How To Cure Time Anxiety

When I was 11, my mother took me back to boarding school after the holidays A Whole Day early.

Why was this a big deal, you could ask? Because it could, of course, be seen as a simple mistake - I myself have certainly got confused about which days my kids end and start new terms.

You could also say that time anxiety increases with age or at least, with both responsibility and the experience of things going wrong (as a young, solo traveller, I would never have been seen dead getting to airports anywhere near as early as I do now, pre-flight, with all of the extra baggage, people and stress that trips as a family entail)…

But this was neither of those things.

Because the behaviour was indicative of how my mother viewed life in general: as one big rush, full not only of competing demands on her attention but also full of competing demands on those whose attention she was trying to grab. In other words, one big time scrum.

Everything had to be got to ages in advance or experiences stretched out to their maximum in the hope of finding that elusive spaciousness and inner peace, for which there was never quite enough time.

No appointment or meeting ever felt long enough for her to say what she wanted to say, to relax into being present or to able to truly connect with others.

Cue: the Time Wound (yes, it’s a thing).

Because when you’re not present, it’s easy to feel swept up into the illusion that time is passing you by, that you are being left behind and pulled out of your individual experience by whatever distractions are happening around you.

But the more embodied and therefore 'out’ of everyone else’s time that you can become, time actually slows down for you - YOU become the eye of the storm, rather than being forced to swirl around others’ and their deadlines.

The key to achieving this is to ensure that Little You is no longer in the driving seat of your life (searching for external validation to feel safe by depending on love and attention from everyone she comes across) and by learning how to reparent that child from within (creating inner safety through meeting her needs in the form of your inner parent).

Then, there is no longer any need to look towards other people, certain things happening or not, or towards having more or less time to cram words and actions into.

the time wound ceases to hold power over you as you learn that The most powerful form of connection is pure presence.

In other words, the less distracted you are and the more focused you are on taking up space as YOU, the more strongly you transmit the energy of you.

My mother never learnt how to do this. And so I inherited her time anxiety.

But the older I get and the more I heal my past and the fears that were imprinted in me, the more present Adult Me can be, the less I need to say or do to feel safe and on top of things, the less manic I feel about deadlines, and the less I need to ‘make the most’ of anything.

Because now I trust that whatever I do, say or manage to acheive in the time that is available, is enough.