Between Worlds: The Purgatory of Slowing Down
It's Saturday morning. You've finished your coffee. The work emails are answered. The house is clean… enough. Your kids are occupied…enough. Your partner is reading…enough. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, there's nothing urgent demanding your attention.
And it feels horrific.
Not bored. Not restless. Something deeper. A low-grade anxiety whispering you should be doing something, anything. Your hand reaches for your phone. Email. Close it. Open it again. News. Social media. Close it. Another app. The checking becomes compulsion, a ritual that quiets the noise for a moment before it returns, louder.
This isn't laziness or a lack of ambition. It's about what happens when the armor comes off.
The Rat Race Wasn't Just About Achievement
We tell ourselves we're busy because we're ambitious, because we care about our work, because we have responsibilities. Those reasons are real. But there's something else driving us, something we don't talk about.
Research from Columbia Business School reveals something uncomfortable: busyness is a status symbol in America, a way of signaling that we're in demand, scarce, valuable. We've turned overwork into a badge of honor. But psychologist Manfred Kets de Vries suggests something more fundamental is happening. In his research on executive behavior, he describes busyness as a "manic defense," a way of warding off what he calls "the demons of loneliness, separation, depression and (above all) death anxiety." Social media can even feel like productivity, you’re keeping up with and connecting with others lives.
The meetings, the emails, the text messages, the never-ending to-do lists: they're not just obligations. They're a buffer. A way to avoid sitting with the parts of ourselves we'd rather not face.
What Your Brain Does When You Finally Stop
When you're constantly busy, your brain doesn't have to confront itself. But the moment you stop, a specific network activates: the default mode network (DMN).
The DMN is the brain's "screensaver." It handles self-referential thinking: reflecting on yourself, your past, your relationships, your future, your mortality. It's where your internal narrative lives.
For most people, this is where uncomfortable thoughts surface. Research from Stanford's Department of Psychiatry found that in depression, the DMN becomes hyperactive, leading to excessive rumination and negative self-referential thoughts. Even in healthy individuals, it often brings up unresolved concerns, regrets, anxieties, and questions about meaning and identity.
This is why doing nothing feels so intense. When you stop moving, your brain automatically turns inward. And what it finds there isn't always comfortable.Meditation teaches you to observe these thoughts without judgment, a critical first step in not being controlled by them. But observation alone is incomplete. Eventually, you have to engage with what's surfacing, not just watch it pass. The thoughts aren't noise to be managed; they're material that needs to be integrated.
The Masks We Wear and What Hides Beneath
Carl Jung understood this dynamic decades before neuroscience could measure it. He described the persona, the social mask we present to the world, as necessary for navigating social life. It's the competent professional, the reliable partner, the person who has it together. In some ways we know the truth, it is hard for anyone to handle all of us all the time.
But the persona is only part of who we are. It gets tricky when we think that means we shouldn’t have access to all the other parts of ourselves. Jung argued that everything we reject about ourselves (the traits that don't fit our carefully constructed identity) gets pushed into what he called the shadow. The shadow contains not just our flaws and fears, but also our repressed desires, unexpressed creativity, and authentic impulses we've deemed unacceptable.
Jung wrote that "the shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort." He described encountering the shadow as experiencing "a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective."
This is what slowing down forces us to confront. When we stop performing our persona, the shadow doesn't disappear. It becomes harder to ignore. We're left alone with the parts of ourselves we've spent years running from. And there’s beautiful things to discover in that shadow if we can learn to let it go.
For many of us, those parts include:
The fear that we're not actually as capable as we appear
The sense that we've built a life that looks successful but feels hollow
Resentment we've never expressed
Needs we've never acknowledged
Dreams we've dismissed as impractical
The creeping awareness that time is passing and we're not who we wanted to become
The Gremlins Pulling Apart the Wiring
In coaching, we call these voices "gremlins": the internal critics and limiting beliefs that shape our behavior beneath conscious awareness. Think of them as the creature on the airplane wing in that Twilight Zone episode, methodically dismantling the machinery while everyone inside remains oblivious. When you're constantly busy, they work in the shadows, unnoticed. But in stillness, you can finally see them, fingers wrapped around the bolts, pulling apart everything that keeps you airborne.
Common gremlins sound like:
"I'm only valuable when I'm producing"
"If I'm not climbing, I'm falling"
"Slowing down means I'm lazy"
"Other people work harder than this and don't complain"
"I should be grateful for what I have and stop wanting more"
"Who am I if I'm not accomplishing things?"
These aren't just random thoughts. They're often internalized messages from childhood, cultural conditioning, or past experiences that taught us our worth was conditional. Research on adult attachment and productivity suggests that many high achievers grew up learning that love and acceptance came through achievement rather than simply through being.
The gremlin that might terrify you most: "What if everything I've been working toward doesn't actually matter?"
Welcome to Purgatory
Here's what makes this so disorienting: you're caught between two worlds.
The old structure (the endless hustle, the clear metrics of success, the familiar identity of the person who's always achieving) doesn't feel sustainable anymore. You've felt the cracks. You know something needs to change.
But the new world? That's obscured. There's fog everywhere, thick and disorienting, and you can't tell if you're moving forward or in circles. You squint, trying to make out shapes in the distance, but there's nothing solid to fix your gaze on. You don't know what's on the other side. You don't know who you are without the hustle. You don't know what fulfillment even looks like outside of achievement.
This is the liminal space. The in-between. The purgatory.
Jung called this the "nigredo," a phase of dissolution and darkness that precedes transformation. It's characterized by confusion, a loss of direction, the feeling that nothing makes sense anymore. He wrote that "in this time of descent (one, three, seven years, more or less) genuine courage and strength are required, with no certainty of emergence."
Purgatory is terrifying because the rules aren't clear. You don't know what you're supposed to be doing, how long this will last, or what comes next. It in fact doesn’t occur to you if there is something you could be doing. You start to ask yourself if this is the ceiling of who you are. And it’s not who you thought you would be.
Yet purgatory serves a purpose. This is where the old identity has to break down so something more authentic can emerge. This is where you finally have space to hear the quiet voice underneath all the noise, the one that's been trying to tell you what you actually want, what actually matters, who you actually are.
The terror and the incubation exist simultaneously. The emptiness and the potential. The death of who you were and the birth of who you might become.
Death Is Closer Than You Think (And Your Brain Knows It)
There's something else lurking beneath the surface: mortality.
Terror management theory, developed by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, proposes that much of human behavior is driven by managing the anxiety of knowing we will die. When people are reminded of death (even subtly), they cling more tightly to their worldviews, defend their identities more fiercely, and seek validation of their value.
In a meta-analysis of over 277 experiments, researchers found that mortality salience consistently triggers defensive behaviors: we work harder to prove ourselves, judge others more harshly, cling to status symbols, avoid anything that threatens our sense of meaning.
Busyness becomes a perfect defense. If we're always racing toward the next goal, we don't have to face the fact that one day there won't be a next goal. The career we're building, the status we're chasing, the identity we're protecting: all of it ends.
When you slow down, that awareness creeps in. Not consciously, perhaps. But it's there in the background, in that vague discomfort that makes you reach for your phone, that restlessness that keeps you moving even when you're exhausted.
What It Means to Sit With Yourself
Contemplative traditions have known this for millennia: transformation requires stillness. Not the stillness of vacation or distraction, but of being present with what is.
Neuroscience research on meditation reveals what happens when people train themselves to sit with discomfort rather than flee from it. Long-term meditators show decreased rumination patterns and increased ability to observe their thoughts without being controlled by them. They develop "decentered awareness": the capacity to experience thoughts and emotions as passing events rather than absolute truths.
This isn't about achieving some blissed-out state. It's about developing the capacity to be with yourself (all of yourself) without immediately reaching for the escape hatch.
Raising consciousness isn't a lofty spiritual concept. It's the practical work of:
Noticing when you're avoiding rather than being present
Recognizing which beliefs are yours versus internalized from others
Catching yourself performing a persona rather than being authentic
Seeing the gremlins for what they are: old programming, not truth
Acknowledging the discomfort without letting it dictate your choices
It means learning to tolerate the liminal space without prematurely collapsing back into what's familiar or desperately grasping for something new.
If you're in this uncomfortable place (if slowing down has surfaced things you'd rather not face), here are practices that might help. They won't make the discomfort disappear. They won't even make it easy. But they can make the discomfort more workable.
Observe when you reach for distraction. What are you avoiding?
Name the gremlins. Would I say this to a friend?
Sit with discomfort for five minutes. Five minutes is enough to start.
Clear one day a week of obligations. See what emerges.
The Discomfort Is the Work
The discomfort doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. The discomfort is the work.
You've spent years (maybe decades) building armor that kept you moving, achieving, performing. That armor served a purpose. It protected you from uncertainty, from vulnerability, from the terrifying question of whether you're enough without the achievements.
But at some point, the armor gets too heavy. It stops protecting and starts constricting. It keeps you from being fully alive, fully present, fully yourself.
Sitting with that discomfort (really sitting with it, not distracting yourself from it) is how you begin to shed what no longer serves you. It's how you start to discover what's underneath the persona, beyond the gremlins, on the other side of the purgatory.
It won't be comfortable. It probably won't be quick. And there's no guarantee of what you'll find on the other side.
But consider this: What's the alternative? Spending the rest of your life running from yourself?
The stillness won't kill you. But avoiding it might hollow you out until there's nothing left but the mask.
The space between who you were and who you're becoming is exactly where transformation happens. But you must be willing to stay there long enough to find out.
References
Bellezza, S., Paharia, N., & Keinan, A. (2017). Conspicuous consumption of time: When busyness and lack of leisure time become a status symbol. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(1), 118–138.
Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two decades of terror management theory: A meta-analysis of mortality salience research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 155–195.
Kets de Vries, M. (2014). Doing nothing and nothing to do: The hidden value of empty time and boredom. INSEAD Faculty & Research Working Paper.
Jung, C. G. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (Collected Works Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton University Press.
Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), 2469–2487.
Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon, D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(4), 681–690.
Sheline, Y. I., Barch, D. M., Price, J. L., Rundle, M. M., Vaishnavi, S. N., Snyder, A. Z., et al. (2009). The default mode network and self-referential processes in depression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(6), 1942–1947.
Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225.
