my mom is a notoriously slow driver. her biggest pet peeve is when she’s on the road and a car behind her gets impatient, pulls out, and zooms past, accelerating toward the light ahead. then the light goes from green, to yellow, to red, and she finds herself stopped right next to the guy who flew right by before.
this is what my mom calls hurry up and wait: hitting the gas for the hell of it, almost just to prove that you can, only to screech to a halt when you could’ve been coasting all along.
hurry up and wait is how so many of us move through life. speeding up just to slow down. slowing down just to speed up.
life moves fast, and there's an unspoken pressure to keep up with traffic, no matter how far above the speed limit. we shift ourselves into gear with the daily vanilla latte (or 3). we keep pace with minute-by-minute email checking, mistaking motion for actual progress. then there's the roadwork: projects bottleneck, timelines shift, and we're forced to a standstill.
the irony: we adjust our natural pace to keep up with everyone else, then we get antsy when things slow down long enough to take a breather. we opt into following someone else’s schedule, and it’s precisely what makes us spin out of control. we get on the roller coaster, then wonder why we feel sick.
my brain races from monday to friday, just waiting to exhale on the weekend. then on saturday afternoon, i find myself fast-forwarding through the show i dreamt of slowing down for all week. i’m so habituated to speed that i don’t even know how to enjoy the stillness i crave.
i’ve been reflecting on the drive to keep up, how i’ve contorted myself to match the pace of the world around me. there’s been this subtle hum of anxiety since i was twelve, sometimes crippling, though i didn’t have words for it until the past few years. some of it was garden-variety anxiety tied to life circumstances. but a lot of it, i now realize, i created for myself.
self-induced anxiety is the kind we opt into, the kind we perpetuate through our own habits and beliefs about our value in the world. i have a tendency to amplify my own distress, and that’s precisely what’s made me successful by the world’s standards. anxiety helps me jump out of bed, do the workout, get to the office, clack away at the keyboard. but i’m now hyperaware of the cost on my body, my mind, my relationships, and the life i’m trying to build moving forward.
self-induced anxiety shows up in a few ways. sometimes it’s agitation, urgency, the (false) belief that everything needs to be resolved right now. and sometimes it’s something quieter, a manufactured high, one whose absence i mistake for something bigger: a quiet emptiness, a lack of purpose, even a familiar depression.
last wednesday afternoon, i was exceptionally antsy and started digging into why. i looked over how i’d been moving through the day: in response mode, by choice. answering everything in front of me in real time. every slack, every email, every text. letting my focus fracture in eighty directions. i was hypervigilant, impatient, agitated, addressing everyone else’s needs even though nothing was actually urgent. we think we’re crossing things off the list, but we’re actually just generating more work, which makes us less effective overall, and drives us mad in the process.
a twenty-minute slack exchange with a dear friend and teammate was the clearest example. we went in circles over something we could’ve resolved in thirty seconds, had we waited for our call scheduled that same afternoon.
what happens when you stop responding? when you close the laptop for twenty minutes instead of pressing on? you realize nothing was as urgent as it felt. the work doesn’t keep ballooning the way you imagine it would. my urge to fix things immediately always feels productive. but it rarely is, it just costs me the patience the problem itself never demanded. if you’re anything like me, and i suspect you are if you’ve read this far, nobody holds you to the standard of responsiveness you hold yourself to. we opt into hypervigilance. and we can opt out.
another way we create our own anxiety is through caffeine, although this one's trickier. it's not just about focus and productivity, it's about mood and quality of life. i love my one cup a day, a double shot of stumptown espresso with a teaspoon (or two) of farmer's market whipped honey!
i’ve tried to go decaf a few times. the first was when i had angry breakouts on my chin during my berlin exchange. my german oma told me coffee could be the culprit, so i vowed off caffeine for nine sad months. the acne persisted, while my sense of humor was at an all-time low. the second time was because i was waking up every night at 2am, and had ruled out everything except my 8am coffee ritual. alas, i abstained again.
both times off coffee, i just felt flat. a bit moody and overall less joy in life. i resolved that my one cup of coffee was my daily antidepressant, that i needed it to keep me happy, and a $3 espresso was a small price to pay. then i heard organic olivia share a hot take on caffeine on her podcast. it went something like this: maybe the issue isn’t that we need caffeine to wake up and get moving. maybe it’s that our culture asks us to move at an unnatural pace to begin with.
perhaps i wasn’t actually sad without coffee. maybe my body’s pace is naturally slower, and my brain has interpreted being sped up on coffee as happy, and my slower, unadulterated pace as low-grade depression. this is something i’m still working through, how to enjoy my daily coffee, but on days i don’t have it, not thinking i’m spiraling into that familiar flatness. maybe i’m spending too much time comparing my natural pace to the speed of the world around me. maybe it’s okay, even safe and preferable, to take a more leisurely pace every now and again.
and here’s another way that we, as women, generate our own anxiety: we delay eating in the morning, running on bird food and pure adrenaline. however counterintuitive, i learned in college that not eating would drive my productivity in a way a proper meal couldn’t. a full breakfast made me feel slow, lethargic, unable to keep up. i’d start my day with a piece of fruit, then wouldn’t have a “real” meal until i’d done my hardest work of the morning, as a pseudo-reward, as if i had to earn my right to exist.
i know i’m not unique in this. i’ve compared notes with countless conscientious, driven women, saying a full breakfast blunts their focus instead of sharpening it. we’ve all heard the same advice. eat a substantial meal with protein, fat, and carbs within thirty minutes of waking, for your hormones. but when we do, we can’t quite lock in. we think we’re more efficient, more productive, more worthy, running on cortisol instead.
this isn’t about starving ourselves. it’s that our brains move faster when we haven’t eaten. it’s researched, and it makes sense: we’re in survival mode, and the heady anxiety of searching for the next meal (ahem, evolution) gets diverted into our work tasks instead.
by not eating substantially, i was inducing major anxiety through my “productive” mornings, then wondering why i was hitting a wall at 3pm. admittedly, i’m still troubleshooting this. gearing up to have a proper meal before i start work, learning to run on food instead of stress. and proving to myself that eating properly, as i should, as an adult woman with high output, has downstream effects i wouldn’t have attributed to it at first: sleeping through the night, no more afternoon slumps, no more low-grade depression, and a gentle ongoing energy, rather than the rollercoaster of the past.
most of what i’ve learned about fueling my body has come from one of my favorite substackers, lucie camilla baker. she’s wired like me: driven to run with every piece of wellness advice, then wondering if she’s broken when it doesn’t work. through lucie, i’ve seen that much of what we’re told is healthy as women (cold plunges, intermittent fasting, protein maxxing, going low carb, etc.) isn’t actually the advice best suited to nervous systems like ours.
now i’m going in a different direction. doing the opposite, and seeing what works. my impulse is always to push myself harder. what would it look like, in this stage of life, to do less? to slow down? to take the opposite advice? scary, as a habitual rule follower. but some things can only be learned by unlearning them first.
i’m letting old patterns go. or more precisely, learning to let them go. they served a purpose for 25+ years. i now see that i was built for slowness. single-tasking. intentionality. depth. i’ve spent most of my life feeding on artificial urgency and adrenaline, speeding myself up just enough to get the gold star, just like everyone else. i stoked and fed on my own anxiety to keep up in school, work, and social circles i was never built to move through. i was successful in that way, but successful on paper, not successful in actually enjoying my life.
i saw other people driving fast and tried to keep up. but now i wonder if they even wanted to be in the fast lane. we’re all approaching the same red light anyway.
