5 Signs You Have Time Anxiety
Sign 5 - You’re triggered by stupid meaningless work
I’m an award-winning user experience designer and psychology major — it’s my job and passion to understand why people behave the way they do. What it means and how we can change it for the better.
To delve into their lives, context and motivations to empathise with their problems in order to help solve them.
I turned this lens, this skillset, on myself when I noticed I was struggling with a negative pattern of emotions: anxiety anger, frustration, irritability and depression.
For me this was strangely out of character.
I’m normally a calm and chilled guy, my nickname has been “Zen” for years. But I’d become anything but — angry, moody and perpetually frustrated I wasn’t pleasant to be around on a bad day.
What I’ve been struggling with is the persistent feeling that I’m wasting my time.
That I was behind where I should be. That it was too late to follow my dreams, change careers (again!) or be as successful as I wanted to be. Everyone was already winning by my age (36). Looking at others online — people years younger — I often felt they were miles ahead of where I was.
I couldn’t sit down, relax and play a game because my mind would nag me that I should be doing something more useful, I should be productive.
I couldn’t focus on one thing because I needed so badly to get ahead that I tried to do multiple things at once. Even though I knew multitasking didn’t work for me.
Last year during lockdown I stumbled across the term for all this frustration, anxiety and anger — Time Anxiety.
Now that I had a nemesis — I decided to fight back — this is what I’ve learned so far. Maybe it can help you understand these feelings if you have them. Maybe it can help you move on and start living the life you want to live. Maybe it can get you out of your head and back into the world.
It’s working for me and I’ve never felt better.
What is Time Anxiety?
Time Anxiety at its core is a paralyzing awareness of our mortality.
We will die. What will our lives mean?
It’s that feeling that you’re wasting your time, you’re not using it properly. That your time on this planet is flowing out of your hour glass and you’re not doing enough with it.
This creates a self-imposed pressure to use each moment so well that deciding on how to spend it best is often impossible.
The fear and pressure, to not waste time and make the most of it, builds until it makes us miserable.
It’s a paradox of our own making.
№1 — You value your time so highly you end up wasting it.
Unable to put it to good use, afraid to misspend it, paralyzed by choice, and half-chasing the dreams of others. Procrastination, anger, and guilt are common symptoms.
If you’ve ever felt you couldn’t relax because you should be doing something else, you may have experienced Time Anxiety.
Early on during the Lockdown, I noticed this pattern in my own emotions. My fixation with time and productivity was causing me a lot of stress.
Time anxiety is the fear of wasting time or having time run out. It comes from a need always to use time productively because life is short.
It’s the ever-present feeling that you’re not spending your time well. A nagging voice that you should be doing more important things.
Or finding a way to be more effective or efficient. To get more done or provide more value. Leading to endlessly searching for better tools, habits, and processes. Being late can cause a lot of stress.
Or the feeling that it is now too late, that the moment or opportunity to do something has passed. It’s too late to write a novel, too late to learn a language, or too late to make a big change in your life.
Or that if you make the wrong choice, you’re wasting part of your life. So you get, paralyzed unable to decide or act. All the while, feeling like time is flowing through your fingers.
№2 — Unable to Enjoy Simple Moments
Why does it matter? Time anxiety, and anxiety in general, robs us of the joy of the present moment.
Instead, we live outside of it, worrying or dwelling in the past or future. The irony is that we often feel the most time rich when we are strongly present — when we experience the opposite of time anxiety, timelessness.
It’s an essential part of Flow when you’re so caught up in what you’re doing time ceases to exist, and you lose yourself in what you’re doing. It happens when you push yourself at something you enjoy, and the risk of failure is exciting.
Time Anxiety is, in a way, Anti-Flow. A blocking of potential and progress by overthinking our actions. Or overestimating our abilities, thinking we can or should have done more with our available time.
We are consumed by what we have done or failed to do or the unwanted consequences of our actions. Consumed by thoughts like:
- I should have done more. I should be further along; I’ve wasted so much time. I can’t get there now. It’s too late to start.
- I can’t do what I need to do to be successful, happy, content because there isn’t enough time in the day. I need an eight-day week, a 25-hour day. I need people to leave me alone so that I can work.
- What if I did that and it turned out terrible? What if people hated it? What if it’s the wrong choice? What if leaving now I have an accident?
Stuck in place, endlessly playing through the possible futures. Or lashing ourselves for failing to achieve a particular goal. Or burning with frustration that we are prevented from excelling.
№3 — Our Expectations of Ourselves are Too High
Who suffers from it? Anyone can suffer from time anxiety, but it is likely to be suffered by people who have a fixation on productivity and achievement. In our fast-paced, ‘more more more’ world, that could be a huge number of people.
Time Anxious people underachieve because they think they should excel. Our ambition exceeds our actions. We try to do too many things to maximize our time, spread ourselves too thinly, and get nothing done. Causing a negative feedback loop.
Our anxiety grows from the belief that we have latent talent meant to be used for a significant contribution. That wasting those talents, effort, and time on the wrong pursuit will wither that contribution.
We won’t make a dent in the universe if we do the wrong thing.
Common phrases like these don’t help someone with Time Anxiety:
- Live life to the fullest.
- Seize the day
- You have so much potential.
Better mantras are:
- Progress not perfection
- Done is better than perfect.
There is a Swahili phrase mountain guides use on Kilimanjaro.
Pole pole.
Pronounced ‘Polay Polay’, they say it often. Whenever they see you straining, pushing, or struggling. It means “slowly slowly” that you should not hurry, take your time, and make slow, steady progress.
Because the main reason people fail to summit the mountain is they go faster than they should. They rush; they expect too much of themselves.
№4 — We Don’t Live in the Present
There are three broad types that map to the three phases of time.
Present or Current Time Anxiety is possibly the most common or easily understood. The ever-present feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do what is expected.
Resulting in a multitasking, hot-swapping frenzy. Feeling constantly rushed without ever being given enough time to do a proper job.
Under pressure, every day, feeling frustrated that people are getting in your way or doing things in the wrong way.
It often leads to distraction and procrastination, to escape and let the pressure off, which obviously makes things worse. Being too scattered to be present.
Past or Existential Time Anxiety, the perpetual feeling that everything is passing you by. That it’s too late to start a big project or change. It’s too late to turn your life around.
That if you haven’t achieved something great by a particular age or mile marker in life, then you’ve missed the boat.
Or the feeling that time is slipping by constantly through your fingers and there is nothing you can do to stop this relentless flow.
And this makes you feel defeated and anxious. You’re not present because you’re always looking back.
Future or What If Time Anxiety is always looking forward, asking, ‘What if I do this and something bad happens?’
Obsessing about the outcomes or consequences of your actions to the point that you don’t take any action.
Over-researching to find the perfect way to do things to avoid failing or wasted time and effort. Leading to analysis paralysis and inaction.
Or worrying about negative outcomes outside of your control. If I take the highway, I might be in a car accident. If I leave now, I might catch the wrong bus.
Thoughts about the unknowable future lead to anxiety.
№5 You Are Triggered by Pointless Work
Time Anxiety is related to meaningful work or contribution. Anxiety about not living a purposeful life, about not living to the full or really making a difference.
Are we doing what really matters to us and do others find it valuable?
Any time we’re forced to reflect on this, even subconsciously, it can lead to anxiety and stress.
Other triggers can be the sunk cost fallacy; they cannot change their current path because they would waste the time they’ve put in. Leading people to feel trapped in their career, their past decisions, or relationships while at the same time knowing they need to change.
The toolbox fallacy is the belief that there’s a perfect setup or set of tools that will enable the perfect use of one’s time and maximum quality and quantity of output. The obsessive searching for this leads to time-wasting, procrastination, and guilt, which feeds the negative feedback loop.
Wasting time during the day. Starting late or being distracted. Accounting or reviewing how productive the time was used. Timesheets. Having a lack of focus personally or unclear directions from your boss.
Trying to be perfect in completing tasks, an irrational quest for efficiency that in itself ends up wasting time.
What this means for you
The overall effect of this obsession with effective time use is often wasting time, which leads to worrying and frustration, inexplicable anger, and lashing out.
People can end up fighting with colleagues and spouses over seemingly very minor things. Being late for a very casual event or not having things done in a very particular way.
A very brief overview of the solution
Mindfulness and awareness of the issue help take action. You need to see the anxiety coming, recognize the triggers, and ideally remove them from their day-to-day lives.
Then make a concerted effort to break the mental framework that your self-worth is linked to your productivity. This is often not easy as many cultural or religious values equate hard-work with virtue. For example, ‘Idle hands are the devil's playground.’
Lowering expectations of possible achievements while being forgiving of failures and celebrating actual progress, however small. This will go a long way to developing a healthy reward and progress outlook.
Lastly, generally speaking, what works for general anxiety will work for Time Anxiety as well. Things such as meditation and yoga, regular exercise, sleep, and a healthy lifestyle are part of the right foundation.
So in a sentence, what’s needed is the realization that one's contribution happens every day, in small ways, and that incremental progress and patience within a healthy life is the best way forward.
