Obsessive Compulsive Time Disorder

when the clock becomes your judge

🎧 Audio (11 mins)

There is a kind of discomfort that doesn’t come from pain or conflict or fear but from the clock. For me, the ticking of the clock is like the ticking of a timer telling me my turn is almost up, and if I don’t hurry, I’m going to either lose my turn or lose the whole game.

Time bothers me more than it should, I know. But ignoring it is like trying to ignore a splinter in my toe. Sure, it’s just so small and unassuming, but still, it demands all my attention. Nothing is technically wrong, but every step reminds me that something is definitely off, and probably going to fester if I don’t do something about it.

Time discomfort comes from fairly benign stuff, like being late, waiting longer than I planned, missing a green light, or just watching minutes slip by while I try to finish something.

These are small enough irritants, so why does something this small feel so big?

As I see it, there are two types of what I’m calling OCTD (Obsessive Compulsive Time Disorder). One has to do with time interrupting my expectations. If something is supposed to happen at a certain moment, and it doesn’t, irritation bubbles up like a canker sore meeting hot coffee. Sure, you say the plan could still happen, and your day doesn’t have to be ruined, but this small disruption sets off a cascade of future disruptions where one missed second spills into the next, and then the next, and suddenly the whole afternoon is sliding downhill fast.

I don’t like cascading time; I like time that stays in line and behaves in an orderly fashion. Time that walks down the hill and arrives without grass stains on its knees.

But there is a second type of OCTD, made possible by the human brain, which, in general, doesn’t always treat language as metaphor. Sometimes it just processes it as a prediction.

So, when we say something like, “I’m running out of time?” Or, “There is not enough time.” It may sound like a harmless enough way to explain how you feel, but my brain is very literal, and it has come to believe that time is, in fact, almost gone, and that sense of urgency gives me all kinds of anxiety. I mean, what will I do if time is all gone?

When we repeatedly say, “I’m running out of time,” our brains start treating time itself like a scarce survival resource, in the category of oxygen, money, or food. That scarcity mentality then triggers urgency, and urgency, in turn, activates the stress response.

Bada bing, bada boom—anxiety. Because something essential is about to disappear, and you definitely better worry about it!

For us anxious types, time itself is a trigger, releasing a cruel taskmaster: the clock, who makes life start to feel like a timed game where the buzzer gets louder the longer something takes.

Tick.

You’re late.

Tick.

You should already be further along.

Tick.

You’re falling behind.

Tick.

You forgot something.

When you have anxiety, the clock is anything but neutral. It’s more of a moral auditor, fastidiously evaluating everything about you.

Pretty soon, your brain starts asking questions that have nothing to do with your minutes and everything to do with your value. Did I do enough? Should I have started earlier? Am I wasting time? Am I going to regret this later?

Did you know that this isn’t how calm people experience time? For them, time is just a sequence, there to organize events without attaching any moral meaning to them. They just see the clock as helping them know:

First, I do this.
Then, I do that.
After that, I’ll deal with the next thing.

And so, when something takes longer than expected, their response is something like, “That took longer than I thought. I’ll adjust.” Are your eyes bugging out right now, like mine?

Their clock informs them, it doesn’t accuse them. It’s not constantly ticking at them, saying, “Something’s gonna go wrong!”

Their minds assume something different than the anxious mind. Instead of thinking, “There isn’t enough time,” their minds assume something like, “There’s only so much that can fit into an hour.”

My trouble is that time is like my shopping bag at an everything’s-free sale, I try to fill my hour with over an hour’s worth of activity so I can get all the minutes I want while time is still available for the taking.

That’s because my brain, like the genius that it is, is running calculations in the background, deducing that if time keeps passing and this isn’t finished yet, something bad is gonna happen. Like, if I’m late, I might disappoint them. If I don’t finish everything, I’ll miss out on what others are getting.

My nervous system turns time into a predictive threat marker with the clock as its warning system, acting like some kind of PR agent attempting to prevent regret, embarrassment, and failure.

My nervous system means well. It just wants to protect me. Bless its heart. But somehow that prediction system has become overly sensitive, and now time itself just feels dangerous, always.

But time isn’t dangerous; it’s just out of my control.

Sure, we can influence it by preparing for it. We can plan carefully and start early, but we can’t command it. The clock keeps moving, whether circumstances cooperate with my plans or not. And that’s where anxiety tries to help us out.

For a mind like mine that feels responsible for making everything go correctly, a loss of control feels like showing up at the gym and accidentally running around the track buck naked.

Exposed!

But that exposure has two possible outcomes, and strangely enough, I do get to choose between them. Finally!

I can either attempt to take over more control and get more stressed out over time’s inability to do what I say. Or I can recognize the exposure for what it is: a glimpse into the difference between what belongs to God and what I’ve been trying to manhandle away from Him.

Turns out timing discomfort might be one of the most ordinary places where human beings discover they aren’t God.

In Fruitful, I wrote that irritation is one of the earliest signs that I’m not relying on the fruit of patience but on my flesh. Patience is my reliance on God instead of on my preferred sequence of events taking place in my preferred time.

Most of us move through the day without noticing this pattern. All we know is that we feel rushed, behind, and slightly stressed from morning until night. Which begs the question, what do we do with this awareness?

Renew your mind

While we all necessarily live within the constraints of time, this side of heaven, we have been taught to conform to the authority of time by assuming that productivity corroborates worth, efficiency proves competence, falling behind equals failure, and the clock determines our value. When you internalize these assumptions, the clock becomes a kind of moral authority telling you when you are failing, behind, or just plain insufficient.

But the Bible calls us to refuse the systems of evaluation that the world uses, and that includes the idea that time is your judge.

Romans 12 tells us not to be “conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And refusing to be conformed can include refusing the belief that the clock is your judge and jury.

Christian theology has always treated time differently from the world because of who God is. He isn’t bound by time. For Him, “a thousand years are like a day.” We, on the other hand, do live within time’s limits, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to treat time as our ultimate authority.

Renewing the mind on the subject of time means learning to see it as a tool rather than a judge. When we move time from the space of boundary to arbiter, we misplace our allegiance. Time was never meant to become the decider of our worth.

An anxious relationship with time reveals a hidden conformity to the world’s system of evaluation, where the clock determines our worth. We renew our minds on this matter by stepping out of that system and remembering that time belongs to God, not to the pressures that try to rule us through it.

But how does that actually happen in real life?

The way the mind changes is both fairly ordinary and magical at the same time. Anxiety is negative faith, having more confidence in a negative outcome than in a good one. Once your mind has formed those conclusions, it tends to hold to them for dear life unless something completely contradicts them. So, the renewal of the mind starts with baby steps, not a full-scale worldview shift.

Your brain learns through accumulated experience, which ironically, takes time. And we’ve all had a lot of time to complicate our relationship with the clock, but it doesn’t take as long to unwind the problem as it did to wind it up.

Think of it as interrupting an old pattern. Time is saying it’s almost up, you are running out of me, but instead of reacting how you usually react, speeding up or panicking, you make one slightly different choice.

You pause.

And you let the moment unfold long enough to see what actually happens next.

That tiny interruption is where you start renewing your mind, because your mind can finally observe something you rarely allow it to see: the timeline slipped, but the world didn’t collapse as anticipated.

God worked this out in the lives of the Israelites in the wilderness. When the people were hungry, and there wasn’t enough food or time in the day to get more, God didn’t give in to their frantic schedule and give them food for the week. He just gave them enough manna for the day. If they tried to store tomorrow’s portion, it spoiled overnight.

The lesson is the same for us as it was for them; tomorrow’s outcome is not ours to control. We all have to move through this hour and trust God over and over again with each passing minute.

Is that such a terrible predicament to be in?

Renewing the mind works the same way. The old instinct says, fix the timeline now. But the new response is different. As you stop looking to the clock as your judge or master, you start to trust that time is in God’s hands.

“My times are in your hands…” (Psalm 31:15)

For example, imagine you run into traffic and realize you are going to be late. Your mind instantly predicts the worst: This is going to mess everything up. And so instinctively you start to rush, reorganize, apologize ahead of time, all in an attempt to prove to yourself that the timeline is still under your control.

This is where small shifts happen.

Instead of fighting the clock, you can allow the disruption to exist for a moment, to be still, in that moment, and know that He is God. You will head to your destination, of course, but you can resist the urge to panic on the way. Instead, let the schedule wobble rather than forcing it immediately back into place.

So, you arrive a few minutes later than planned, but the conversation still happens. The meeting still starts. The day continues moving in roughly the same direction it was already headed.

Just recognizing moments like that starts teaching your brain something new. The timeline slipped, yes, but life continued anyway. As the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8–9)

Your nervous system may have predicted catastrophe, but reality produced something far more ordinary. Each time that happens, the prediction loses a little authority. Gradually, the clock stops sounding like an alarm and becomes what it always was, a way of measuring moments rather than a judge of your worth.

Which makes me wonder if the clock was ever really the problem.

Maybe timing discomfort is just one of the places where the illusion of our control gets exposed. The clock is going to keep ticking either way. The only thing that changes is how we experience those ticks, as something slipping through our fingers, or as something safely kept in God’s hands.

I’d love to hear your experience with time, whether it’s similar to mine or completely different.

If you missed the previous four chapters on Experiencing the Comfort of God in Your Discomfort, you can read them here:
Chapter 1 - When Discomfort Feels Like Abandonment
Chapter 2 - What Do You Do With a God Who Doesn’t Fix It?
Chapter 3 - Is Discomfort Proof You’re Doing Something Wrong?
Chapter 4 - One Dangerous Little Word That Fuels Anxiety