5 Signs Urgency Culture Has Quietly Hijacked Your Nervous System

When was the last time you sat down — and felt completely at ease doing nothing? No phone in your hand. No mental list running in the background. No low-level guilt about what you should probably be doing instead.

If you’re struggling to remember, you’re not alone.

What you might be is a woman whose nervous system has been quietly taken hostage by something most of us never even noticed happening. It has a name: urgency culture. And by the time most of us realize it’s got hold of us, it’s been running the show for years and it leaves a mark.

Here’s how to know if it’s happening to you.

Sign 1 — Rest makes you more anxious, not less

You finally get a quiet afternoon. The kids are out, the work is done, there is genuinely nothing that needs your attention right now. And instead of relaxing — you feel worse.

Restless. Guilty. Vaguely panicked. Like you’re forgetting something important.

This is one of the clearest signs that your nervous system has been rewired by chronic urgency. Your brain has learned — through years of go-go-go — that stillness equals danger. That if you stop moving something bad will happen. So it keeps the alarm bells ringing even when the emergency is over.

The science behind this is fascinating and, honestly, a little heartbreaking. When we live in sustained stress our amygdala — the brain’s threat detection centre — becomes hyperactivated. It starts firing at things that aren’t actually threats. Silence. Slowness. Rest. Your brain has genuinely lost the ability to tell the difference between danger and downtime.

“Be still and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10

God didn’t say be still and feel guilty about it. He said be still and know. Stillness was always meant to be where we find clarity.

Sign 2 — You feel behind even when you’re on top of things

Your inbox is clear. Your to-do list is manageable. By any real measurement- you’re fine. And yet there is this persistent feeling — quiet but constant — that you are somehow behind. That everyone else is doing more, moving faster, managing better.

This is urgency culture at its worst. It doesn’t need an actual emergency to keep you in a state of low-level panic. It manufactures one from thin air.

What’s happening neurologically is that your cortisol levels — your stress hormone — have been elevated for so long that your body now treats that heightened state as normal. Coming down from it doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like something is wrong.

The good news — and there really is good news here — is that your brain is neuroplastic. It can change. Those pathways that learned urgency can learn something different. We’ll get to that. But first, recognising the pattern is everything.

Sign 3 — Your body never fully powers down

Tight shoulders. A jaw you clench without realising. Sleep that doesn’t quite restore you no matter how many hours you get. Waking at 3am with your mind already running.

Your body is keeping score of every unprocessed stress response your busy life never gave you time to complete. This is your nervous system stuck in what scientists call a state of chronic sympathetic activation — the biological equivalent of leaving your car engine running all night, every night, wondering why you keep running out of gas.

God designed our bodies with an a capacity to regulate themselves — to move between action and rest, between work and recovery. The technical term for this is vagal tone — the health of your vagus nerve which acts like a brake on your stress response. When vagal tone is good your nervous system moves easily between states. When it’s been overridden by urgency for too long that brake stops working properly.

The woman in Proverbs 31 — is described as being clothed in strength and dignity, and laughing without fear of the future. Not grinding herself into the ground. Strength and rest were never meant to be opposites.

Sign 4 — You feel guilty when you’re not productive

You read a book and a voice in your head says you should be doing something useful. You take a walk and you feel like you need to justify it — it’s for your health, it’s exercise, it counts. You can’t remember the last time you did something purely for the pleasure of it without the productivity police showing up in your own mind.

This is urgency culture’s deepest lie — that your worth is measured by your output. That rest must be earned. That doing nothing is the same as being nothing.

It’s also theologically incorrect. You were declared worthy before you did a single thing. Rest was built into creation not as a reward for the hardworking but as a rhythm for everyone. The Sabbath wasn’t invented for lazy people. It was given to all of us because God knew what we would need.

When the guilt shows up — and it will, at first — try noticing it without obeying it. It’s just a well-worn neural pathway doing what it’s always done. It’s not the truth.

Sign 5 — You’ve forgotten what you actually enjoy

Not what you’re good at. Not what you should enjoy, or what looks enjoyable on Instagram. What you — the real you, underneath all the roles and responsibilities — actually love doing just for the sake of it.

Chronic urgency has a way of slowly squeezing the joy out of life -not dramatically- but gradually. You stop doing the things that fill you up because there’s always something more pressing. And after enough time you can’t quite remember what those things were.

This one is worth sitting with. Because rediscovering what genuinely restores you is not a luxury — it’s a nervous system intervention. Play, creativity, pleasure, rest — these are not indulgences. They are the biological conditions needed for your brain to heal, rewire and grow.

“He restores my soul.” — Psalm 23:3

Not he optimises my productivity. Not he helps me manage my schedule. He restores my soul. That’s the promise. That’s what we’re here for.

So what do you do with this?

The work of getting back to calm ground isn’t complicated but it does require intention. It starts with understanding what’s actually happening in your brain and body — which you’ve just begun. It continues with small, consistent practices that retrain your nervous system toward safety rather than urgency. And it’s held together by a faith that has been pointing toward rest and restoration since the very beginning.

None of this requires a dramatic life overhaul. It doesn’t need hours of your day. You just need to decide that an exhausted life is no longer something you’re willing to accept as normal.

Because it was never meant to be normal.

— Melissa

Want to go deeper? The science behind this post draws on the work of Dr. Bruce McEwen on stress and the brain, and Norman Doidge’s brilliant and very readable The Brain That Changes Itself. Both are worth your time.