There’s a version of Murphy’s Law that’s held true in my house since children came into the picture. It says: the more of a rush we’re in, the more impossible at least one person’s shoe will be to find.
When my kids were smaller, nothing I seemed to try would corral the shoes, and so we would consistently find ourselves in a mad scramble to get out the door. As possibly goes without saying, these were not my finest parenting moments. I would get louder, angrier, and more rigid, and by the time we would manage to make it to where we are going – even if it was miraculously on time (which was hardly ever) – everyone was totally miserable.
When the dash involved dropping kids off, they’d tumble out of the car as frustrated and upset as I was, and I would drive off feeling guilty and stuck in this vicious cycle. Even then, I recognized that the urgency that I was enacting on everyone was only fueling more stress, and it certainly wasn’t helping things along. And yet, I couldn’t figure out how to do it differently. Life as a whole felt like a mad dash, and I felt stuck inside the race.
Meanwhile, the advice I’d hear from parenting experts about collaborating with the kids to come up with systems or dropping the rope and letting us just be late sounded okay in theory, but impossible in practice. The advice seemed designed for people with fewer children, no other obligations, or dispositionally greater patience.
The constant urgency I operated from certainly didn’t feel like a choice, but rather a sentence for my life. This is just what it feels like, I thought, to raise a family and work in the modern age. Rushed. Pressured. Stressed. In a perpetual state of urgency.
I wasn’t wrong about the modern age. Instant communication, late-stage capitalism, intensive parenting pressure, and other social forces have absolutely converged to create a culture of urgency. It’s a system that tells us that everything is crucial and there’s never enough time. I was living in this system – trying to work and parent and love in this system – but I had also become part of the system, one of its dutiful soldiers.
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I want to deconstruct urgency for a moment here because I think we need to if we want to reshape our relationship to it.
We’ve come to see urgency as the natural result of our circumstances – all of those high-pressure tasks that seem to demand our immediate response. That’s certainly what most of our work environments and social systems would try to convince us of.
In this way, we often think of urgency as a feeling that we have to respond to. I feel a sense of urgency and so I had better hurry up, do it faster, get it done. But urgency itself isn’t really the feeling. The feeling we have when we end up acting from urgency is threat.
We experience something that we care about being at stake, and we move into a threat state. What seems at stake generally falls into one of these three categories – our sense of security, our sense of approval, or our sense of control. Whenever we are operating from urgency, we perceive one of these areas is in danger.
When we feel like our security, approval, or control is threatened, we adopt a belief of urgency. A part of us says that if we hurry or hustle, we just might be able to protect what’s at risk. If I can just get these kids out the door, I’ll feel in control. If I can just get this one last project finished, I’ll feel accomplished. If I can respond quickly enough to this text, I’ll feel appreciated.
In any of these scenarios, or the infinite others that pull us into urgency, there’s a wish to to protect something – to be safe.
Our drive to protect ourselves is understandable, but when we zoom out and look at the way we are operating in our lives, many of us are spending 90 percent or more of our days in a threat state. We are walking (or running) around in a state of hypervigilance, either responding to what feels like constant threats to our security, approval, or control, or trying to anticipate when the next threat will come – and to get ahead of it.
It might be obvious to state, but operating with a nervous system in frequent threat is not good for us. It’s not even neutral. It’s downright toxic – and I don’t use that word lightly. The human body adapted to experience periodic states of threat stress (like when we were being chased), times when cortisol would spike and adrenaline would elevate. When we live day to day this way, those hormones disrupt sleep, digestion, immune function, blood sugar regulation, cardiac function, and reproductive health. When urgency becomes the baseline, the body never fully returns to safety. Without safety, it cannot truly heal, regulate, or thrive.
So most of us get this is bad. It doesn’t serve our minds or bodies. It feels pretty miserable too. And yet most of us feel trapped in operating this way. Could we be addicted to it?
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Urgency may not be addictive in the classical sense, but it can certainly have some addictive-like properties. For one, it tends to feed on itself, growing stronger and wider with every urgent response.
When I find my own urgency growing, let’s say because school just got cancelled and I’m scrambling to figure out the day, I find myself spiraling not just about the immediate issue, but suddenly about eight other things I need to do or solve. None of those other issues actually needs my immediate attention, but it can feel almost impossible to convince my now urgent brain of that fact.
We can understand this through the lens of one of my favorite psychological principles – story after state. What that means is that the physical state often comes first, followed by our thoughts. In this case, the initial disruption pulls my body into a state of threat, which means my heart is racing, my breath is shallower, and my mind is starting to move faster. Once my physiology is there, stories start to come. My mind is going to search for more things to feel anxious about, even unrelated – things that earlier when I wasn’t activated, I wasn’t thinking about at all. In this way, anxiety begets anxiety – urgency begets urgency.
And when we are in an urgent state, we respond to the mere suggestion that we can slow down as another threat. Several weeks ago I shared someone else’s Instagram reel that said something like, “POV: You realize that not everything is urgent.” Someone DM’d me to say, “But what if is???” I imagined she was very stressed. I don’t think this woman was alone, and I think we feel this way most acutely when we are living in a state of constant threat and stress.
A quick note to say that my message here isn’t that nothing is urgent. But I’ve come to believe that far, far fewer things actually warrant our urgency. The bulk of urgency is manufactured by systems, as mentioned earlier, or based on our beliefs about our own worth.
If you’re still with me and you don’t want to live in this perpetual state, let’s talk about how we start to break free.
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I’ve been working on breaking out of urgency culture for a while now, and while it’s a continual work in progress, there are few strategies that have been helpful for me.
- There’s a sentence that took me a bit of practice to fully trust, but now I live by its message. It says: there is nothing that urgency can do that a calmer nervous system can’t do better. A calmer presence will always make decisions, be more responsive, loving, and open, as well as be more effective. Starting to repeat this as a mantra when urgency was picking up has helped to strengthen my willingness to then practice some of the next few strategies.
- When you notice urgency coming on, pause for 16 seconds to do one box breath. Four counts in, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. Repeat a few times if you are willing. You will not think you have 16 seconds to do this, but unless you are an emergency responder, you do. Before you walk into the room. Before you send the text. Before you rush to the next thing on your to-do list.
- Pick one physical manifestation of your urgency and follow it for one week. For me, my shoulders lift and contract when I’m in that state. I can practice checking in on my shoulders as often as I can and then actively relaxing them. Sometimes I’ll notice that just a couple seconds later, they’ve unconsciously tightened again. That’s okay. Release again. Doing this helps you become attuned to how you are carrying urgency and, as we talked about above, reduce the physical signal to your brain that it needs to find even more things about which to stress.
- Pick one thing – the one that matters most. So much of our urgency comes from trying to prioritize multiple things at once. When my kids can’t find their shoes, my stress isn’t just my irritation with them; it’s wanting to both be an effective and loving parent and wanting to honor the time of the person I need to meet at work. When stressed, it feels like both can’t co-exist. The reality is that maybe they can’t. Accepting this and actively choosing which I value most and going with that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly delighted, but it eliminates the tension I feel – which is often ultimately where the urgency comes from (I want to do it all!). And don’t judge yourself for what you pick. Just own whatever it is.
It feels important to add that sometimes our lives are set up for urgency. Whether we chose that consciously or not (usually not), we can find ourselves in relationships or systems designed around the expectation of urgency. Often we find ourselves here when we are over-committed – so all of our values are constantly colliding in conflict with one another. When we’re in these situations, we often won’t feel truly free of urgency culture until something shifts. But what I’ll suggest is that we don’t have to wait until the circumstances change. When we start to respond even periodically without our habitual urgency, magic starts to happen. We start to feel less tolerance for getting pulled into urgency by others, and our desire to make changes in our lives to reduce that increases.
And something else begins to happen too. Shoes are still lost. School still gets cancelled. Deadlines still exist. But the emotional temperature in the room shifts. I am no longer sprinting through my own life as if it is perpetually on fire.
