I keep on thinking about the question Abby posed last week: how do we move quickly without rushing?

The dilemma, and the assumptions behind it, can be illustrated like this:

We all know the Fast and Rushing quadrant well.

It’s a version of “OMG I have SO much homework…” “No I have SO MUCH HOMEWORK!” that surfaced sometime in school. Busy becomes a way of life, and we get hooked on the buzzing tension. That rushing, frantic feeling can accompany getting a lot done. But often, we start to unconsciously equate fast with frenzy, and it’s no surprise that we often end up at a breaking point.

Ironically, it’s also possible to take that same energy into the “slow” quadrant: fear takes hold of us, and we cannot face reality. The tasks we are able to  accomplish pale in comparison to everything that needs to be done, so we do less. Yet we still find ourselves expending a tremendous amount of energy on worry and fear. We are paralyzed.

That, to me, is the main difference between the top and bottom half of this graph: not the amount we get done, but the amount of mental energy we spend cycling through worry.

We know how it feels to end up in this place: no matter how much we accomplished, it’s feels impossible to truly stop at the end of the day.

We can’t stop our minds from churning even when we’ve closed the laptop.

We’ve gotten on such a stimulation high—maybe, even, from crushing it all day—that we spend the rest of the night stimulating ourselves more, scrolling or finding other ways to get a dopamine hit.

As our brains gets used to this pattern, the pattern itself strengthens. We get to a point where, thanks to long stretches (months, years) of both moving fast and being frenzied, we assume that “fast” and “frenzied” are inseparable.

Think, for a moment, what fast and intentional looks like: maybe a professional athlete, or an animal in the wild that knows exactly where it’s heading.

There’s an efficiency of movement, a calm focus, no wasted energy, and a power that comes from a lethal combination of relaxation, clarity, and aggression.

“How much we do” and “how we do what we do” move on independent axes.

To be clear, I’m as likely as the next person to get caught up in worry, in unproductive cycling through “what if’s,” of a sense that if I slow down for even 20 minutes to sit and really think about something that I’ll have fallen behind.

But that mode makes me neither more effective nor happier, so I’m trying to observe it to see if I can let it go.

When I come up short, bouts of intense exercise and moments of unbridled laughter and joy with loved ones are a great way to reset.