Hurry sickness is the habit of rushing even when nothing is actually chasing you. It is taking the handheld basket instead of the cart because you can move through the grocery store faster. It is zipping around people on the sidewalk, answering emails at red lights, and feeling weirdly agitated when the person in front of you walks at a normal human pace. If that sounds familiar, this conversation is for you.
I joined my friend Dr. Mariza Snyder on the Energized podcast to talk about what is really driving that constant urgency in high-achieving women. Spoiler: it is usually not your calendar. It is a wound that is running the show.
What hurry sickness really is
Dr. Mariza sees it in her practice every day. Women come to her burned out, with thyroids under attack, autoimmunity, chronic migraines. She treats the physiology, and she also knows there is often something deeper underneath. A belief driving the whole pattern.
She shared her own version so honestly in our conversation. A migraine forced her to slow down for a day, and for once people were going around her in the store instead of the other way around. It rattled her.
Often a default mode of mine is a rushed version of me.
That is hurry sickness in one sentence. The rushing is not a response to your to-do list. It is the default state your nervous system has learned to live in.
The belief underneath the rush
In my work, that urgency almost always traces back to the success wound, the belief that your worth depends on what you produce. For one of the achiever patterns I write about, the grinder, the inner monologue sounds like this: I am behind. I cannot waste time. There is so much to do and it is all on me.
When your success wound gets activated, it flares up in recognizable ways. Grinding. Pleasing. Hiding. Seeking. Working hard and playing hard. Or simply a voice inside yelling that it is not enough, that you are not enough.
Your body knows before you do
Here is the question I asked Dr. Mariza, and I will ask you the same one. When you feel like you missed the mark, when the email lands or your boss says you are not hitting it, what physically happens in your body?
For me, it is a pit in my stomach, a clenching in my throat, and I catch myself holding my breath. For Dr. Mariza, it is shallow breathing, a tightening in her chest, and she physically speeds up. Your version might be the sense of jumping out of your skin. Whatever it is, that body signal is the earliest warning you get, and most of us have trained ourselves to ignore it.
A tool to interrupt the rush
So many of the women I coach do not need another productivity framework. They need to learn how to address emotions when they come up and extract their wisdom. Emotional work is the missing piece in your career. Here is the tool I walked through on the show, and it takes two minutes.
First, pause wherever you are. Step outside the office or shut the laptop for a second. Notice where the feeling lives in your body and give it three adjectives. Heavy, sinking pit. Tight, closed fist in the throat. Then take a deep breath and ask the feeling a question.
What do you want me to know? What are you scared is going to happen?
If the answer comes from the feeling and not from your head, it will sound surprisingly simple. I am scared. I am not enough. I need a hug. Almost like a child. Then ask one more: what are you afraid would happen if this feeling were not here protecting me? It will name the real fears. I would fall behind. People would walk all over me. I would lose everything I have built.
That is the moment the rush loses its grip, because you have finally heard what it was trying to outrun.
Slowing down is lifelong work, not a life sentence
I wrote my book to be a guidebook you come back to at the turning points, in the moments your success wound flares up. We heal on four levels: emotion, thought, behavior, and spirit or purpose. There was a real debate about the title, and I insisted on Healing the Success Wound rather than How to Heal the Success Wound, because this is ongoing work. These are tools in your toolbox, not a finish line.
So the next time you notice yourself rushing through a store, a conversation, or your own life, take it as information. Ask the feeling what it wants you to know. The answer is usually kinder than the pace you have been keeping.
You can find the whole toolbox in Healing the Success Wound.