing something, always on top of things, always engaged. From the inside, it’s a way of staying in motion without ever landing somewhere still enough for the uncomfortable stuff to catch up.
The phone during a difficult conversation. The podcast during the commute that used to be the only quiet part of the day. The work email at ten at night, not because it’s urgent, but because the alternative is lying in the dark with whatever’s been circling.
Minyoung Shin and colleagues, in research published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology, found that media multitasking is consistently linked to anxiety and avoidance coping—and that for many people, the reaching for multiple inputs at once is less about productivity and more about managing a discomfort they haven’t quite named. The multitasking isn’t causing the anxiety. It’s responding to it.
There’s always something to fix, and that’s safer than just sitting with someone
There’s often a specific shape to the way these people relate to the people around them, too.
They’re good at the helping, the doing, the problem-solving. Give them a task in a relationship, and they’re fully there—fixing the thing, handling the logistics, following through. What’s harder is simply being present. Sitting with someone who’s struggling without immediately trying to make it better. Having a conversation that doesn’t have an action item at the end.
Being useful is a way of being in a relationship while keeping a certain amount of themselves protected. The doing provides structure. The structure prevents the kind of open-ended emotional presence that might require them to feel something they’re not prepared to feel. They’re not cold people. They’re just more comfortable when there’s something concrete to do—and discomfort tends to arrive the moment there isn’t.
The quiet is where they’d have to face what’s going on
Most people who chronically multitask already know, on some level, that they’re doing it. They’ve noticed the reaching for the phone, the inability to sit through a meal without looking at a screen, and the feeling that doing nothing is somehow not allowed.
What they often haven’t connected is what the quiet would bring if they let it.
Bernard Golden, PhD, writing for Psychology Today, notes that emotional avoidance—the pattern of keeping uncomfortable feelings at bay through distraction and activity—gradually shrinks a person’s capacity to be fully present in their own life. The avoidance works in the short term. Over time, it means living at a slight remove from yourself, from other people, from the actual texture of the life you’re in.
The quiet isn’t the problem. It’s just where the things they’ve been avoiding tend to live. And as long as there’s always something else to do, they don’t have to find out what those things are.
They look fine. They’ve also stopped checking.
The most common version of this pattern isn’t dramatic. It’s not someone obviously in crisis. It’s someone who is, by every external measure, absolutely fine.
They function well. They’re productive, reliable, engaged. They show up for the people they care about. They fill their lives in ways that look full.
What’s underneath that fullness is harder to see because they’ve gotten so good at maintaining it. The truth is that they stopped checking in with themselves somewhere along the way—stopped asking what they were actually feeling, what they actually needed, what was actually wrong—because the checking-in required a pause they found uncomfortable, and there was always something else to do instead.
Being occupied and being okay are not the same thing. They’ve learned to use one as evidence of the other. And because the occupied version works well enough, the gap between those two things never quite gets examined.
The feelings find a way through regardless
Avoidance is imperfect. Things slip through.
The mood that arrives on a Sunday afternoon for no clear reason. The disproportionate reaction to something small—a minor frustration that produces a response bigger than it deserves, because it’s carrying something else that’s been waiting for an opening. The flatness that comes at the end of a productive week, when everything got done and nothing felt like anything.
These are the feelings that didn’t get managed. The ones that made it past the busyness. And they tend to be confusing, because they arrived in the wrong context—not attached to the thing that produced them, which already got buried, but free-floating, landing on whatever happened to be nearby.
The feelings don’t disappear because they weren’t attended to. They just become disconnected from their source, and that makes them harder to understand, harder to process, harder to do anything useful with.
What they’re avoiding isn’t as dangerous as it feels
This is the part that tends to shift things, when it shifts.
The feelings themselves aren’t the problem. Grief, anxiety, loneliness, dissatisfaction, fear—these are things that can be survived. Most people survive regularly without falling apart. They’re uncomfortable, but they’re not dangerous.
What makes them feel dangerous is the accumulated avoidance. The longer something has been kept at a distance, the more weight it accumulates, the more the stillness that would let it surface starts to feel like a threat. The nervous system has learned to treat the quiet as a signal that something bad is coming, because something bad is usually waiting there.
But the waiting usually makes it worse than the actual sitting with it. Most people who finally stop running from a feeling find that it’s more manageable than the years of running suggested. They don’t need to process everything at once. They don’t need a plan or a therapist or a breakthrough moment. They just need to start sitting with a little more of what’s actually happening inside them—and trust that what’s there, however uncomfortable, is something they can handle.
Because they already have been, in every other way. The competence that kept them busy, the reliability that kept everyone else okay, the steady forward motion through every hard thing—that was all real. They just happened to leave themselves out of it. And it turns out the feelings they’ve been outrunning were waiting for them to notice that they could stop.
