Urgency: Is Rushing Harming The Diabetes Community?

Questioning how rushing is harmful is far from a straightforward question. Learn how urgency is part of our cultural and how it amplifies inequity for people with diabetes.

Simple questions often appear straightforward; for example, what is the value of slowing down? Rushing not only takes the joy out of your actions but also increases mistakes. Yet telling your client to slow down isn't effective when they're eager to find a solution to their eating, body image, or blood sugar concerns. This article will explore the hidden harms of rushing and share effective ways to return to the present moment. 

As the body ages, simple tasks take more and more time. My retired clients have told me, “I don’t know how I managed when I was working!” I nod in agreement, choosing to ignore the reality that mental concentration, physical ability, and emotional processing require more time as we age.  

In the case of diabetes, which is experiencing a surge in technology and medical advances, there is also a need to add time for learning. This learning could be about new phone apps, creating Bluetooth links between medical devices, or simply downloading devices and communicating effectively with the medical team using text, chat, and patient portals.  Taken together, these changes add time to any process.  This means tasks that took ten minutes now take twenty. When you pause and remember that these extra minutes are compounded throughout the day, it makes more sense when clients say, “I don’t know where the day went.”  

We can all empathize with the frustration of lost keys or a missing object. It is annoying to misplace things. Imagine feeling like you misplaced time?  Not only do clients feel like they lost time, but they also know that they didn’t have much time to begin with, activating a sense of urgency, making losing time even more painful.  When combined with the time required to manage a chronic illness, it makes sense that the familiar sense of urgency, rushing, and a ‘fix it’ mentality becomes an invisible force in diabetes care. 

The problem with a “Hurry Up” attitude is our failure to see it is not an individual problem but a societal issue that came from and has been nourished by White Supremacy Culture, WSC. 

If you thought, “Whoa! That is a big mental jump.” Let’s unpack what White Supremacy Culture is and isn’t. At its core, WSC is a way of seeing the world shaped by many systems, including capitalism. Like all cultures, WSC is a set of norms that guide and shape groups of people. What it isn’t is a person. You are not White Supremacy Culture.  However, you and I have all been shaped. influenced and harmed by it. 

White Supremacy Culture is harmful, especially for people in the diabetes community. As Temo Okun explains, “While white supremacy culture affects us all, harms us all, and is toxic to us all, it does not affect, harm, and violate us in the same way. White supremacy targets and violates BIPOC people and communities with the intent to destroy them directly; white supremacy targets and violates white people with a persistent invitation to collude that will inevitably destroy their humanity.”

For people working in healthcare, we want to open our eyes to see how aspects of WSC create the conditions for oppression, ableism, healthism, weight stigma, and othering. When you choose to learn about WSC culture, you are choosing to look at the water you are swimming in. You are choosing to see the conditions and qualities that reinforce the belief that some people are better, preferred, or more deserving than others.  

This brings us back to how being fast, right, and young is considered a virtue that is subtly and overtly communicated as the goal of all interactions.  It is good to be a ‘quick learner.’ It is ideal to understand how technology works. It is important to be healthy. These desires are part of our society and are absorbed as the dominant culture's standard. Yet these unspoken desires are not present for many clients with diabetes. They are spending their time thinking, learning, and managing diabetes. The burden of diabetes is hard to imagine fully, especially because PWD on average, are faced with 180-300 additional decisions each day. Every one of these decisions takes time, and time is in short supply. 

How rushing and urgency serve my clients.  

How is it helping them more effectively manage their blood sugar? How is it fostering a sense of inclusion? When clients can’t ’keep up,”’ do they feel like they belong, have ease, or feel seen and heard, or do they feel othered, with problems that healthcare professionals don’t see or hear?  

When at work, if you are rushing, you unintentionally communicate how rushing is normal. That to rush is to be ‘important.’  We have all been trained to believe that important people are busy. This message is communicated in many ways, and it is hard to see how it has been personally internalized. This is why the IDC created a course called Diabetes Distress: Creating Space and Grace for Your Clients. 

Understanding how to slow the pace of your session and explore the power of coming alongside diabetes is helpful. No one really knows how we accept our lives. This is why offering grace, or the belief and support that acceptance will emerge, provides compassion. Change happens slowly but with support, an increasing sense of belonging, and the belief that your client can get ‘there’ too - to the place of graceful acceptance. 

The idea of inclusion as part of diabetes care is new for many healthcare professionals. This is why Inclusive Diabetes Care created the Inclusive Diabetes Care pyramid. It is designed to identify five essential felt experiences. 

Belonging forms the base of the pyramid, meaning no other aspect of inclusion can happen until your client feels they belong. When clients rush, there is a good chance that they feel or are afraid of being left behind. This sense of being excluded is also part of WSC because WSC is a system that provides advantages and privileges that have not been extended to Women, Mothers, LBGTQIA, Queer, Fat, Houseless, Food Insecure, or BIPOC clients equability.  

For many groups, rushing is the norm. Rush is familiar. Urgency and rushing have become a survival response to historical, institutional, persistent-historical, and personal trauma that they or their families have experienced. The amazing book My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem, LCSW, explains how generational trauma is also passed down in our DNA.

Clients often discuss how they need to get their blood sugar under control.  This desire brings them to the session but isn’t their only need or wish. They also need to belong, to have ease, and to feel seen and heard without judgment. It is likely that fear and rushing have created a cycle of urgency that is triggering and ineffective.  Understanding how rushing harms people with diabetes is complex but essential if we want to support wholesome and sustainable self-care.