When Your Insides Are Moving Faster Than Your Life

There’s a feeling I get sometimes when I finally stop moving.

It usually shows up after I’ve been going for a while — days where everything is full and layered and stacked on top of itself. Tasks, thoughts, responsibilities, conversations, plans. Then something interrupts the momentum. I sit down. I close my eyes. Or I lie still for a moment.

I can feel it immediately.

My body is still moving fast.

My chest feels tight and active, like my heart is trying to keep up with something that isn’t actually happening anymore. My breathing is shallow. There’s this sense of internal motion, like I’m still running even though I’m physically still.

It’s always a little disorienting when I notice it because the realization comes with it — my insides haven’t caught up to my life.

Lately I’ve been noticing this more.

My son is almost seven months old now, which feels impossible to say. People always tell you that time speeds up when you have kids, but I don’t think I understood what that meant until now. There’s this strange time distortion that happens. The days are full and dense, but the months disappear. Moments feel long when you’re inside them, and then suddenly they’re gone.

Sometimes I look at him and feel this immediate pull to slow down.

I’ll be putting him to bed, just lying next to him, watching his face, and something in me softens without effort. My breath changes. My movements change. It’s like my nervous system remembers a different pace.

There’s always this mix of feelings.

Part of me wants the moment to last forever — this exact age, this exact version of him, this exact stage. Almost immediately, another part of me knows that would be wrong. He’s supposed to grow. He’s supposed to move forward. Life is supposed to unfold.

That tension — wanting to hold something and knowing you can’t — is part of the experience of time.

In the work of unbecoming, I talk about time not being linear. For a long time I understood that mostly in terms of the past living in the present — how old experiences continue to shape current reactions, how memory and emotion don’t move in straight lines.

Lately, I’ve been noticing another dimension.

Time speeds up and slows down depending on how present we are to it.

Four minutes can feel endless in physical pain or exertion. The same four minutes can disappear when you’re absorbed in something meaningful. Nothing about the clock changes. What changes is attention.

Attention is deeply tied to pace.

When my mind is moving fast — thinking ahead, worrying, organizing, tracking — my internal experience speeds up. Even if I’m sitting still, I’m not actually here. My body reflects that. My breathing stays shallow. My heart rate stays elevated. My nervous system stays activated.

There’s a mismatch between my internal state and the moment I’m living.

When something pulls my attention fully into the present — my son’s face, a conversation that requires listening, the sensation of my own breath — everything slows.

My insides match my life, and when that happens, something else appears almost immediately.

Meaning.

Not the big existential kind that we try to solve intellectually. Just a sense that this moment matters. That being here is enough. That nothing else needs to happen right now for life to feel full.

That’s one of the things I think we misunderstand about meaning. We often treat it like something we have to create or find or figure out, but a lot of the time, meaning emerges naturally when attention returns.

Slowing down isn’t about productivity or mindfulness or doing something correctly. It’s about allowing awareness to come back online.

In the phases of unbecoming, awareness is always present. It doesn’t disappear. What shifts is whether we notice that we’re aware. Phase one names that recognition. Phase five names the returning — the moment when we realize we’ve drifted into becoming again, into speed or effort or distraction, and then something recognizes itself.

“Oh. Here I am.”

That overlap between returning and awareness happens constantly. We leave. We come back. We leave again. We come back again.

The body plays a huge role in that process.

Our bodies are anchors to the present in a way the mind isn’t. Sensation happens now. Breath happens now. Touch happens now. When attention drops into the body, the nervous system often recalibrates without conscious effort.

Connection depends on that slower pace too.

It’s hard to truly listen when your internal world is racing. It’s hard to feel someone else when you’re already three thoughts ahead. I’ve noticed this in myself lately — moments where my husband is talking and I realize I’m only half there, or my son is playing and I’m thinking about something else entirely.

Then I notice.

Then I return.

And as soon as I do, everything shifts slightly. The interaction becomes fuller. More alive. More meaningful. Not because anything changed externally, but because I’m actually there for it.

I think a lot of us move through seasons where our internal pace speeds up without us realizing it. Life gets full. Responsibilities stack. Attention fragments. We don’t notice the mismatch until we stop for a moment and feel how fast everything still is inside.

If you’re in one of those seasons, nothing has gone wrong.

You’ve just moved ahead of yourself a little.

The return is simple.

You’re here.

Take a breath.

Let your body catch up.