Are we Addicted to Urgency? What to do when Everything Feels Like an Emergency.

Everyday feels like an emergency. There is always too much to do and you have been in a dead sprint for longer than you can remember. You keep telling yourself that if you can just make it over the next hill you’ll get a breather, but the break never seems to come.

If this sounds familiar, you and/or your organization may have an urgency addiction.

A past therapist told me that when we grow up in contexts that are unpredictable this becomes our sense of normal, and then as adults we seek out those types of environments because they are familiar. When this happens, our very sense of what is normal, comfortable, and acceptable is defined by volatility. This rings true to me personally, and I see this pattern reflected in the social sector.

In social change organizations we are often working to change extremely harmful systems and address real human needs. This is important work. And we have a pattern in our organizations and movements of normalizing overwork, stress, and a crisis mentality in our day to day operations such that it has become both expected and a badge of honor.

Tema Okun describes “our cultural habit of applying a sense of urgency to our every-day lives in ways that perpetuate power imbalance while disconnecting us from our need to breathe and pause and reflect”. A constant sense of urgency makes it hard to tell the difference between what is really urgent and what feels urgent, which leads to burnout and exhaustion.

As leaders we may feel that unless we are working at the very limit of our capacity (if not beyond it) we are not doing enough. This stems in part from unrealistic expectations we have of ourselves, and from expectations that come from funders who expect organizations to do too much with too little.

Normalizing this level of persistent urgency requires us to disconnect from our body and our spirit. We stop listening to our bodies’ cues: ignoring hunger and working through illness. We don’t attend to our spirits’ exhaustion: becoming disengaged in our family and friendship, snapping at our children and partners, and de-prioritizing leisure activities that bring us joy. We hurt ourselves and each other for the sake of “the cause.”

Ironically, moving at the level of urgency that many of us have become accustomed to doesn't forward our mission, it actually harms it. When we are struggling to keep our heads above water we exclude others, don’t seek full information, see decisions as all or nothing, and struggle to think creatively – all in the name of expediency.

We are in a moment where there is real crisis and urgency and if we cannot tell what is actually urgent because we are so used to treating everything as urgent we will not be able to direct our energy effectively. We get to allocate our greatest resource, our energy, strategically and intentionally.

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree browne describes the concept of fractals saying, “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” When we inculcate calm and groundedness within ourselves we then ripple that out to our teams, our organizations, our movements, and the world. To do this requires us to step out of the unrelenting pace demanded by our capitalist society, to acknowledge that we are not cogs in a machine that can be driven to exhaustion and beyond, and to reconnect to our bodies and spirits.

I invite you to slow down. If you notice that slowing down is uncomfortable for you and brings up feelings of inadequacy, stress, or fear you may have forgotten what having a regulated nervous system feels like. You may be so used to urgency, crisis-mode, and volatility that it has become your normal. It will likely take some practice to rewire your brain and body to move at a more intentional, and less reactive pace.

To be very clear, slowing down does not mean that you care less, are less committed, or are weak. These are common stories that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves going at an unrealistic pace.

We get to shift our thinking to understand that part of leading is building discernment to tell what is truly urgent, rather than operating from a place of urgency as the default.

Reclaiming your calm is in service of building a just world.