Urgency is not universal
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Rushing doesn’t work for every brain. In fact, for (some) neurodivergent people it can do more damage than good. It doesn’t create momentum. It doesn’t inspire nor motivate. It adds unnecessary pressure and it overwhelms. Sometimes, it barely registers at all. Other times, it floods the nervous system, tips everything sideways and leaves us staring at the task with a rising sense of panic and no clear way forward.
The sense of urgency doesn’t always translate in a way that is expected. Not everyone experiences time in a way that aligns with calendars, clocks or external deadlines. There are brains that drift in rhythm, that feel time in flashes and fog and that know something needs doing but can’t quite connect to when or why it is so time critical.
For those of us wired this way, urgency often shows up too early to matter or too late to help. The in-between gradual building of energy toward a task doesn’t always happen. Or if it does, it’s invisible from the outside.
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The weight of urgency brings a kind of exhaustion fed by a continuous cycle..
Wanting to do something → not being able to begin → feeling the pressure pile up → finally forcing a start through stress, fear and dysregulation → recovering for hours afterwards.
The thing is, it’s not a lack of willpower or desire at all. We’re in fact contending with nervous systems that don’t respond to pressure in a predictable way, brains that flicker between extremes and bodies that must feel safety before they feel readiness.
Neuronormativity assumes a shared and homogeneous access to time, regulation and initiation that might just not be there. This expectation chips away at the trust in ourselves, our intentions, our capabilities and our processes.
Urgency doesn’t just pressure us — it can trigger us
Urgency taps into deep systems of perceived threat, which means it can activate the fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses because the conditions surrounding the task feel unsafe.
Your brain can’t prioritise performance when it’s preparing for perceived failure, judgement or rejection. So it shuts down. Or it floods. Or it over-functions until burnout crashes through.
There are different signs that urgency may be a trigger..
📍You physically freeze when someone adds a time pressure to a task.
📍You shut off completely at the sight of countdown timers or clocks.
📍You procrastinate until you’re panicked enough to act and then collapse afterwards.
📍You say “yes, I’m doing it!” just to stop the pressure, even if you’re nowhere near starting.
📍You succeed under pressure but it wrecks your body and no one sees the cost.
📍You avoid tasks entirely because you associate them with time-based shame.
How others have described the sense of urgency :
Alice McSweeney from Neurodiverse Journeys explained “One of my big triggers being a PDAer. Sends me into a freeze or panic mode and I lose all motivation and passion for what I was doing. Also try and prepare for every eventuality so I’m a couple steps ahead and not caught in that scenario, that part definitely exhausting.”
I asked Carleigh from The Neurothentic Network what urgency feels like to her and she said: “Stress. Anger at myself. It makes my heart rate increase just thinking about it and my stomach goes weird.”
How does urgency make you feel?
What support should look like
Letting regulation happen before task initiation.
Replacing urgency with rhythm, flexibility and co-regulation.
Using collaborative language instead of commands.
Framing time as a soft structure, not a threat.
Letting people express their own internal sense of readiness without forcing alignment to external time-frames.
Most importantly, believing the body when it hesitates.
Urgency is rarely the thing that gets us moving, but rather the belief in our rhythm. Part of building truly supportive environments means questioning the assumption that urgency is a shared language.
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I find this so interesting. In like all settings, timers are horrifying. I can't think of anything else but that timer. BUT, I thrived working in emergency and ICU hospital settings. The time pressures there are immense and I think I saw it as a driving force for improving myself and the motivation to help someone.
I needed this today! I’m learning to drive (age 43 with cptsd from a car crash as a child) having gone through 5 instructors. Anyway my test is in 2 weeks and my instructor has gone “bad cop” on me, saying I need to learn to drive under pressure and that he does it to everyone in the last month of learning. I did a mock test and passed easily. I don’t need “urgency” from him reminding my tests coming etc. I just need calm, like he has been for the last 6 months we’ve got on fine. I certainly don’t need shaming. Anyway, I could barely drive today in my lesson. I will try again to tell him that making it feel urgent just sends me into “freeze” which is useless when you’re trying to drive! Thankyou for describing why urgency doesn’t work for some so well.