As a college student, I feel like there's a race against the clock between attending class, doing homework, studying, going to work, and just everything else that I have to complete at that time. Just staring at a list of everything that I have to do in a time constraint makes me feel very stressed before I even begin. This prompted me to consider whether the feeling of not having enough time is enough to elicit a physical stress response.
Stress affects the body largely through the autonomic nervous system, which includes the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system functions to assist the body to react when it is under stress, while the parasympathetic nervous system functions to help the body go back to a more relaxed resting state (Kim et al., 2018). A general measure of this sympathetic parasympathetic relationship that researchers can look at is heart rate variability (or HRV) which is the variation in time between each individual heartbeat (Kim et al., 2018). Schmid et al. (2024) investigated if time pressure could elicit this sort of cardiological response to everyday stress. The team followed 394 adults for two to four days. The participants regularly tracked and reported the levels of time pressure and emotional fatigue they experienced while being wired to a wearable electrocardiogram to measure their HRV. Rather than having the participants produce stress in a laboratory setting, the team was able to study the elicited bodily responses to real-life stress. The researchers found that when participants experienced greater time pressure, their HRV temporarily decreased (Schmid et al., 2024). This decline reflects decreased parasympathetic tone and is what we would expect physiologically if a person is presented with an immediate stressor. The authors also observed that individuals whose HRV was more responsive to time pressure were more likely to report having high emotional exhaustion.
I always think of stress coming from things such as taking a difficult exam or experiencing a major life event, but even something as simple as frequently seeing the time on the clock or stressing about deadlines causes our bodies to respond. Having read this research, I believe I must be more aware of my own pacing. Rather than continually rushing and stressing myself out, I will now plan ahead and give myself even more extra time to get tasks done. This will go a long way to reducing the pressure of feeling like I am under a time constraint all the time.
Kim, H.-G., Cheon, E.-J., Bai, D.-S., Lee, Y. H., & Koo, B.-H. (2018). Stress and heart rate variability: A meta-analysis and review of the literature. Psychiatry Investigation, 15(3), 235–245. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2017.08.17
Schmid, R. F., Thomas, J., & Rentzsch, K. (2024). Individual differences in parasympathetic nervous system reactivity in response to everyday stress are associated with momentary emotional exhaustion. Scientific Reports, 14, 26662. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-74873-9
It's cool how the researchers observed HRV and connected that to time pressure. This also made me think about how an obsessive time pressure concept can also be caused due to toxic productivity which can in part cause physical and mental decline. I watched this YouTube video on productivity thats pretty cool. It mentioned a 2022 survey of around 1 million people showed that productivity was their #1 goal. Here's the link: https://youtu.be/VQK64SrYkzs?si=jtbS-n8VRqbdvXMz
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