Letting go · · 3 min
The anxiety was the clock, not the work
I thought my Sunday dread was about the week's work. Then I felt the same rush playing a game with no goals. It was never about the tasks. It was the clock.
In short
In June I noticed that I rush when I play Cities: Skylines II, a city-building game. No goals, no deadline, and I still race to hit a population number I made up. That's when I saw the hurry wasn't about any task. By August I could name what my Sundays were carrying: a fear of not having enough time to do everything. On a free afternoon, the same fear flips into worrying that I'm wasting it. Now when the hurry shows up, I try to ask whether it's about the work or the clock.
In June I noticed something about Cities: Skylines II, a city-building game I play. It’s an open world with no goals, no milestones and nothing to win. It’s just a game.
And I rush. I set my own goal, a population number, and I race to hit it. Build, build, build. I often get anxious about it. I find it hard to just play.
That’s when it clicked that the hurry I feel isn’t about the work. There was no work. There was only a clock that nobody had set.
What did I think the anxiety was about?
For a long time I thought it was the week ahead. In May I noticed my anxiety and tension rising on Sundays and Mondays, and I assumed the cause was obvious: everything I had to get done.
At the end of August I sat with the Sunday feeling long enough to look at it properly. It wasn’t attached to any task. It was a fear of not having enough time to do everything. I’d been calling it anxiety, and blaming it on the to-do list, for years.
The next day I caught the other half. When I do have free time, the same fear flips around. Now I’m worried I’m wasting it. Not enough time, or time I’m using wrong. The clock wins either way.
How can you tell it’s the clock and not the work?
For me, a few things give it away.
Work-fear points at something, a task I can name.
Clock-fear doesn’t. It shows up in a game with no goals. It shows up on Sundays, before the week has even started. And it shows up when I finally have free time, as the fear of wasting it.
So my test is simple. If I can’t name the task, it’s the clock.
Where does the hurry come from?
It’s older than any of the work it attaches to. In May I wrote that I needed to be careful not to listen to the part of me that wants to rush, because that part isn’t my true self. It learned a long time ago that you have to move quickly and hurry up.
Part of it is tied up with worth, which I wrote about last month. If I’m not doing enough, fast enough, the old rule says I’m not enough. The clock is how that rule keeps score.
What do I do with it now?
First, I try to tell which fear it is. Honestly, that’s still more of an aspiration than a habit, and I miss it often. But when I do catch it: if it’s the work, I do the work. If it’s the clock, there’s nothing to do. So I sit with it instead of obeying it.
Second, I have a phrase. At the end of a voice journal entry in June I said: “No hurry, no pause. We’re doing this one day at a time.” For me, no hurry means I don’t race, and no pause means I don’t freeze up either. A few weeks later I caught myself repeating it four times in a row, almost like a chant.
Third, I test it in small ways. Around the same time, I read one chapter of a book slowly, stopping whenever I noticed myself rushing. Usually when I stop mid-chapter, I lose my place. That day I didn’t. Going slower didn’t cost me anything. If anything, I kept more.
I still feel the hurry. Some Sundays it’s loud. What’s changed is that I don’t take it as an order anymore.
The city doesn’t need to be finished by Monday. Neither do I.
Written by Martin Ronquillo, founder of Genuai. He reads every reply.
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