Undoing the Trauma of Urgency

In movies, time is often used as a narrative device to create tension.

Time is running out. There’s a race against the clock. There’s no time to lose.

In most sports contests, players don’t only compete against each other — they also contend with the limits of time.

Many CrossFit WODS are done “for time” with a time cap, creating a scenario where you’re both racing the clock and time is running out.

The construct of time as a limiter for an activity can help us narrow our focus and eliminate distraction, but at what cost to our physical and mental well-being?

The Trauma of Urgency

In a recent episode of The Astrology Podcast, astrologer Britten LaRue spoke to how the urgency of modern life “privileges the demands of clock time over the rhythms of the body.”

She mentioned that she hears from many people about the trauma of being told to hurry up, the impact of constantly being told you’re not fast enough, that you need to stop what you’re doing to get out the door.

The trauma of constantly being told to hurry up.

I hadn’t thought about it in this way before, and it deeply resonated.

As a person who naturally tends to move at a slower pace, this has been a recurring theme in my life.

The Time Tension in the Body

That “time tension” that movies use a plot device often lives within us, especially when we’re trying to keep pace with the world around us. The speed of everything is so fast, that we often don’t give ourselves the space in time we need to process and move through.

The constant pressure of urgency — whether real or manufactured — can wreak havoc on our systems.

Constantly monitoring the clock and calendar is a head game; it uses cognitive resources which we might otherwise use for more constructive work. When we are living so much from our heads — in the “figuring out” of time — we lose connection with our bodies.

And it is through our bodies that we experience time — and life.

The Body Lives in the Now

When we get caught up in the construct of urgency, we start fast forwarding in our minds to live in the future, or we try to deconstruct the past.

Your mind can take you to the past or the future. In your mind, you can bend time and travel to other points in time. But your body can only be in one place in time. It’s always “now” in the body.

Sometimes, time constraints are real and necessary. Unlimited time is often the enemy of creative work and productivity in general.

That said, urgency should be the exception, not the rule.

The body will always seek to return to homeostasis.

When I feel rushed beyond my normal pace for too long, my body tends to shut down until I reconnect with it. Any number of issues will arise that force me to slow down. I’ll get sick. My back will seize up. I’ll feel a range of physical pains. I’ll lose mobility and range of motion.

It’s as if the body is calling out for attention, bringing me back home to it to come back to what it needs.

Undoing the Time Trauma

To undo the time trauma, give yourself permission to embrace your natural pace.

We need days in each week — and sometimes a span of several weeks — when we do not accede to the demands of urgency placed on us, where we linger a little longer between tasks, where we take our time.

There’s nothing so important that it can’t wait, except maybe your health and wellness.