Why Urgency Is a Trauma Response, Not a Personality Trait
We’re told we’re “too much,” “too busy,” “always rushing.”
We’re told to slow down, breathe, stop being so urgent.
But here’s the truth: urgency isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trauma response.
The Nervous System Lens
Polyvagal theory teaches us that the nervous system has three main survival modes:
Fight/flight (mobilize → urgency, productivity, busyness)
Freeze (shutdown → numbness, collapse)
Safe/social (connection → presence, play, intimacy)
When life has demanded that we perform, produce, or keep the peace in order to survive, the body wires urgency as a default state. The nervous system says: if I stay busy enough, maybe I’ll stay safe. This is not about character. It’s about wiring. And while neuroplasticity allows us to shift over time, we don’t shame a survival response out of existence. We witness it, contextualize it, and create enough safety for other ways of being to emerge.
Family Systems + Collective Context
Family systems theory shows us that we don’t live in isolation. Every nervous system belongs to an ecosystem.
If urgency runs in your system, chances are it runs in your lineage:
A parent or grandparent hustling to feed the family.
A culture shaped by capitalism’s demand to produce.
A family climate where stillness wasn’t safe.
Your urgency isn’t just yours. It’s inherited, relational, systemic.
In fact, social scientists have named urgency as a hallmark of what Tema Okun and others call “white supremacy culture”: speed, productivity, perfectionism as survival. When we locate urgency in this context, it stops being an individual flaw and becomes a collective design.
The Spiritual Perspective
From a spiritual lens, urgency is the refusal of presence. It’s the nervous system’s attempt to outrun mortality, pain, or loss. It’s the illusion that if I just go fast enough, I can get ahead of the end. But endings come anyway. Death comes anyway. The world changes anyway. Urgency is the soul’s way of saying: I don’t yet trust that I am held.
The Metaphor
Think of urgency like fire.
A campfire warms, cooks, sustains. But an unchecked wildfire devours everything in its path. Your nervous system’s urgency was built to protect. To keep the fire burning so you could survive. But when urgency runs without context, it consumes your life instead of nourishing it.
The Medicine of Context
Here’s the most radical truth: you are not broken for being urgent.
Urgency is not your identity. It’s a nervous system state, a family inheritance, a cultural imprint.
And when we place it in context, something shifts. The shame loosens. Compassion enters. New rhythms become possible.
This is why I created unarmor: a free teaching + mini-podcast about unhooking from urgency, listening to your nervous system, and receiving support without shame.
Because urgency isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a wound. And wounds deserve tending, not judgment.