The Dynamics of Constant Stimulus, False Choices of Urgency, and the Power of Pause

How taking a beat, in a crisis, can lead to better thinking

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. — Lincoln’s First Inaugural 1861

Dear Reader,

I normally post a message to you in the morning, but I felt this one might be better coming at the end of the day, when we confront the stress that has accumulated over the previous hours of the day. And, in those moments, we can be overwhelmed by new emails, more news, more impositions on our time. And especially in crisis feel the need to move and do something, reclaim our narrative and power. Our agency.

Because of this speed, and the tyranny of tempo, we don’t have time to think, at least we do not believe we have time to think. Consequently, we tend to think of wisdom and insight as things that arrive after the fact—something we glean in the aftermath of chaos. But what if wisdom does not have to be a retrospective enlightenment? We live in an age of urgency; I think it is often a false urgency. A “breaking” moment pops up on our screens, and within minutes, or seconds, we are expected to have an opinion, take a stand, make a post, or issue a denunciation. That’s exhausting, and we tend to make bad choices when we are exhausted. Yet we have to engage. We are taught to treat silence as complicity, hesitation as cowardice. Everything, everywhere, at once and not remotely in a good way. For some people who have experienced a trauma, the need to react can also be a response to something that was retraumatizing. We may not recognize it because again, we have been conditioned to see immediacy as virtuous and competent, and to confuse acting fast as being decisive. Sure, that can be true sometimes, but not always; it is not a hard rule, in fact, the opposite may be more true. It is a modern illusion born of dopamine hits from our devices, and the pressure of our pace of life, that tyranny of tempo.

But, what if what we need sometimes is to pause and not do something in the moment? To gain perspective and potential insight by waiting, and looking before we leap rather than having to learn from our mistakes after we are through the problem. We now know that our prefrontal cortexes control our executive function, which includes our attention regulation, memory processing, and impulse control. And we have learned that pausing is like a break on impulses, and that a way to place a cap on rashness is to take a break, a moment, and think. It can reset our brains. When we panic or react in the moment, we can self-sabotage, but when we claim a moment for collecting ourselves, when to stop to reason, we can actually find our agency to do what we must. There is an interpretation that the word “selah” in the Psalms is an instruction to pause and reflect; it seems fitting given the role of the Psalms as a book of lyrics and poems written to celebrate a transcendent deity’s relationship with humanity.

The 20th-century Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler helped to expound the idea that humans are not merely bundles of instincts, but purpose-driven agents shaped by the meanings we assign to our experiences. In contradistinction to the more famous senationalist Sigmund Freud, who saw repression and unconscious drives, and the more mystical Carl Jung, who saw archetypes, the more practical Adler saw goals, choice, and the capacity to reframe. To Adler, how a person reacts in crisis reveals not just their wounds, but their worldview. Do they see themselves as a victim of fate—or as a steward of meaning? Can they stop, evaluate, and choose a response that aligns with who they want to be? Adler argued that:

We are not determined by our experiences, but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life, we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations. — What Life Could Mean to You, 1931

Pause gives us time for context.

I think the clearest, most profound example of pausing with purpose is Abraham Lincoln. Today is April 14, the 170th anniversary of his assassination, when he was shot at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, in 1865, and died the following morning. Most writing and reflections about the Civil War this weekend have been about that, or Fort Sumter being fired upon on April 12, 1861, or Grant forcing Lee to surrender on April 9. April is a big month for Civil War remembrance, as you can see, but I want to focus on how Lincoln began to be the hero America needed. The right man to be president at the right time. He paused and in doing so, he changed the course of American history.

It needs to be said that fighting the Civil War, resisting secession, was a choice. Defending the United States Constitution was a choice. When Lincoln was elected president in November 1860 and confirmed by the electoral college the next month, the slaveholder elites who controlled the Southern states started leaving the Union. The first was South Carolina on December 20, 1860, and adopted its formal declaration of secession on Christmas Eve. Mississippi followed on January 9, 1861; the next day, Florida left, and the day after that, Alabama bolted. Georgia at least had the courtesy to wait a week and abandoned the Union on January 19, and Louisiana did the same on January 26, and finally Texas overthrew Governor Sam Houston so it could also betray the Union on February 1. We call this the Secession Winter of 1860-61. That is an imposed urgency; a real rising dread of impending disaster. And a month to go until Lincoln could do anything about it. Lincoln had done nothing illegal or unconstitutional to justify this, as he was not even president yet; he held no office because Inauguration Day was March 4. Imagine you are Lincoln, and before you set foot in the White House, seven states were in rebellion against the Union. Imagine the stress and pressure of being elected fair and square, and your mere election is the stated cause for the Deep South to try and break the country. You could have forgiven Lincoln if he had tried to act rashly or if he was overwhelmed by fear and doubt. Even though there was no lull in the crisis, Lincoln breathed, paused, and acted with prudence.

During this period, James Buchanan, the outgoing lame duck president, did nothing. When South Carolina seceded, Buchanan declared it illegal, and then did not do a thing about it. He did not respond to the theft and seizure of federal arsenals. While we commonly think of the firing on Fort Sumter, the reality is that South Carolina first fired on the Star of the West, a US Army ship, on January 9, 1861, and Buchanan did not respond to the attack on a military asset. Because of his decision to let the rebels do what they wanted, they were able to put a government, the so-called Confederate States of America, into operation. As all this happened, Lincoln had no power to intervene. He knew it would all be worse by the time he took office. And yet he did not lash out or go on the rhetorical attack. He took his time. It was the most urgent period in American history up to that point, and he paused to plan and think; to not jump to conclusions or engage before he had the power to back it up. He did not permit the imposed urgency to force him into false choices. The ancient proverbs reinforce this idea of taking time to think before reacting.

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Proverbs 15:1

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. Proverbs 18:17

Wisdom can come from taking time to choose your words and to resisting anchoring bias, which is when we give too much weight to the first pieces of information we receive. The first interpretation of a crisis often becomes the lens through which all future events are judged, whether accurate or not. Lincoln understood this instinctively. By allowing himself space before acting or speaking, he did not buy time; rather, he claimed the power to set the anchor. The pressure on Lincoln was immense. Could you imagine the constant strain of urgent pleas and unsolicited advice? His party was divided between radicals demanding an aggressive response and moderates urging compromise. Opponents accused him of plotting against the Constitution. Newspaper editorials attacked him. Friends and enemies alike waited for Lincoln to reveal what kind of man he really was. He was a man of reflection.

We are better off because Abraham Lincoln took the interlude between his election and inauguration to consider his options on how to confront the secession Winter of 1860-61, and he arrived at the right decision on how to frame the dispute in his First Inaugural Address. He could have accepted the seven states’ secession as the end, a fait accompli, and let them leave the Union with their slaves and territory. Some urged him to do just that, to let the slaveholders go, so that the North could be rid of their constant troublemaking and the slaves too; abolitionism was a minority position at the time. There were those in the North who despised slavery not because it was inhumane or they cared about the Africans, but because they hated the politics, power, and culture of the slaveholders. Leading voices wished to say “goodbye and good riddance,” even if the meant millions of people would be even more thoroughly enslaved by a “Confederate” government that contained no free states or abolitionist sentiment. But Lincoln was clear on his duty as he understood it: the Union was his to preserve, protect, and defend. Again, fighting for the Union was a choice; protecting the national existence was a decision he did not have to make. While Buchanan was busy letting the Union fall apart, Lincoln put together his cabinet. Lincoln consulted political leaders in the North, the West, and the border states. He took time to communicate with Congressional leaders to ensure that no compromise with the South would be agreed to that would tie his hands and prevent him from constraining slavery in the territories as he was elected to do. He made mistakes, but he was on the whole cautious and careful, not at all needlessly reactive.

He acted defensively before the attack on Fort Sumter, which placed him and the country in a better position to wage and win the Civil War. If he had acted impulsively, he might have given the rebels plausible deniability for the war they were starting or might have been overwhelmed by his detractors and ultimately decided not to resist secession like his predecessor, the now universally condemned James Buchanan. Taking a beat, a moment in the midst of crisis and disappointment can be the best thing for us, especially when our senses are overwhelmed by urgency, dread, and fear.

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861