The day after I graduated college, a deep anxiety filled my belly. I had a degree in theatre, $50k in student loans, no place to live, no health insurance, and no job opportunities on the horizon. 

The day before my graduation, my life was figured out. I lived with my best friend, I had an on-campus job, my bank account was refreshed quarterly with funds (like magic!), and I had the satisfaction of having worked on dozens of meaningful projects with classmates who felt like colleagues.

Graduation created a before and an after. The after felt apocalyptic. Overwhelming. Impossible to navigate. Anxiety became my new normal, and a deeply rooted sense of lack filled my body like light filling a room.

What Hurry Sickness Feels Like

In the wake of this devastation, I started to feel hurried all the time. There was a sense of urgency to rid myself of the sense of lack, and it seemed that in order to do that, I had to move in dozens of directions at once. I had to find a new place to live, figure out how to make money, budget my income so that it supported my expenses (which seemed to quadruple overnight), and figure out a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Each time I made progress in one direction, it seemed I had fallen behind in something else. No matter how quickly I moved, I was always behind. I was behind in my financial needs, behind in my needs to experience purpose and meaning, behind in my relationship goals, behind in the intelligence needed to properly navigate this adult space, behind in success.

I had no role models to speak of. Most of my friends were in the same boat as me; my mom had been bedridden for 13 years at that point, sick in bed and sequestered from the outside world; I hadn’t spoken to my dad for many years at that point in my life; I was cut off from my extended families; I had no mentors outside of college. I felt totally and utterly alone on my quest to figure out these many dimensions of my life, and I felt in a giant hurry to get it all done.

What Is Hurry Sickness?

Looking back, I can come to call this Hurry Sickness, which is what happens when I believe I lack something in life. The sense of lack creates a sense of urgency, which articulates itself in the speed at which I do things. When I feel rushed or hurried, it’s because I feel compelled to figure things out, to solve problems quickly. As a result, I talk fast, I read fast, I write fast, I think fast, I move fast. Everything in my life is fast.

There are implications of this, of course. When I look back at my old journals for instance, I can remember the speed at which I wrote different entries. The fast-written entries strike me as banal and superficial. There are holes in the logic, the points meander, I tend to disagree with a lot of what I wrote when I look back at it later on. By contrast, the journal entries I wrote at a slow, metered pace seem to hold up better over time. They are more deeply thought through. Their points make sense. The writing is more melodic, more rhythmic. The logic is sound, the thinking more precise.

When I talk fast, I can see other peoples’ eyes glaze over, as if they struggle to keep up. It takes me 100 words to communicate a point that could more succinctly be expressed in a sentence, if only I had stopped and allowed my mind to wander and think through my point before jumping to express it.

When I move quickly, I overlook key details and fail to think things through. I miss what could be easily foreshadowed,  instead letting my eagerness drive me to doing things in inefficient ways. For instance, I might jump to volunteer for a project at work, feeling pressured by my inner sense of urgency, thinking that my eagerness will keep me safe and put me on the fast track to promotion. In reality, I jump at the chance to do something that I don’t have time to do, that I’m not the most qualified to undertake, and that results in a low quality outcome at a high expense to me and those I work with. 

When I read fast, I become easily distracted, often resulting in my need to slow down and re-read things over and over again because I have failed to really absorb the meaning.

Solutions for Hurry Sickness

In my rush to resolve my sense of lack, I create more problems for myself. Doing things at a hurried pace comes with its own baggage. I exhaust myself easily, I perform below my potential, and I’m not able to enjoy the moment I’m in because I’m eagerly wishing for the following moment  to feel less strenuous than the present.

Over the last several years, I have become more interested in this sense of rush, and have come across five helpful ways of relating to it that make life calmer and more even-paced. 

Think Big

For me, feeling hurried goes hand in hand with obsessing over the minute details of what needs to get done. Sometimes I will survey my to-do list and find that there are 20 outstanding things that need to be moved forward on today. Immediately, I feel rushed to complete them. In reality, I might be taking a shower or waking up in the morning or making myself a cup of coffee, but internally I’m juggling a hundred different balls, struggling to keep everything airbound.

With practice, I’ve learned to group my smaller tasks into bigger categories, moving from an obsession with details to bigger picture thinking. The same amount of things still need to get done, but they’re easier to conceptualize and manage psychologically when they’re grouped together in two or three main categories. Combined together, they no longer feel massive or quite as overwhelming. I can approach each category by taking a deep breath and reminding myself to slow down before I speak or write or move forward on some task.

“How Can I Make This Fun?”

This is a question I like to ask myself when I go to do things that aren’t innately enjoyable. I’ve come to terms with the fact that chores are a feature of life. I cannot opt out of doing things I don’t naturally like to do. And I’ve seen that doing those things has a future payoff, so while I may not like doing them at the moment, I know they will lead to positive outcomes.

When I ask myself, “How can I make this fun?” I engage my creative thinking to reimagine my to-do list in ways I haven’t seen it before, in ways that will possibly make my life richer and fuller.

Make Time for Your Mind to Wander

Perhaps the most useful thing to ease my sense of hurriedness is to carve out time for my mind to wander. This entails putting aside whatever other mental work is on the docket and allowing my mind to go where it wants to go. Letting my mind wander is not the same thing as scrolling on my phone or working through a mental challenge. It’s time where I nurture trains of thought that start with, “I wonder...,” or, “How does…,” or, “Maybe…”. It’s time where I purposefully remove the constraints I usually have on my thinking processes, and allow my mind to untether itself, like a helium balloon floating far, far away.

Slow Down

When I do things in a rush, I rarely think them through before acting. I don’t consider my point before talking. I don’t think through a task before engaging. I don’t re-read a sentence before writing the next one.

To counter this, I have needed to teach myself to slow down. This means I stop and consider what point I’m trying to make before opening my mouth to speak. It means pausing after a sentence to leave space in the room for others to take in what I’ve said. It means reading each sentence I write before writing another. It means pausing to take in the entire task before beginning. It means checking in with myself while reading or listening to someone to ensure I’ve captured the point that was intended to be communicated.

There are ancillary benefits to slowing down. Not only does it help with calming the sense of rush, it keeps overwhelm at bay. It’s much easier to feel overwhelmed when I don’t know my next step forward, when I can’t see the finish line, when I’m merely hoping that things will turn out okay instead of engaging in a way that makes positive outcomes more likely.

Dismantle False Beliefs

This is the most abstract solution, but also the most critical. This solution is an attempt to reengineer beliefs, which are at the root of behaviors. In other words, if we want true and lasting behavioral change, we will need to address the underlying belief systems that fuel them.

Beliefs are layered. We may be able to address the most superficial layer of a belief with satisfaction, but underneath it is a deeper blanket that must also be addressed to satisfaction. In this way, behaviors are actually easier to reprogram because they are a matter of repetition; to completely reprogram a belief is a philosophical undertaking, which potentially takes much longer.

In this case, a sense of lack is at the root of feeling hurried all the time. This sense of lack arises when we believe to be incomplete, when we feel separate from abundance, when we feel like the world is withholding from us the things that will meet our needs. When we ask ourselves, “what proof do I have that I am separate from the world?”, we begin the process of dismantling this belief. This process completes itself when we have addressed the layers of our belief and have arrived at the incontrovertible answer that we are a part of the inseparable fabric of existence, not separate from it. 

The implications of this are profound. If we are an inseparable part of existence, there can be no such thing as lack, because everything is already a part of existence. Existence itself is not lacking, it contains all elements of reality within it. Therefore, to believe that something is lacking within us is a fallacy.

Simply reading these words is not enough to dismantle the belief in lack. Only a process of inquiry--of uncovering the different facets and layers of the belief, and employing the wisdom of logic and experience, will produce lasting change in the belief system that underlies the feeling of being rushed all the time. 

Is There Life After Hurry Sickness?

It’s now been 12 years since I graduated college. Through a combination of hard work and luck, I have been able to pay off my student loans, get a mortgage, maintain a loving long term relationship, train myself up in marketable skills, and experience meaning and purpose. 

There is, of course, still work to be done. I am not completely satisfied with how I make my living, I’d like more discretionary time, and I’m looking forward to more abundance. 

But it truly blows my mind to think back on the day after my college graduation, at the road I saw ahead of me at the time, at how impossible it all seemed; and to compare that with my present life where most of my needs are met regularly, and where by and large, my life is great.

Feeling hurried is still my default. It’s been practiced so much that I’d be silly to think it would disappear. But I can feel the tides changing. I can feel more calmness, more precision, more intention filling my days. I can see the benefits in how other people regard me, the quality with which I am able to accomplish things, the amount of things that I’m able to get done, the opportunities that are presenting themselves to me.

By targeting both my behaviors and my beliefs, I am able to wake up feeling calmer than yesterday. My rubric of success is not whether today is perfect, it’s simply that today is better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be better than today.

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