When Your Body Wants Slowness But Your Life Demands More
The internal conflict of life transitions
Before you begin
Here’s what we’ll explore:
Why your body may be asking for slowness even as life demands more
The nervous system conflict that often appears during major life transitions
Why this tension doesn’t mean you’re failing or falling behind
What it actually looks like to honour your body without abandoning your life
A quieter, steadier way to move forward when speed no longer works
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from being pulled in two directions at once.
Your body is asking for rest.
For space.
For fewer inputs, fewer demands, fewer decisions.
And yet your life is asking for the opposite.
More responsibility. More output. More clarity. More momentum.
For a long time, I assumed this was a motivation problem, but experience taught me otherwise.
This has nothing to do with laziness or willpower. It’s not about fixing yourself.
You’re in a transition. And, your body knows it before your calendar does.
When the body slows before life does
Most of us are taught to interpret slowness as a problem.
If you feel tired, you must need discipline.
If your energy drops, you need motivation.
If your body resists pace, something must be wrong.
But during periods of transition — especially emotional, identity, or life-stage transitions — the body often downshifts first.
It begins to conserve energy.
Tolerance for overload decreases.
The system asks for simplicity.Not because it’s broken, but because it’s recalibrating.
The conflict begins when life does not slow down alongside you.
I saw this happen while I was still in the corporate environment.
In my last position, I found that the demands kept increasing: higher output, more visibility, better signalling of “culture,” stronger performance optics.
All I wanted was space to breathe.
Instead, I developed chronic back pain and a frozen fascia that would not resolve, no matter how much I stretched or meditated.
The more my body reduced its tolerance for overload, the more I was perceived as disengaged at work.
Something had to give.
Eventually, I was placed on a PIP. I was told how much they “believed in my abilities”, but even then, I realised I didn’t have the energy or desire to prove anything anymore.
At this point, some people would panic and double down on performance.
I took unpaid leave.
A month later, while still on leave, I resigned.
The only word for what I felt was relief.
And the chronic back pain?
Gone. Like it had never existed.
This is not the outcome everyone needs, but it is an example of what happens when the body’s signals are finally taken seriously.
Your nervous system senses change before your mind has language for it.
It will always give you signs if you’re willing to listen.
The hidden conflict of transition
The conflict of transition appears when life continues to demand performance while the body is preparing for something else.
This is where many people turn against themselves.
They feel guilty for needing rest while still carrying responsibility.
Ashamed that they can’t keep up the way they used to.
Afraid that slowing down means losing everything they’ve built.
So they push.
They override hunger. Ignore fatigue. Talk themselves out of what they feel.
The body responds by slowing further — not out of defiance, but protection.
This is the internal conflict of transition:
Your body is preparing you for a new chapter while your life is still structured around the old one.
No one teaches us how to hold that tension without self-judgment or self-abandonment.
How to honour the body without abandoning your life
The fear underneath slowness is simple:
If I listen to my body, everything will fall apart.
But slowness doesn’t mean quitting everything. It doesn’t mean disappearing. And it doesn’t mean giving up ambition.
It means:
letting the body set the floor, not the ceiling
choosing rhythm over urgency
releasing the need to resolve everything immediately
You can still show up, just not in self-erasing ways. And you can still move forward, just not at a pace that costs you your health.
Transition asks for presence, not pressure.
You don’t have to quit your job as I did.
But you do need to understand what season you’re in and what your body is asking of you.
For me, the cost of pretending had already been paid. I chose to stop negotiating with what I knew.
Slowness is the passage — not the obstacle
This is where many people misread what’s happening.
They assume slowness is something to push through — a temporary malfunction before “real life” resumes.
But in every meaningful transition, slowness appears for a reason.
What if slowness is the crossing?
What if this quieter phase is where old survival strategies fall away, and new capacity quietly builds?Most meaningful transitions are not loud.
They are subtle. Internal. Bodied.
If your body is asking for slowness, it may not be asking you to stop — but to arrive differently.
Transitions that are rushed don’t resolve.
They repeat.
How life transitions actually work
Here’s what’s rarely said plainly:
Transitions don’t respond to force. They respond to attunement.
When people try to speed themselves out of a threshold, one of two things happens:
the body collapses later, or
life recreates the same conditions in a new form
This is why so many people feel like they keep starting over.
The work of transition is not clarity.
It is capacity.
Capacity to hold uncertainty.
Capacity to move without overcorrecting.
Capacity to let the body recalibrate before asking it to perform again.
This is beyond self-care. It is structural.
And this is the lens through which I understand transition.
This is the work I do
I work with transitions as a distinct phase of life — with their own rules, rhythms, and requirements.
Not emotions to be soothed.
Not problems to be fixed.
The Threshold Map exists because thresholds behave predictably, even when they feel personal or disorienting.
Inside this work, we don’t ask:
“How do I get back to who I was?”
or “How do I push through this faster?”
We ask:
“What phase am I actually in?”
“What does this stage require?”
“What cannot be carried forward?”
This is how people move through transitions without burning their lives down — and without abandoning themselves in the process.
Inside the Threshold Map
The Threshold Map is the applied form of this philosophy.
It’s a structured way of walking through life transitions without rushing, bracing, or forcing premature clarity.
People come to this work when they already know:
speed no longer works
motivation isn’t the issue
returning to old versions of themselves isn’t an option
If this essay resonates, you don’t need persuasion.
You’re recognising the terrain.
If you are moving more slowly while life asks for more...
Your body is not lagging behind your life.
It is preparing you for how to live what comes next without collapse.
You don’t need to rush this phase into clarity.
You need to stay in contact while it unfolds.
Slowness is not the pause before your life resumes.
It is how this chapter is crossed.