Mental Health in the Age of Acceleration

Is this you or something like you?

The phone is in your hand before your eyes have properly opened. There is a tightness across your chest that you barely register because it has been there so long it feels like weather — just the climate you live in. You move fast from the moment you get up. Coffee, kids, inbox, commute, meetings, lunch at the desk, more meetings, dinner, couch, screen, bed. By the time you stop, you are so wired and so depleted at the same time that sleep does not do what it is supposed to. And the next morning, you do it again.

I used to live closer to that than I care to admit. I know that particular exhaustion — the running. Endlessly on the way to the next thing, so I am missing what is happening right now. My mind is saying ‘eat to get it done so you can start work.’ So I miss the delicious breakfast in front of me because I am not really there. My mind whirling and slightly overwhelmed with trying to get everything done. Even time for me felt like something I ticked off a list so I could feel a bit better.

My mornings look completely different now, but I want to be honest: this did not happen by accident, and it took real effort to build. I get up, drink a glass of water, and meditate before anything else gets a look in. Then I walk or go to the gym because my body asks for it and I have learned to take that seriously. I ease into work slowly, with space between clients so I can breathe, sometimes stepping outside to play with the dog when my head needs clearing. My phone is on silent all the time. I have built my days around spaciousness because I hit a point where I genuinely could not bear what the alternative was doing to me.

Living in India helped me understand something about this that I could not see from inside my own culture. You cannot rush a street in Pune and Himachal Pradesh. The sheer beautiful chaos of it — the noise, the colour, the crazy traffic, the way time seems to run on entirely different rules — made speed an absurd ambition. Something in me settled each time I was there. I came home softer, more present, more in my body. More like myself, actually.

The structures I have built in my own life, I built because my body made it very clear it could not keep going the way it was going. That wall is real. Most people I work with have hit it, or are heading towards it, and the conversation we keep having about mental health as a society is not really meeting that reality.

The numbers are hard to ignore. In 2024, 43% of adults reported feeling more anxious than the year before — up from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022. In the same year, 59% of US employees reported burnout, and in Australia the figure sat at 46%. And tellingly, 69% of adults now cite the spread of misinformation as a major source of stress, and 57% say the same about the rise of AI — both figures up sharply from the year before. We are not just tired. We are losing our bearings.

We tend to talk about mental health as something that happens to particular people — a diagnosis, a crisis, something requiring clinical attention. What I see is something far more widespread and much harder to name. A slow fraying. The shoulders that never fully drop. The sleep that does not restore you. The sense of being perpetually a step behind, stretched a little too thin, running on fumes you keep pretending are reserves. Functioning, yes. But with something essential missing.

The speed at which we are expected to process life has become genuinely extraordinary. Information arrives faster than we can absorb it. Decisions that would once have taken days need answers within the hour. Time that used to serve as real recovery has been eaten up by screens. And because everyone around us appears to be keeping up, there is a creeping suspicion that the problem is personal — that we need to manage ourselves better, optimise our sleep, build more resilience.

The body, though, is not confused. It is tired. It has not had space to come back to itself. And the longer that signal gets overridden, the louder it eventually needs to become.

A few things that actually help — and I mean in the body, not just on paper:

Move in the morning, before the day gets its hooks in. Even twenty minutes. Walking counts. The point is to feel your body as something that belongs to you before you hand your attention over to everything else.

Build gaps into your day and treat them as non-negotiable. Between one thing and the next, even two minutes of sitting, feeling your feet on the floor and your breath moving, changes the register of the whole day.

Put your phone on silent. All the time. The urgency you feel when you cannot check it is the addiction talking, not the reality. Most things can wait twenty minutes.

Try this at some point today. Before you move from one thing to the next, stop for thirty seconds. Feel the weight of your body where you are sitting. Notice what is happening in your chest — is there a held quality there, a bracing? You do not need to change it. Feeling it is enough. That is where the shift starts — in thirty seconds of actually being where you are.

The body has been keeping an honest account of how you are actually doing, underneath whatever story you are telling about managing fine. Learning to read that account, before it has to shout, is the most useful thing most of us could do right now.

References

Here are the research citations used in the Mental Health in the Age of Acceleration post:

Anxiety statistics (43% of adults feeling more anxious): American Psychiatric Association. (2024). American adults express increasing anxiousness in annual poll. https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/annual-poll-adults-express-increasing-anxiousness

US burnout (59% of employees): High5Test. (2025). Employee wellbeing & mental health workplace statistics (2024–2025). https://high5test.com/employee-wellbeing-statistics/

Australian burnout (46% of employees): Enmasse. (2025). Burnout in 2025: What the data really tells us. https://enmasse2.com/news/burnout-in-2025-what-the-data-really-tells-us/

Misinformation and AI as stressors (69% and 57%): American Psychological Association. (2025). Stress in America 2025: A crisis of connection. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2025

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