You don’t have enough time to get all your shit done.
You’re anxious getting out the door in the morning and short with your partner. You chase your tail all day. You’ve got less patience with clients and your team and secretly wish they’d just f*ck off and leave you alone for five minutes. You walk through the door wired, but even when work finishes, your brain doesn’t. You can’t switch off. Can’t stop thinking. Can’t properly rest.
And despite constantly moving, your to-do list somehow keeps getting longer. Psychologists call this time famine - the persistent feeling that there is never enough time.
The important thing to understand is this: Your brain doesn’t experience scarcity purely through money or resources. It also experiences scarcity psychologically. The brain interprets:
…as forms of deprivation.
So time becomes psychologically scarce even when objectively you’re not actually doing more.
Scarcity captures the mind.
When something feels insufficient, the brain allocates disproportionate attention to the unmet need. That consumes working memory and attentional capacity. Then your nervous system shifts into survival mode.
When resources like time feel uncertain, the brain increases activity in systems associated with threat and survival - your sympathetic nervous system, your amygdala, aka your monkey mind.
Meanwhile, activity in the prefrontal cortex (associated with planning, perspective, restraint and long-term thinking) decreases. Under scarcity, the brain literally becomes less capable of calmly relating to the future.
The future shrinks. And because survival feels uncertain, the brain biases attention toward the immediate.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. If survival is under threat, prioritising the present is adaptive. So the brain starts discounting the future more heavily.
You become more impulsive. You seek immediate certainty and quick wins over long-term investment in actions that strategically compound.
This is why scarcity thinking creates paradoxical behaviour:
chasing opportunities while lacking direction
overworking while underperforming
constant activity without meaningful progress
Scarcity also distorts time perception itself. People underestimate available time, overestimate demands, struggle to feel present and feel rushed even at rest. This produces a constant internal sense of: “I’m behind.” Even in stillness.
A person may technically have free time but cannot psychologically access spaciousness.
That’s why people stuck in scarcity often cannot enjoy rest and feel guilty when slowing down.
The antidote is abundance.
Research suggests that when people feel psychologically abundant, time subjectively expands. Patience increases. Long-term thinking improves. Creativity rises. Strategic thinking returns.
Why? Because the nervous system no longer needs to conserve cognitive resources for survival monitoring.
Psychologically secure people often appear calmer and more effective because they’re operating from temporal spaciousness rather than temporal scarcity.
At a deeper level, scarcity mindset is often less about resources and more about identity. Unconscious beliefs like:
“There won’t be enough for me.”
“If I slow down, I’ll fall behind.”
“My value depends on output.”
…create a life where time itself feels adversarial.
You don’t merely have too little time. You experience yourself as perpetually lacking.
My advice:
journal to bring the deeper psychological stuff to the surface
reconnect to your mission and your why
put the immediate in a 10–20 year context
get clarity on what’s truly important
conduct a dispassionate review of where you actually are relative to your goals
jettison the extraneous sh*t that isn’t serving the long term
And remember:
You can’t control everything. Surrender to the chaos you’ve chosen.
In the words of John Lennon: “There’s nowhere you can be that you’re not meant to be.”
