The Myth of Urgency

Why everything feels urgent — and why almost nothing is

Last week, I found myself somewhere I haven’t been in a long time: complete dissociation.

Nothing had gone terribly wrong. From the outside, my life looked full, even good. But inside, something was starting to shut down.

I could feel it in my body before I could name it, that subtle tightening, the sense that everything on my plate suddenly carried the same weight. Emails, conversations, decisions, loose ends. It all started to feel critically important, like I couldn’t set anything down without something else collapsing.

So I did what my nervous system has done for most of my life.

I left.

Not physically, but internally. I stopped listening to myself. I stopped noticing the quiet signals coming from my body that I was tired, that I was overwhelmed, that I felt disconnected from myself and from my partner.

I couldn’t feel anything: not joy, not sadness, not connection. I was short-tempered in my relationships, snapping at my partner and feeling rushed in moments of closeness. I was doomscrolling on Instagram to distract myself. I was barely eating. Sleeping (one of my favorite things) was a chore. I felt like a caged animal in survival mode.

I slipped into that familiar state of freeze, where the only thing that matters is getting through. Just keep going. Just get it all done. You can rest later.

For years, this was my baseline. Through my PhD, through the early years of my career, through a life that looked impressive from the outside but felt strangely distant from the inside. It’s a strange state to live in, because you can function, you can produce, you can even appear successful, but you’re not really there. You’re not in your body, not in your relationships, not in your life.

So when I noticed it happening again last week, I felt frustrated. How is this happening again? Haven’t I already worked through this?

And then, underneath that frustration, something quieter surfaced: Healing is a spiral.

We don’t return to old patterns because we’ve failed. We return because there’s something new to see.

What I saw this time was urgency. Not real urgency, not life-or-death urgency, but the kind we’ve been trained to live inside of. The quiet, constant pressure that says everything matters equally, everything needs your attention now, everything is important enough to override your body.

It’s so normalized that we rarely question it. We treat emails like emergencies, deadlines like crises, productivity like survival.

And there’s a strange paradox inside it.

When everything feels urgent, the mind tells you the solution is to push harder, to work longer, to override the exhaustion and just get through the list so you can finally rest.

But the list never actually ends. New things keep coming in. The baseline keeps moving. And the deeper you get into that state, the harder it becomes to step out of it, because the urgency feeds itself.

What I’ve started to understand is that the way out isn’t to push harder. It’s to do the opposite.

To listen to the body instead of the story your mind is telling. To slow down, even when it feels counterintuitive. To remind your system, gently and repeatedly, that there is no immediate threat, that nothing in front of you is life-or-death, that you are safe.

That’s what actually allows the nervous system to regulate. And only from that place can you begin to move again in a way that doesn’t cost you yourself.

When I slowed down enough to look at it clearly, something very simple became obvious. Almost nothing in my life was actually urgent.

Urgent is taking someone to the hospital. Urgent is caring for someone in crisis. Urgent is life and death.

Answering emails isn’t urgent. Finishing a project isn’t urgent. Even the goals I care deeply about aren’t urgent in the way my body was acting like they were.

No one was going to die if I set things down for a few days. My nervous system, however, was acting like they would.

So I made a different choice.

For three days, I stopped working. I didn’t try to catch up or get ahead. I let things sit unfinished and turned my attention back to my body instead. I slept more than usual, read without a goal, sat around in a way that would have once made me uncomfortable, and let myself feel what I had been overriding.

I kept reminding myself, gently, nothing here is life-threatening. You are safe. It wasn’t productive, and it certainly wasn’t impressive, but it was regulating.

Slowly, my body began to settle. The urgency softened, the tightness eased, and my mind became clearer. My energy started to return, not in that frantic, adrenaline-driven way, but in something steadier, something I could actually sustain.

And from that place, the things that had felt so overwhelming started to look different. Not smaller, exactly, but no longer carrying that same false sense of urgency.

There’s something we’re taught, implicitly, especially in American culture, that urgency equals importance; the more something matters, the more urgently we should treat it.

But what I’m starting to understand is almost the opposite.

The things that matter most—relationships, presence, creativity, the way we move through the world—require space. They require a regulated nervous system. They require us to actually be here.

Urgency pulls us out of that. It collapses everything into the same level of importance and asks us to override ourselves in order to keep up.

And for many of us, that becomes normal. We stop noticing how disconnected we feel. We stop questioning the pace. We stop asking whether any of it actually needs to be happening this fast.

Last week reminded me of something simple, but easy to forget: Urgency is often a story, not a reality. And it’s a story we can choose not to believe.

Nothing in my life needed to be done right then. What I needed was to come back into my body, to feel again, to listen again, to remind myself that I was safe.

And when I did, everything began to move again.

Nothing had fallen apart in my absence. The work was still there. My life was still there.

But I was back inside it.

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