Episode 22: When Urgency Isn't Useful

Being a human is kind of like being the pilot in an airplane.  Your cockpit is lined with switches and dials and buttons, and you are receiving constant input of things that need action or attention.  In today's episode, I share 2 strategies that can help you react, but not OVERREACT when you feel urgency about a situation. 

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 22, when urgency isn't useful.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, my friend. How's it going? Today, we're going to talk about urgency and when urgency is useful and also when it's not.

So let's start by defining it. Urgency is the quality of being very important and needing attention immediately. So this could be a medical emergency like a broken leg or profuse bleeding.

We would want to get to urgent care or maybe even the ER right away. This could be a fire alarm telling you to evacuate the building immediately. Maybe you have a deadline for a project and people are depending on you to finish it.

So it's urgent that you get it done in the next two hours. So something that's urgent is important and it requires immediate action to attend to it. So if you have firefighters and they're making spaghetti dinner at the firehouse, but then the fire alarm goes off, they stop whatever they're doing.

They stood up and they get out of there because it's very urgent. If you were to put that situation into a CTFAR model, which of course I'm going to do because I'm a nerdy life coach, then it would be something like this circumstance, making spaghetti, fire alarm sounds thought we need to attend to this right away. This is urgent, right? So that they're going to think something like that.

And then they're going to feel urgency. And from that feeling that will drive the actions of, they're going to get their suits on as quickly as possible. They're going to slide down the pole.

They're going to start the fire engine. They're going to head to the fire. They're going to put it out and save lives if they can.

So in that situation, the feeling of urgency is very useful. It moves the firefighters into action that creates a result of saving lives. If your child runs into the street and a car is coming, you might feel urgency to jump into the road, grab their hand and pull them back to the sidewalk.

And in that case, if your goal is to keep your child safe, then that urgency was really useful and helpful because it drove you to take actions that prevented harm or injury to your child. Same thing. Like if your bathtub is overflowing, you see the water start to flow over the edge and onto the floor, then you might feel urgency to be like, Oh my gosh, I got to hang up the phone.

I've got to go turn that water off because I don't want my house to flood. And in that situation, it would be appropriate and helpful to take those actions from that feeling of urgency that creates a result that is what you want in the end. Sometimes though, we take actions from a feeling of urgency that aren't as useful or helpful in the end.

So here's an example for me. I'm type one diabetic and sometimes my blood sugar gets low, and this is an urgent situation. It requires immediate attention.

So when this happens, an alarm sounds on my phone and I stop whatever I'm doing and I eat sugar to bring my blood sugar back up. And this is useful and helpful to take this action in this situation. But even after I've eaten an appropriate amount of juice or glucose tablets to treat the low, it still takes like 15 minutes or so for it to take effect.

So in the meantime, my body still feels an urgency to eat food and my heart is beating and my muscles are tight and I'm shaking and I'm having trouble concentrating and my body knows the solution is food. So it's like, Hey, we're still feeling pretty bad. Eat more food.

This is urgent. And sometimes I've acted on that feeling of urgency and I'll go eat cookies or cereal or candy, like way more than I need to get my blood sugar up 30 points. And then as a result of those actions, my blood sugar will go up 200 points or even 300 points.

And I'll feel terrible for the rest of the day, right? So this is an example of overreacting to a feeling of urgency. The feeling itself is valid, but the actions that we take are sometimes in excess of what is helpful or appropriate. So when we overreact, our actions produce a result that isn't useful in the end.

It's not really what we want to create ultimately. Here's another example of this. Let's say circumstance is 7 50 AM.

And I feel urgency because I'm thinking my kids aren't going to be ready for school and they're going to be late. So I can react to that in a helpful and appropriate way by maybe helping to fill up water bottles, helping to pack lunches, maybe reminding them what time it is. Maybe I'm going to walk a little faster than I normally would around the house, right? This is appropriate and helpful to the situation, but I could also overreact to that feeling of urgency that I have.

And that might look like criticizing my kids. Why didn't you find your shoes last night? Or lecturing them like school starts in five minutes and you're not going to be ready. And you're not really showing up responsibly here.

And this needs to change. Maybe I would get in the car and lean onto the horn. And for me, I would define those actions as overreacting to the urgency that I feel in my body about getting my kids to school on time.

So here's how I like to think of it. Being a human is kind of like being the pilot in an airplane and your cockpit is lined with switches and dials and buttons. And you are constantly getting alerts of stuff that's happening as you're flying your plane.

And today I want to give you two strategies that can help you not overreact as those alerts and alarms come in. And as you feel urgency from those alarms to take action in different situations, these strategies can help you not take too much action or action that isn't going to be helpful. So if you have a situation where you have overreacted, when you felt like something was urgent, what I recommend that you do is you coach yourself after the fact.

So like once the plane has landed and you can reflect on the situation you were in, take a minute and review the flight. And of course, the way that you can do this is to make a model. Circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result.

And just ask yourself like, what happened? What was the circumstance? And what was the feeling, urgency or panic or fear or stress, right? And then what actions did I take from that feeling and how useful or helpful were those actions in the end, right? So if I were reviewing my flight of a recent low blood sugar, I might sit down and say, okay, I had low blood sugar and this is what I did. I had three glucose tablets and then I still felt panicked and I still felt urgent and I still felt like I needed to eat. And so I had a ton of cookies and I had some cereal.

And then I would look at that and be like, how useful or helpful were those actions in the end? Not very, I way over treated that low. I overreacted in the situation, right? Or in the example of being with my kids in the morning when they're running late, if I realized that I overreacted, then I probably created a lot more stress. And then maybe I felt regret and we were probably late either way.

So it wasn't even that useful or helpful because we were going to be late no matter what I did. And so we could have been late without all the stress and the pressure. And so I might say how useful or helpful were those actions? Well, not very.

And they probably didn't help me achieve the result that I'm wanting to create in a relationship with my kids of being loving and supportive and speaking in a kind tone and all of those things, right? So that's kind of what it just looks like. To review the flight is just notice what happened, what did I do from that feeling of urgency? And do I think that that was appropriate and helpful? Or do I think that maybe it was an overreaction so that it was more action than was actually useful or appropriate or helpful? If you're going to have the courage to do this, I recommend that you skip the part where you think of yourself as a terrible person and where you go, oh, I'm always messing up. I always overreact.

Why do I do this? What's wrong with me? I recommend that you skip that part and also skip the part where you blame anybody else for the actions that you took. Well, they were being rude or they were yelling or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't blame anything on anyone else.

Just notice your own actions and own it. Yep, I overreacted and I'm not a terrible person and there's nothing wrong with me. This is just how I responded in this situation.

Then from that place, you can design how you'd like to handle it in the future. Like, okay, I think I'd like to eat glucose tablets and then set a timer for 15 minutes and not eat anything else until that timer goes off. And that's going to be hard to do because my brain is still going to be telling me, this is urgent.

You need to eat food. You need to eat simple carbs, go find something that you can eat. But I am not going to do that.

Maybe I'm going to chew gum for 15 minutes until that timer goes off so that I can take some action to answer that urge, but not overreact in a way that's going to produce results that I don't want. So you can negotiate with yourself ahead of time what is truly urgent and what isn't, and then kind of decide a plan of action. So sometimes I like to think of my brain as like the co-pilot of my airplane.

And sometimes situations happen and then my co-pilot starts to freak out. And it's like, oh my gosh, this is a terrible situation. We got to get on the PA and we got to make an announcement to all the people on the plane.

And it's like, no, hey, I'm the pilot and I don't want you to get on the PA right now. And I don't want you to freak out. This is not a truly urgent situation.

We just need to address what's going on. Right. And sometimes in the moment I can do that with my brain, but oftentimes it's really helpful to reflect on a previous flight where my brain freaked out and then say, hey, this is what we're going to do in the future.

And so if you want to try this, you get a piece of paper and you just put two different columns, right? One is going to be labeled things that are truly urgent. And then the other column is things that aren't truly urgent. And that can be really helpful just to write that down for yourself.

And so on the left column, it's like, if something is actually life threatening, if someone is in true peril, right? If we have bleeding or something, then it's like, oh, this is very truly urgent. And we just need to spring into action right away. But a lot of the things on the right column are things that are important, things that we really care about.

But actually, if we really look at it objectively, when we're not in the situation, we can realize, okay, this is not something that is truly, truly urgent. And that can help sort of dial down in the moment how we're going to respond. And as you're doing this, you could decide ahead of time, like what would an appropriate action be for this situation versus what would be an overreaction that probably wouldn't be really useful or helpful.

And it would probably create a result that I'm not going to want, or that I'm going to regret. The goal is you want to rewire the neurological circuitry so that when you feel a sense of urgency, it's going to be helpful so that it will launch you into productive action. Or when something happens, you could be like, you know what? This isn't actually urgent.

I don't want my body to get so amped up with this feeling of urgency because then I'm going to end up overreacting. So does that make sense? So you just negotiate with your brain ahead of time on paper. These are the things that are truly urgent.

And here's how we're going to respond to those. And these are the things that are going to feel urgent in the moment, but they're not actually. And so here's how we're going to take action, but not overreact to it.

So in your life, if something is truly urgent, it's a medical emergency, it's a house fire, it's a flood, you want to spring into action right away. But when you encounter something on the not actually urgent list, before you take action from a place of urgency, maybe just try slowing it down, taking a breath, saying a prayer, and then deciding what you want to do. Because it can feel urgent to confront somebody who didn't follow through on a commitment they made.

It feels like something you need to do right this second. But if you pray first, you might be able to take appropriate action without overreacting to the situation. Maybe it feels urgent to lecture a child for making choices you don't want them to be making.

It feels like something you need to do right this second. But if you pray first before taking any action, maybe what you'll end up saying and doing will be more helpful in the end than the things you would have said if you acted right away. So in your life, you're going to be faced with situations on a regular basis where you feel a sense of urgency that something needs to be done.

Alarms in your cockpit are going to go off constantly. And there are really important decisions that need to be made as those alarms go off. And some of them are truly urgent.

As the pilot of the plane, you get to decide what things are truly urgent, what things aren't, and what actions you're going to take in any situation. And if you find that you totally overreact to an alarm during a flight, once you get the plane on the ground, take a minute to examine that alarm and see if you can rewire it so it won't beep as loud or as often if it's not truly urgent. In this process, I want to encourage you to be patient with yourself as you examine the instances where you may have overreacted and to really enjoy designing how you want to show up next time.

You'll get better and better with every flight as you notice your thoughts and feelings and actions and make little adjustments in the wiring in your brain of how you're thinking about things in order to get better results next time. I hope this is helpful for you as you fly your airplane. Thanks for joining me.