Charlie* was flustered the first time I met him. He was running late, fitting our appointment into a morning of back-to-back video calls. He ate his lunch while we spoke and told me about how he feels a crushing pressure to work more and earn more. He spoke of his daily “juggling act”, his experience of being a parent, working a full-time job and trying to maintain some friendships and hobbies. He described feeling tired, disconnected and out of touch with what really matters to him.

Charlie’s experience is a microcosm of the modern pressures so many of us contend with today. Like trying to reach the finish line on a treadmill, we grapple with never-ending to-do lists, convincing ourselves that if we only run faster, work harder, be better, we will achieve the goals we seek. This is evidenced in so many of the “timesaving” tricks we employ to feel productive, most of which can spectacularly backfire. Like trying to multitask, or fill every pause with activity, the evidence suggests that we are hurting, not helping, our performance and our mental health.

Before we could broach the concept of time wealth with Charlie, we had to tackle the topic of financial wealth. Like many he had no choice over whether he worked or not. He simply could not afford to cut back his hours, nor did he have the time to increase his hours to earn more. He earned enough money to get by but the nagging sense that he needed to earn more was noticeably causing him pressure. We talked through the values that Charlie wants to be known by, trying to strip back the layers and understand what a “good life” looks like to him.

Charlie conceded that professional success and financial wealth were lower down his values list than he realised. At the top was being present with his loved ones, adventure and growth. Realising that growth represented many things – especially learning new things and self-improvement – helped Charlie to see that financial wealth was just one of many ways he could find fulfilment.

When it came to being more present with his family and tackling the frantic pace of life he was moving at, we discussed some of the main principles of “time wealth” (also known as “time affluence”). Some of them were out of Charlie’s control, such as how much free time he had away from work. Approaching his life at a more unhurried pace, though, was something Charlie felt he could tackle.

Over the course of a few months, he began a few behavioural experiments. The first was identifying the things that he usually tries to multitask, to see what would happen if he just focused on one at a time. This meant eating meals without doing anything else (like joining appointments with his psychologist!), and scheduling intentional play time with his kids, leaving his phone in another room. Far from feeling as though he had less time after making these adjustments, Charlie noticed that he was feeling less “brain-dead” and far more rested and present.

His second experiment was to bring an unhurried pace to his working day, knowing that mindfulness has been linked to time wealth in research studies. Whereas he previously found himself tense at work, trying to furiously type out as many emails as possible while racing from meeting to meeting – his new “go slow” mantra reminded him to breathe deeply in between tasks, to look outside the window to ground himself and to tackle one thing at a time.

Charlie’s final experiment was to get really clear on the “needs” and “shoulds” in his life and what he could afford to let go of to open up more time. Needing to pick the kids up from school, for example, was a non-negotiable – as was needing to go to work five days a week. On the flipside, Charlie was able to let go of the idea that he should be reading books every day or should be keeping the house spotless. He acknowledged that there would be a time later in life, when the kids were a bit older, where these “shoulds” might be possible. For now, he is focused on radically accepting exactly where he is at in life right now and trying to enjoy the little moments, instead of running through life in search of more.

Charlie’s story is just one example of the bind that so many of us all fall into: feeling that the solution to feeling too hurried is to hurry even more. As Charlie was able to experience, very rarely does the world implode around us when we take the time to slow down, accept the limitations of our restricted time, and commit to using it in an intentional, unhurried way.

Of course, the macro forces at play in society do make it substantially easier for certain people (most often those who are materially wealthy) to experience time affluence. But that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach for those of us who are on the daily treadmill of life trying to get by.

* Names and details have been changed

• Dr Amanda Wallis leads the R&D team at Umbrella Wellbeing. Gaynor Parkin is a clinical psychologist and founder at Button Psychology