I spent three weeks in Copenhagen last winter, staying with a colleague from my clinical training days who’d moved there eight years ago.
On my third morning, I found myself sitting in her kitchen, watching her make breakfast with what seemed like geological slowness. She was buttering bread. Just buttering bread. Not checking her phone between slices, not mentally reviewing her schedule, not eating standing up while packing her work bag. She was present with the butter and the bread in a way that made me realize I hadn’t been present with anything in years.
The thing that struck me wasn’t the act itself but my reaction to it. I felt physically uncomfortable watching her. My hands kept reaching for my phone. My mind kept calculating how much faster this could be done. I was experiencing what I’d describe to clients as activation without threat—my nervous system was revving up simply because someone else was moving at a human pace while I’d apparently internalized the rhythm of a stock exchange floor.
The pace we think is normal isn’t
After twelve years in practice, I thought I understood stress. I’d helped hundreds of clients identify their triggers, develop coping strategies, recognize the patterns they’d inherited from childhoods where urgency was currency. But sitting in that Copenhagen kitchen, I realized I’d been operating inside the same invisible cage as my clients—we were all treating a manufactured tempo as if it were a law of physics.
In Scandinavia, the baseline is different. Not because they’re inherently calmer people or because they’ve discovered some secret the rest of us haven’t. They’ve simply agreed, collectively, that certain rhythms are worth protecting. Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability science professor at Lund University in Sweden, puts it this way: “Having this slower pace of life both displaces other potentially high carbon activities and is restorative and positive.”
What she’s describing isn’t just environmental—it’s psychological. When you remove the constant pressure to optimize every moment, something shifts in your nervous system. You stop treating rest as something you have to earn. You stop experiencing pauses as threats to productivity.
We mistake motion for progress
During my second week in Copenhagen, I tried to maintain my Portland schedule remotely. I woke at 5 AM to maximize the time zone overlap, scheduled back-to-back video calls, ate lunch at my laptop. My colleague would come home from her job at the hospital—an actual hospital where actual emergencies happen—and find me more frazzled than she was.
“Why are you creating emergencies where none exist?” she asked me one evening. It wasn’t an accusation. It was genuine curiosity, the kind I used to employ with clients who couldn’t see their own patterns.
The truth was, I didn’t know. The urgency felt real even though I couldn’t name what was actually urgent. Nothing would collapse if I responded to an email three hours later instead of three minutes later. No one was going to die if I took twenty minutes to eat lunch without multitasking. But my body didn’t know that. My body had been trained to treat every request as immediate, every pause as dangerous.
This is what we do—we create stress responses to imaginary threats. We’ve convinced ourselves that being constantly activated means we’re doing something important, when often we’re just spinning in place, mistaking the sensation of stress for the sensation of purpose.
Your stress tolerance isn’t a strength
Here’s something I learned both as a therapist and as someone who burned out of therapy: we treat our capacity to endure unnecessary stress as if it’s an achievement. We compete over who got less sleep, who worked more hours, who can function on more caffeine and less rest. We’ve turned dysregulation into a badge of honor.
In Copenhagen, when someone asks how you are, they actually want to know. And more surprisingly, people actually answer. Not with “busy” or “stressed” or any of the non-answers we use in the States to signal that we’re important enough to be overwhelmed. They answer with real information about their actual state.
My colleague’s friends would say things like “I’m taking things slowly this week” without any defensiveness. They’d leave work at 4 PM without performing elaborate apologies. They’d take sick days for mental health without calling it something else. The absence of shame around having human limitations was so foreign to me that at first I mistook it for laziness. That’s how deeply I’d internalized the idea that stress is proof of significance.
The body keeps its own time
During my last week there, something shifted. Not consciously—I didn’t decide to slow down. My body just started to recalibrate to the rhythm around me. I stopped waking up with my jaw clenched. I stopped checking my email before I was fully conscious. I started tasting my food.
These weren’t major changes. I wasn’t meditating for hours or doing yoga at sunrise. I was just existing at a pace that allowed my nervous system to complete its cycles. When something stressful happened, I felt it, processed it, and then it ended. The stress didn’t cascade into the next moment and the next and the next until my entire day was one long stress response interrupted by sleep.
This is what we miss when we’re moving too fast—the natural resolution of our emotional cycles. We stay activated because we never give our systems time to recognize that the threat (real or imagined) has passed. We live in a state of perpetual incomplete response, and then we wonder why we’re exhausted.
What stays when the urgency goes
When I returned to Portland, to my apartment in Northeast where everything was exactly as I’d left it, I tried to maintain some of what I’d found in Copenhagen. I failed almost immediately. Within three days, I was back to eating standing up, to treating emails like emergencies, to filling every pause with some kind of productive motion.
But something had changed. I could see it now—the artificial urgency, the manufactured stress, the way I was choosing to live as if everything was on fire when nothing was actually burning. The awareness didn’t immediately change my behavior, but it changed my relationship to it. I stopped believing my stress was inevitable. I started recognizing how much of it I was creating, maintaining, defending.
We tell ourselves we don’t have a choice about our pace. We have bills, responsibilities, a culture that demands constant availability. All of that is true. But it’s also true that we participate in our own activation. We choose to check our email at 10 PM. We choose to eat lunch while working. We choose to treat rest as optional and stress as mandatory.
Conclusion
The most valuable thing I learned in Copenhagen wasn’t a technique or a strategy. It was simply seeing that another way exists. That millions of people are living at a pace that allows for actual presence, and their world hasn’t collapsed. They’re not behind. They’re not failing. They’re living.
I’m back to my early mornings now, my 6 AM writing sessions before the day accumulates its weight. But I’m trying to protect those hours differently. Not as time to be maximized but as time to be inhabited. Some days I succeed. Most days I don’t. But at least now I know the difference between stress that comes from actual demands and stress that comes from the story I’m telling myself about those demands.
The space between those two things—that’s where the real work happens. Not the work of doing more, but the work of recognizing how much of what we’re carrying was never ours to carry in the first place.