Are you busy, super busy, insanely busy?  Most likely when asked "how are you?", you add "busy" to your reply.  You don't have enough time and neither does anyone else.  We sacrifice relationships, health and most importantly, sleep, so we can cram more and more into each 24 hour period. (By the way, everyone get the 24 hours, no more or less.)
   

What is it about modern life that we've ended up with more to do and seemingly less time, although we have unlimited conveniences like drive-through coffee shops and instant-read thermometers.  Our busyness is ridiculous given that we spend roughly 20 percent of our time on personal computers liking, tweeting, pinning, and 30 percent of our time on our mobile devices doing the same.  The average U.S. consumer spends two hours and 42 minutes a day on mobile devices. And,  there's hours of binge watching Breaking Bad or House of Cards.

Besides the loss of sleep, which is a tragedy in itself, especially for our young, there's no time to think. Even when we "might" have a few second for an unformed thought to sneak in, like waiting in line to buy the latest flavored home-crafted Kombucha, we reach for our phones. There are no "breaks" that aren't filled.  A New York Times article(1) reports on an experiment involving 700 people where the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6-15 minutes.  Participants (64% of men and 15% of woman) began "self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think".  They had previously said they "would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt".    

We are problems solvers so when left alone with our thoughts, we have a tendency to ruminate. The focus of our thoughts may be problems, be it difficult relationships, struggles at work or the late charges on your Mastercard. To avoid the these sometimes negative thoughts, we reach for our phone to see who "likes" us on FB.  It's understandable, but ultimately harmful.  Suppressing negative or strong feelings gives them more power. This continual battle of avoiding thoughts, which the article calls "cognitive strain", can lead to a range of psychological troubles like obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, expression and panic attacks, to name a few.  There's also asthma, headaches, IBS and eczema.  

Time to think is the petri dish of creativity which breeds new ideas, allows space for brainstorming and encourages problem solving.  Studies have shown that when the mind is idle people come up with more novel uses for objects.   It's not surprising that Google gives their employees courses called "Search Inside Yourself" and "Neural Self-Hacking",  They feel this training in mindfulness frees up the employees' "mindspace".  This openness can allow for creativity to, according to the article, "intuit end users' desires and create products to satisfy them".