Why You’re Always Rushing and Why Slowing Down Might Actually Save You Time

“Shoes. Come on. We have to go.”

“Did you brush your teeth?”

“Please stop playing. We don’t have time.”

“Guys. Seriously. We’re late.”

You finally get everyone into the car, pull out of the driveway, and realize something: You’re not actually late. Or maybe you are, but only by three minutes. And yet your body has been acting for the last 20 minutes as if something terrible is about to happen.

This is rushing. And I think a lot of moms are doing much more of it than we realize.

Rushing isn’t really about moving quickly

Sometimes we genuinely need to move fast. There is a meeting at 9:00. School starts at 8:15. The plane is not going to wait for us. Moving quickly can be useful, but rushing is different. Rushing is what happens when time pressure becomes nervous system pressure.

There’s the actual fact: We need to leave in ten minutes. And then there is everything our brain adds: We’re never going to get there. Why can’t anyone just listen to me? I should have gotten up earlier. I cannot be late again. Come on, come on, come on.

Now we aren’t just managing time, we’re trying to get rid of the discomfort we feel about time. And when that happens, we tend to move faster, talk faster, become less patient, stop listening and start controlling.

This is where something that looks like a time-management problem becomes a relational one.

Motherhood makes this especially hard

Before kids, you could probably compensate for a lot. Running late? Walk faster. Forgot something? Turn around. Need to get out the door at 8:00? Decide to leave at 7:55 and do it.

Children change the equation. A three-year-old doesn’t understand why putting on her own shoes for the first time is inconvenient at 7:52 a.m. Your five-year-old doesn’t suddenly stop having feelings because preschool starts in eight minutes.

Your child is living in the moment. You are living in the moment and three moments ahead of it. You’re thinking about traffic, the school bell, your 9:00 meeting, whether you packed the water bottle and what happens if you walk into work late again.

That ability to anticipate and plan is incredibly useful. I call it Strategic Intelligence.

But there are moments when the very intelligence helping us manage our lives starts interfering with our ability to actually be in them.

What happens to our kids when we rush them?

Think about what a child experiences when we are rushing. Come on. Faster. We don’t have time. Just et me do it. Hurry.

Again and again, the message their nervous system may receive is: Where we are right now is not okay. We need to get somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean saying “hurry up” harms your child. Parents have places to be and kids sometimes need to move faster. This is real life. But when rushing becomes the emotional climate of family life, we lose something.

We lose curiosity. We miss the story they were trying to tell us. We tie the shoe ourselves instead of letting them struggle with it. We become irritated by developmentally normal slowness. And our kids feel our urgency.

Nervous systems communicate with one another. When we are activated, children often become activated too, which can create the exact opposite of what we wanted.

We rush them because we need them to cooperate. They become dysregulated because we are rushing them. Then everything takes so much longer.

Rushing has a cost for us, too

I think this is the part ambitious women especially need to hear.

Slowing down can feel inefficient. You have a lot to do. Why would you intentionally move more slowly?

Because rushing often isn’t making you more efficient, it’s making you more activated. And activation changes how we perceive what’s happening.

We become less flexible. We have less patience. We make decisions from urgency. We make mistakes. We forget things. We snap at people and then spend another ten minutes repairing what happened.

Sometimes the fastest way through a moment is actually to stop trying to make the moment go faster. That’s the ROI. You spend 30 seconds helping your nervous system settle and save yourself the ten-minute battle. You spend two minutes connecting with your child and cooperation comes more easily. You stop treating every three-minute delay as an emergency and arrive at your destination without needing 20 minutes to recover from getting there.

And perhaps most importantly, you actually get to inhabit more of your own life.

So how do we stop rushing?

Probably not by telling ourselves to “slow down.” If that worked, we would have done it already. We have to build our capacity to experience the thing underneath the rushing, because usually there is something there.

Uncertainty. Loss of control. Fear of disappointing someone. The discomfort of being late. The possibility that someone will think we are disorganized. The frustration of another human being moving at a pace we cannot control.

This is where Relational Intelligence becomes useful.

Relational Intelligence is our capacity to stay engaged with reality as it is, especially when it’s uncertain, uncomfortable or different from what we expected, so we can choose a response that aligns with our values and the relationship we’re trying to build.

And rushing gives us a wonderful place to practice it.

Try this the next time you feel yourself rushing

First, notice. What is actually happening in your body? Are your shoulders tight? Is your jaw clenched? Are you moving quickly? Is your voice getting louder?

Then separate fact from story.

Fact: School starts in seven minutes.

Story: This is a disaster. We are always late. Nobody listens to me. I cannot handle this.

Then get curious. What feels so urgent right now?

And offer yourself a little compassion. Of course I feel pressure. I care about getting my child to school on time, and I have somewhere I need to be too.

And then comes the part that matters most: Choice. Who do I want to be in this moment?

Maybe the answer is still, “We need to move quickly.” Relational Intelligence doesn’t mean wandering peacefully through the kitchen while everyone misses school. It means urgency doesn’t automatically get to decide who you become.

You can move quickly without making the moment an emergency and you can hold the boundary without adding fear to it.

You can say, “We need to leave now. I’m going to help you with your shoes,” without communicating that something has gone terribly wrong.

The goal isn’t a slower life

This is important. I don’t think ambitious mothers need another person telling them to do less, want less or somehow become more relaxed versions of themselves. I certainly don’t.

Your drive your ability to plan are useful. Your capacity to anticipate what needs to happen next is probably part of what has made you incredibly good at many things.

The invitation is to become more fluent. To recognize when the moment needs Strategic Intelligence and when it needs Relational Intelligence. Sometimes we need to plan better. Sometimes we need to leave ten minutes earlier. And sometimes nothing needs to change except our capacity to tolerate the fact that this moment is not moving at the speed we wanted it to.

That is a very different skill, and motherhood gives us approximately 4,000 opportunities a week to practice it.

When we stop treating every delay, detour, and inconvenient feeling as something we have to get through as quickly as possible, something surprising happens. We don’t necessarily accomplish less, and often, we actually function better. We think more clearly, make fewer mistakes, cooperate more easily, make better decisions, and waste less energy fighting with reality.

But there is another return that’s harder to measure.

We spend so much of motherhood trying to get everyone to the next thing…The car. School. Dinner. Bath. Bed. Tomorrow.

And these ordinary, inconvenient, maddening little moments we keep trying to hurry through? They are our lives.

Instead of asking, How can I get everything done?

Let’s begin wondering, Can I stay right here while I’m doing it?