Stop hurrying, find calm now

Do you recognise this pattern? ‘I’ll get this quickly done and then I’ll sit down.’ Perhaps you’ve said it today already?

Every time we rush through the present moment with the promise of rest later, we’re training our nervous system to default to hurry. We’re programming our brain to become accustomed to the frantic pace. So when the time finally comes to sit, we’re still trapped in that mode of ‘I’ll just do this, I’ll just do that, and then I’ll relax.’ The stillness never arrives.

With all the technology we have at our fingertips, we’re no longer spending hours each week scrubbing dirt out of our clothes by hand or standing next to a mangle, squeezing water from the fabric. Many of us have dishwashers. We spend less time cooking. We don’t have to mount a horse and ride for miles to deliver a message, we simply send a text. In theory, we should be swimming in free time.

Yet what has actually happened?

We do get more done, but at what cost? We find ourselves feeling busier, more anxious, and somehow more empty than ever before.

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, in 1930 predicted this peculiar problem at the beginning of the last century. He wrote:

For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem, how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.

Keynes imagined a future where we’d all be sat around, bewildered by our abundance of leisure time, uncertain what to do with ourselves. Yet, he didn’t predict something crucial about human psychology – our desire to always reach for that little bit more.

Today, even when we have free time, we rarely pause to appreciate it. Instead, we agonise about how to spend it most effectively or efficiently. We see other people doing things we’d like to do, some of them cost money, so we think- ‘I’ll work that little bit harder, and then I can go and do that nice thing.’

It used to be that only the working classes were perpetually busy whilst the wealthy enjoyed leisure. That distinction has vanished. Now we see rich people frantically busy too, aspiring for more and more. There’s always another rung on the ladder, always more to achieve, always another way to optimise.

Here’s what I believe sits beneath all this rushing about.

We find it psychologically difficult to truly choose what we want to do with our lives. We avoid committing to a direction, avoid taking meaningful steps towards what we genuinely desire.

Why? Because what if it doesn’t work out?

Most of us are terrified of really, truly going for what we want. If we give it our all and it doesn’t pan out, what are we left with? Nothing left to wish for, or so we tell ourselves. Better to keep the dream intact by never testing it against reality.

So instead of taking even small steps towards our goals and dreams, we avoid them like the plague. We keep ourselves busy with other things, useful things, urgent things, someone else’s things. We become expert self-saboteurs, stopping ourselves from getting where we actually want to be.

And here’s the heartbreaking truth at the centre of it all. We cannot control exactly how things turn out. We want certainty desperately, and yet we know that we can take action and the outcome still isn’t guaranteed. This uncertainty feels unbearable, so we choose the certainty of inaction instead.

So how do we stop hurrying?

How do we cease avoiding what we truly want?

How do we start pacing ourselves towards our actual goals rather than everyone else’s expectations?

Start by asking yourself this:

What would you want to do with your time, even if it didn’t work out the way you hoped?

What if you could take action knowing it would make your desired outcome more likely, even without guarantees? How much freer would you feel if you could act from that place, not from desperate attachment to a specific result, but from genuine alignment with your values?

The irony is this that by slowing down enough to notice what you’re actually doing and why, you create space for what matters. By releasing the illusion that certainty exists, you become free to move.

The calm you’re rushing towards isn’t waiting for you later. It’s only ever available now, in this moment, even amidst the imperfection and uncertainty of taking real steps towards what you care about.

What if you stopped hurrying, just for today?

Here is some more calm available for you

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