Managing Anxiety: The Urgency Stress Response
Written by Cassandra Currado and Michelle Garraway
“I just feel anxious all the time”. “I’m overwhelmed and I feel like I’m drowning”. “I feel like a failure”.
These are phrases we hear all too often at The Relationship Agency. The general public uses the blanket term of anxiety to refer to what might more accurately be described as a constant feeling of dread, worrying that you’re falling behind or missing deadlines, having racing thoughts about your endless to do list or whether you’ve offended someone or let them down. Anxiety is a big hairy monster that shows up in many different ways and has many different causes. A key feature of anxiety is that it takes us out of the present moment and has us focused on and worrying about the future, and less often but also the past. In this article we’re looking at how anxiety and stress relate to our sense of urgency and worry about the future, specifically when it manifests in our never ending pursuit of achievements and goals. There’s a lot of suffering that comes from the time pressures and deadlines we place on ourselves. Whether it’s getting married by a certain age, or graduating from school at a certain time, these deadlines add unnecessary stress and anxiety to our life. It’s time to remove time pressures and feelings of urgency from the equation and instead, rest in the present, gifting yourself the space to enjoy life at your own pace.
Understanding the Urgency Stress Response
When you live a life around constant looming deadlines, the sense of urgency that guides you is your stress response taking over. As a society we’ve somehow created this mutual understanding that certain life milestones happen at specific ages, including graduation, marriage, having children, and starting careers. Just as any time pressure ignites your urgency stress response, the deadlines placed on life milestones bring these same feelings of stress and anxiety. Though deadlines can motivate you to finish your work or school task, the deadlines you place on life milestones impact the simple joys of life. As you consider your future, take a moment to understand what you currently want for your life instead of blindly following a timeline of nonexistent deadlines.
You may have heard this stress response referred to before as “fight or flight”. While the definition has expanded to include fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, what these responses have in common is that they are all states that shift your autonomic nervous system out of it’s happy, calm resting place of the parasympathetic system into the sympathetic nervous system - the place that gets activated when we humans sense a threat. Both systems serve a purpose and neither is “good” or “bad”, but what is bad is when you are consistently stuck in sympathetic (the stress response state) and don’t make it back to parasympathetic (calm) very often. This is what we see when people are constantly living under looming deadlines with feelings of urgency - they are stuck in their stress response state.
Urgency = Anxiety + Stress
It isn’t always easy to know when your urgency stress response is guiding you. When people hear the word urgent they often connect it to times of stress and emergency. However, urgency can be driven by positive emotions, like the exhilarations of love, or negative emotions, like anxiety. In both scenarios, urgency is a stress response that influences your decision-making process.
Types of Urgency
Positive Urgency
As a hopeless romantic you jump from one relationship to the next feeling like you’ve found “the one” every time. You can’t wait to put a label on the relationship even though you know nothing about them yet. These feelings are your attachment style taking over, driving your urgency to rush into relationships.
Negative Urgency
You’re feeling anxious because you’re 28 years old and planned to be married with children by now. As you’re still single living with your parents you feel anxious about falling behind your envisioned life plan. In this case your urgency stress response comes from feeling unfulfilled with your own life through the rigid deadlines you created.
A Life Bound with Uncertainty
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic began what seemed to be the ‘falling dominoes’ of life uncertainties. Globally we experienced a pandemic, human rights movements, riots, protests, and wars. With millions of people passing away, no one knew what their life would look like now 4 years later. Now post-pandemic, many people feel like they’ve missed out on the past 4 years of their life. They never got to take that trip to Europe, they graduated from college in their bedroom, or they missed out on their dream wedding. So much can happen in 4 years, yet for many their life was put on hold.
With life returning somewhat back to normal, people are ready to live their life as they intended. However, as people realize their life doesn’t look how they originally planned they’re now experiencing feelings of anxiety, stress and urgency. Due to the bumps along the path, you may not have met those career, relationship or life goals you envisioned. Though this is bound to bring stress and anxiety, I can assure you there’s much more time ahead of you than it feels.
Reevaluate Deadlines and Timelines
“I have to be married by 25 or I’m going to be alone forever”
“I just graduated college and need to find a job in my field now or everything was a waste.”
If you haven’t said these exact words you’ve likely thought of some version of them. In general, having a deadline for a goal can help with motivation and persistence, but not when it comes to life milestones.
Through my research I came across a list titled, “Here’s How Your Life Should Look,” outlining when you should complete each life milestone, and included everything from a first kiss to retirement. Though you may want to experience all the ‘typical’ life milestones, there’s no need to place unnecessary time pressures on these experiences. The way our society functions and the values people hold are constantly evolving. This alone should have you questioning the legitimacy of these life milestone deadlines.
Oftentimes we let other people’s timelines influence our understanding of what we actually want. Whether it's through others’ picturesque social media posts, or the nagging comments from family members, we constantly experience pressures that cause our urgency stress response to take over. Maybe you’re rushing into your next relationship so you can be married by 25. Maybe it took you an extra year to graduate college and now you’re anxious about how this will affect your other goals. It’s time to re-evaluate your life milestones and how they fit with your current values, instead of living your life based on the ideals of others.
How to Start Living with Less Urgency
Though you may think you have an idea of how your life will look in 10 years, the truth is no one knows 100% what's going to happen. Maybe you’ll end up in a completely different career, become a foster parent, or embrace the single life and backpack around the world. This uncertainty can feel uncomfortable, but in actuality it opens you up to far more opportunities. Unfortunately, we tend to cling on to the stories we have created instead of reality, blocking us from even being aware that other amazing opportunities and experiences exist outside of what we’ve decided MUST happen for us. The therapists at The Relationship Agency have shared that a lot of the work that happens in individual therapy has to do with distress tolerance - the ability to sit with hard or uncomfortable feelings before or instead of acting on them. Tolerating the uncertainty of what will happen in life is a key skill to reducing anxiety, stress, and that sense or urgency.
Have you ever stopped to truly reflect on how and why you decided on your goals and timelines? Your therapist will couple distress tolerance with exploring the stories you hold about what you “should” be doing and achieving. Examining these stories in a new way, with the new perspectives offered in therapy, will give you insight into the anxiety you hold about not checking those items off your list. Once you have that insight you can move from just tolerating the distress to lessening it or even having it go away completely. This all takes work, and individual therapy is a supportive environment with a trained professional who can help you move through the process and breakthrough the other side to a life with less urgency, anxiety, and stress.
“Many people become so obsessed with being ‘right’ about their life that they never end up actually living it.”
~ Mark Manson, American self-help author
Managing Feelings of Urgency
Getting to a life with less urgency and anxiety doesn’t happen overnight. It’s usually a long process as you start to build distress tolerance, gain insight into your personal beliefs, and being to shift your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours toward a life lived with more presence and value alignment. That’s a life with less anxiety and stress, and more authenticity and calm. While you’re walking the path toward less anxiety and urgency, there are things you can start doing now to manage your feelings of urgency.
Notice where these feelings of urgency are coming from
This starts with a noticing in the body. What happens in your shoulders, neck, or stomach when you feel urgency? Does that feeling ever go away? Bring awareness to your body and feelings so that you have a baseline to work with.
Explore the stories you’ve created about the deadlines, milestones, and timelines you feel you need to achieve.
What do these life milestones mean to you?
From who did you learn that these things are important?
Do you want these experiences for yourself or does the want come from social pressures?
What do you imagine will happen if you don’t achieve these things?
Validate the part of you that feels threatened
Does your fear and worry makes sense to you?
Based on what you explored in your story, can you understand why you think these things are important?
If you understand the fear, let yourself know you see it and it makes sense.
Take your time and experience life at your own pace
All of the therapists at TRA value mindfulness and presence as key to living fulfilling and calm lives.
Explore a meditation practice, or start by simply adding mindful moments to your day where you pause and notice what’s around you in real time.
Get Additional Support - work through your anxieties or heal your past to understand what you want in relationships through our individual therapy services.
Life is filled with twists and turns, making it nearly impossible to know how your life will turn out. Though it's wise to create life goals, it’s just as important to be flexible with your goals. Remove those rigid deadlines from your life decisions and give yourself the space to have fun. You have one life to live, and it’s better spent when you take the time to enjoy each step along the way.
Meeting with a therapist can help you make sense of what is important to you so you can prioritize your time and enjoy your life. Book a free 20-minute individual or couples consultation with one of our skilled therapists today by clicking here.
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