The Rush to Nowhere: How Anxiety Fuels Our Fast-Paced Lives

Blog by Alan Fadling

There is a condition called hurry sickness. It’s the feeling of always being rushed, as if we are lagging behind in a race, and it raises our stress levels. One sign of hurry sickness is a sense that we don’t have enough time to get everything done. We can end up feeling increasing frustration with anyone or anything that gets in the way of what we believe we have to do. Multitasking is a strategy we use to try boosting our productivity, at least in the short-term. But the long-term costs of hurry can be high.

In a series of emails beginning with this one, I’ll be discussing core drivers of hurry that I’ve been addressing in my own life since I wrote An Unhurried Life. Today, in the spirit of my recent book A Non-Anxious Life, I’ll unpack how anxiety drives hurry in our lives.

In my continuing journey of recovery from hurry sickness, it’s important for me to recognize what is driving my hurried soul. I can identify many things, and I wrote A Non-Anxious Life, in part, to explore ways that anxiety continues to drive my own hurry.

Anxiety can have different effects on us. Sometimes it paralyzes us and causes us to freeze. Sometimes it diverts us and causes us to flee. But sometimes anxiety can drive us and rush us and put us into fight mode. That’s a specific type of anxiety I see even in the lives of Christian leaders, and it greatly influences what we do and how we do it. It can cause us to be moved less by the holy energy of hope and joy and love, and more by a desire to feel important and valuable and productive.

I know I’ve said things like this before, and maybe I’m repeating them partly for my own benefit. Simple reminders can have immense value. In fact, in his second letter, the apostle Peter says, “So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have” (2 Peter 1:12). He is writing to people who are already firmly established in the truth they’ve received, and he says even they still need reminders.

Forgetfulness is one of the great challenges to spiritual growth. I learn something good. I grow in that goodness. But over time I can forget the goodness of that truth. Perhaps I take it for granted and begin to wander a bit.

Sometimes, what I need most is not a new insight but a simple reminder of something I already know. It’s good when truth is refreshed at the center of our souls. In the end, there is a holy simplicity about truth. That’s why some say that growth moves in the direction of becoming a beginner again.

So today’s reminder is about anxiety because it’s a basic issue in many of our lives. Some of us are more aware of it than others. Over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that anxiety is a primary driver of hurry and to recognize it as a continual challenge in my own leadership.

For example, when I was first drafting this post, I had a Zoom conversation that was both exciting and nerve-racking. I was talking with someone who has encouraged me in my writing and who has a lot of influence in the publishing world. I left the call encouraged but also nervous. You see, anxiety has become such a habit for me that it isn’t provoked only by the prospect of something bad happening. Even good possibilities can arouse anxiety in me. As I said in A Non-Anxious Life, anxiety can become a habit—a kind of autopilot that just feels like an unchangeable part of me.

The insight that anxiety is a temptation like any other has been helping me in my own struggle against it. In An Unhurried Life, I wrote a chapter titled “Temptation: Unhurried Enough to Resist.” The thing is, temptation thrives on hurry.

Temptation never recommends that you take your time and think things through. Temptation is all about now. Hurry up and grab what you want! Take control before somebody else does! Get busy and prove yourself! Temptation is by nature hurried.

Think about the counsel of James when it comes to temptation: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). How does that actually work when it comes to anxiety-driven hurry?

Submitting to God looks like the opposite of anxiety-driven hurry. Instead of telling ourselves, “Hurry up and grab what you want,” we lean into the invitation of the closing lines of Psalm 27:

Wait for the Lord;

be strong and take heart

and wait for the Lord.

Living less hurried involves learning to wait on God. There are things that you and I have absolutely no control over. My anxiety has often been an attempt to gain control over situations that only God can manage. Yes, there are actions I can take. There are good things I can do. There is good work for me to engage. But none of it requires anxiety. None of it.

Listen again to those words from Psalm 27: Be strong. Take heart. Wait for the Lord. Does that sound more like anxiety or more like peace? Don’t you hear the shalom saturating those phrases?

In a couple of weeks, I’ll share more about the dynamic of anxiety that underlies much of our hurry these days.

For Reflection:

• How has anxiety fueled patterns of hurry in your own experience?
• When have you listened to the advice of anxiety and found yourself in a frantic, reactive mode?
• When anxiety rises up, are there ways you are learning to slow down, even for a moment, and offer yourself to the God of peace who is always present? How might you experiment with this approach?