One of the invisible pressures of modern life stress is the feeling of racing against time. This time anxiety definition, which quietly and insidiously infiltrates our daily life challenges, often makes us feel like we are late for something or that we cannot catch up with anything. Sentences such as ‘time is not enough’, ‘a day should not be 24 hours’, ‘I have to catch up’ are no longer just complaints, but have almost become a fact of our lives. So, what is this time anxiety in modern life? Why has it become so widespread, and what are the psychological effects of time pressure?
Not Managing Time, Fighting Time
Nowadays, time management strategies are presented as a necessity, not just a skill. To-do lists for productivity, productivity applications, time planners with aesthetic designs… Everything is to do more in less time. However, over time, these tools have become more demanding than serving us. Every task we cannot do, every job we cannot keep up with, brings with it an inner sense of failure. Thus, time, instead of being a friend with whom we travel together, turns into an enemy that always walks one step ahead of us. While this distorted relationship reinforces the feeling of inadequacy and anxiety, it can lead to anxiety disorders or burnout causes in the long run.
The Psychological Weight of Time
Time is not just a technical concept, but an emotional experience of time. While the same day flows quickly for one person, for another it gets heavier every minute. This difference is often directly related to the mood and time perception of the person. In depressive tendencies, time almost stops; in anxiety and time flow, it flows rapidly. The individual experiencing anxiety is always busy with something that he/she ‘cannot reach’, his/her mind is constantly filled with regrets of the past or uncertainties of the future.
To give an example, last week’s earthquake in Istanbul effects has concretely demonstrated how time is experienced differently by individuals. For the individuals who experienced the earthquake, the days lengthen like an eternity. Since the minds of millions of people who experienced the earthquake in Istanbul that day were in a constant state of alarm and the individual did not know when the pause, they searched for a safe area during crisis as soon as possible. This process caused individuals who experienced the earthquake to experience time perception in trauma quite differently. On the other hand, for individuals living in a city far away, perhaps in a city that has never felt the earthquake, and for children having fun with games at 23 April celebrations, time progressed in its normal flow. This different experience reveals how much an event can change the mood and anxiety effects and the effects of events on time perception.
Individuals who confuse the rapid passage of time with this anxiety and uncertainty in life are afraid to pause and catch their breath. On the one hand, they always want to go forward, but on the other hand, they lose clarity about what to do and when to do it. This leads to a feeling of time pressure, not by time itself, but by the psychological pressure of time.
Feelings of Being Late and Social Pressures
In the modern world pressures, timetables have become more than just a part of personal goals and time. Social media and time anxiety and media tools offer us all the opportunity to compare our lives with ‘someone else’. Societal expectations and anxiety such as graduating at 25, getting married at 27, starting a business at 30 create a new, often oppressive timetable for our personal journey pressures. The feeling that we need to move quickly in all areas of life feeds the feeling of being late in life. Time becomes another trap at this point: The endeavor to conform to the timetables of others leads to the loss of one’s own inner pace and balance. As the individual tries to live at a pace similar to someone else’s journey, he/she has difficulty in finding the real rhythm within themselves.
Fear of Stopping and the Search for Meaning
One of the deepest causes of time anxiety causes is the fear of stopping and anxiety. The pressure to do something at every moment sometimes does not create an opportunity to think and turn to the inner world reflection. However, stopping allows the mind to reorganize, to reorganize emotions and thoughts management. Even a moment spent aimlessly is an opportunity to breathe. However, when we see time as an enemy rather than a friend, we label these moments of pause with a kind of ‘no work being done’ perception. At this point, our search for meaning in life takes shape. Living with the fear of pausing, we focus only on ‘doing’ instead of understanding what is really important.
What Can We Do?
Transforming our relationship with time management is an important step in managing anxiety reduction strategies. Accepting time as a life partner for mental health, rather than just a means to an end, can alleviate this time anxiety relief. The first step in making peace with time is to see it as a ‘friendly companion for life balance’ rather than an ‘enemy to be kept up with’. Moving at our own pace, staying away from social pressures and mental health or digital pressures and anxiety, and most importantly, sometimes stopping and thinking about ‘what you should do’ will help us build a more meaningful relationship with time and peaceful life balance.
Dear reader, not everything needs to be squeezed into a timetable. It must be remembered that life is a journey, not a race. The pace of individual life is different, and success and happiness timeline does not have to come at a certain age or in a certain order. Seeing time not as a unit of measurement but as a process that gives meaning to life itself will help us find both inner serenity through time and true happiness in life.