I Sat With Three Clients Who All Believed Time Had Run Out

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Each week, I write about perfectionism, the inner critic, and how to find more peace and joy in a world that often demands too much. If you’re a high achiever, a sensitive striver, or simply want more ease in your life without giving up your ambition, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

In this week’s essay, I’m exploring that rather annoying feeling that time is running out—that you should be further along, have figured something out by now, or need to hurry up and make something happen.

Sound familiar?

I recently had an experience that is not so uncommon anymore: conversations with three clients who were all struggling with the same dilemma—a sense of time urgency.

In one way or another, each felt that they had missed the boat. Regardless of their actual age, they were too old now. If they were going to make a life pivot, something had to happen in the next six months, or else all that time would have been wasted.

What was disconcerting about these conversations is that I, too, had been feeling something similar, even if for completely different reasons.

One woman felt that she had sacrificed almost two decades of her life to a company that would never, in her opinion, give her the promotion she deserved for all of her ingenuity and talent. Yet she kept sticking around, convinced that if she just kept proving herself, eventually they would see her value.

Now in her 50s, she believed there were no other options for her in the entire world—whether that meant doing something entrepreneurial, working for another flagship company, or even taking a year off to figure things out.

To her, time had run out.

A man in his early 30s believed that, despite his three degrees, he had made a mistake by choosing academia because his paycheck would never attract a life partner. Not only did he believe he had to be in awesome physical shape, he felt he needed the awesome paycheck, too.

He needed the brains, body, and budget.

Yet his luck on the Tinder dating app was perpetually disappointing—also not an uncommon complaint—which only reinforced his belief that he had to become the “whole package” before someone would choose him.

And another woman in her 40s, working for several nonprofits and doing amazing work, was convinced that her life choices in doing good were leading her toward poverty in old age. She wasn’t convinced that focusing on what she really loved to do would be enough to carry her through to a comfortable retirement.

The numbers didn’t add up. So she was in a constant scramble, chronically scattered, and carrying a lot of regret about choices she had already made.

Three different stories. One shared belief: if I don’t hurry up and do something, I’ve wasted my life.

This experience of time urgency is so pervasive—and reinforced socially, economically, and technologically—that it would almost be unusual not to feel the pressure of time.

I’ve seen versions of this described as hurry sickness, addiction to busyness, and hustling for worthiness. Others wear it as a badge, embrace multitasking and take pride in how much they can get done in a short amount of time, even when the tradeoffs are sleep, relationships, and overall well-being.

They are constantly pleasing, perfecting, performing, and producing.

They might not consider themselves perfectionists, but they recognize themselves in compulsive striving. They’re proud that they can listen to a podcast or audiobook while driving to work or taking a walk. There is always something else to learn, improve, finish, or optimize.

Their minds are never at rest.

And neither are their bodies.

With all the to-do lists and important and necessary tasks, self-care falls to the bottom of the priority list. And what happens when our heads become disconnected from our bodies?

We stop noticing the signals.

Digestive problems. Headaches. Back and neck pain. Fatigue. Insomnia. The accumulated physical wear and tear of always being “on.”

Decades ago, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman popularized the concept of the “Type A” behavior pattern, characterized by qualities such as competitiveness, impatience, hostility, and a persistent sense of time urgency. Later research complicated that picture, suggesting that certain components—particularly hostility and impatience—were more consequential for health than ambition or achievement striving itself.

The Type A label is somewhat outdated now despite our attachment to it. Contemporary personality research more commonly uses models such as the Five-Factor, or Big Five, framework: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

But you don’t need to identify as “Type A”—or neurotic—to recognize the feeling of being rushed, irritable or moody.

From my vantage point, if anything, the pressures are even greater today. We can become so accustomed to overriding ourselves that we miss the signals screaming at us to slow down, take a rest, and spend time relaxing with people we love.

As I listen to my clients, there is a part of me saying:

I get it. I feel you. I totally know what you mean. Oh, me too.

If I could reverse-engineer my life, I would have made different choices along the way. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I had the life experience to show me.

And that may be one of the cruelties of time urgency: we judge our earlier choices with knowledge we could only have acquired by living through them.

It is very hard to interrupt this cycle.

When we’re busy, we’re active. When we’re active, we believe we’re being productive. And being productive can easily translate into feeling worthy.

Yet as I listened to these lovely high achievers—people who want to do good things in the world, make meaningful contributions, and be recognized for their efforts—I noticed something else they were missing, although they weren’t necessarily aware of it:

The experience of joy.

It took a twenty-something med student to name it for me. She called this part of her “Mooch.” We identified this as an inner “joy thief” (one of five inner critic types I write about in The Perfectionist’s Dilemma) because it mooched all the fun she could be having in medical school—making friends, enjoying a new city, and simply experiencing this chapter of her life.

But that inner joy thief didn’t suddenly appear in graduate school. It had accompanied her through much of childhood and adolescence, in part because she had grown up in an environment that prioritized achievement over connection. By the time she reached me, the stakes just felt higher.

That’s the thing time urgency actually steals. Not time. Joy.

Many of us have inner joy thieves, I’ve discovered. What I have found helpful is to start by naming the underlying motivation—or fear—that drives the sense of time urgency, and then becoming present to the actual felt experience of it. Ask yourself:

What does time urgency look like for you?

How do you show up in the world when you feel it?

Where do you feel it in your body?

What do you say to yourself?

When did you learn this habit?

How do you think it serves you? And how does it hurt you?

What do you imagine would happen if you slowed down?

How might your life be different without this constant sense of urgency?

What would you like to experience instead?

How do you experience joy?

This reflection is important because once you can see what is happening, you can begin to find a path forward. Noticing this doesn’t dissolve it. But it’s a place to start. Three steps, in order:

And, oh how the third step is often the hardest! If you’ve spent years rewarded for busyness, rest doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like falling behind or an intolerable guilt-trip.

The nurture step isn’t the soft option here. It takes permission and it takes effort, in that order. I’d add in a generous dose of courage, too: the courage to resist the nervous system’s habit of jumping back on the hamster wheel.

Imagine the energy that might be freed up to focus and feel into what you actually want to invite into your life—the partner, the career, the wonder—rather than stacking your life with more work, more degrees, and more hacks.

To nurture is to care.

For yourself.

As you would for anyone you deeply care about in your life.

I’ve seen what’s on the other side of this. One client in her late twenties calls herself “a great manifestor” now—not because her life is problem-free, but because she’s learned to redirect her attention toward what she wants instead of rehearsing what could go wrong. Another client, working through a serious health crisis and real isolation, made self-compassion his anchor. He made radical changes in his relationship with alcohol, diet, and physical well-being—and started using a word for his self-care he’d never used before: tenderness. That word became the doorway to a community of real friends, for the first time in his adult life.

Neither of them got more time. They changed their relationship to it.

What also changed was the place from which they began making choices.

Less fear. Less proving. Less racing against an imaginary clock.

More attention to what matters. More care for their whole being.

And more room for joy.

If you’re caught in this cycle—the sense that you’re always behind, always catching up, never quite arrived—that’s exactly the work I do with clients: breaking the loop between self-doubt and self-worth, so success stops costing you the life it was supposed to build. If that’s where you are, I’d love to talk. DM me.

Paid subscriber, download a the Notice, Name & Nurture skill and watch my 8-minute video demonstrating Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) that can address time urgency.

Disclosure: How I Use AI