You want to be better now. Not in six months. Not next year. Now. You’ve done the work—you’ve gone to therapy, read the books, tried the practices. You’ve sat with the discomfort, done the shadow work, faced the difficult truths. Surely that should be enough. Surely you should be healed by now.

But healing doesn’t work on your timeline. And the desperate attempt to rush it—to speed up the process, to force transformation, to be done with this already—is just another form of drinking saltwater.

Because distillation takes time. And there’s no way around it.

The Fantasy of Quick Fixes

We live in a culture obsessed with speed. Same-day delivery. Instant downloads. Quick results. Ten-minute abs, five-day detoxes, three steps to happiness. We’re conditioned to believe that everything should be faster, easier, more efficient.

So when it comes to healing, we bring the same expectation. We want the express lane. The shortcut. The life hack that will get us from broken to whole without all the messy bits in between.

The self-help industry feeds this fantasy. Six weeks to transform your life. Twenty-one days to break any habit. One weekend retreat to heal your trauma. As if decades of conditioning, generations of inherited patterns, and years of accumulated wounds could be resolved in the time it takes to finish a course or complete a challenge.

This is saltwater. It promises relief but leaves us thirstier than before—more frustrated, more despairing, more convinced that there’s something wrong with us because we’re not healing fast enough.

Why Healing Takes the Time It Takes

Think about physical healing. A broken bone takes six to eight weeks to mend. You can’t speed that up with positive thinking or sheer willpower. You can’t hack your way to faster bone regeneration. The body has its own timeline, and trying to use the limb before it’s ready will only cause more damage.

Psychological and spiritual healing works the same way. Wounds need time to close. Neural pathways need time to rewire. New patterns need time to become established. Trust needs time to rebuild. Integration needs time to settle.

Research in neuroscience shows that genuine, lasting change requires repeated experience over time. It’s not enough to have an insight once—you need to reinforce new neural pathways again and again before they become automatic. Studies suggest it takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form a new habit, with an average of 66 days. And that’s just for simple behaviours, not complex emotional and psychological transformation.

Trauma therapy can take years. Recovery from addiction is often measured in decades. Grief has no expiration date. And none of this means you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it at all.

The Distillation Process Cannot Be Rushed

Remember the distillation still? You can’t speed up the process by turning up the heat too high—you’ll just burn the saltwater and destroy the apparatus. The transformation happens at the right temperature, maintained steadily over time. Too fast, and nothing distils properly. The result is contaminated, incomplete, useless.

The same is true for healing. You can’t force integration. You can’t rush readiness. You can’t skip the stages of grief or bypass the necessary work of sitting with discomfort. Each phase has its purpose. Each stage needs its time.

When you try to speed it up, you often end up prolonging it. You reopen wounds that haven’t fully closed. You build new patterns on foundations that haven’t settled. You move forward before you’ve learned what you needed to learn, and so you repeat the same lessons until you finally slow down enough to integrate them.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” —Lao Tzu

The Cultural Pressure to Be “Fixed”

Part of why we struggle with the slow pace of healing is cultural. We’re not just impatient with ourselves—we’re responding to external pressure to be productive, functional, “over it” already.

How long after a loss are you expected to be back to normal? How many therapy sessions before you should have sorted yourself out? How long can you talk about your struggles before people start suggesting you’re wallowing, dwelling, or being self-indulgent?

There’s an unspoken timeline for acceptable healing. Take too long, and you’re not trying hard enough. Take the time you actually need, and you’re accused of making excuses or enjoying your victim status.

This pressure to perform recovery—to demonstrate visible progress on someone else’s schedule—is exhausting. And it’s antithetical to actual healing, which requires that we stop performing and start being honest about where we actually are.

Signs You’re Trying to Rush Your Healing

How do you know if you’re trying to force transformation rather than allowing it? Watch for these patterns:

• You feel frustrated or ashamed that you’re “still dealing with this”
• You’re constantly searching for the next technique, teacher, or modality that will finally fix you
• You skip rest because it feels like you’re not making progress
• You judge yourself for having setbacks or difficult days
• You compare your healing timeline to others’ and find yourself lacking
• You’re doing all the “right things” but with gritted teeth, waiting to be done
• You feel impatient with your own process and just want to “get there” already
• You pressure yourself to have insights, breakthroughs, or transformations before you’re ready

What Actually Supports Slow Healing

If healing can’t be rushed, what does it need instead? Patience. Consistency. Trust. And an enormous amount of self-compassion.

It needs you to show up for the work without demanding immediate results. To tend to your wounds without constantly checking if they’ve healed yet. To trust the process even when you can’t see progress. To remember that invisible work is still work—integration happens in the quiet moments, not just the breakthrough sessions.

It needs you to stop comparing your chapter three to someone else’s chapter twenty. To release the fantasy that there’s a finish line where you’ll finally be “healed” and everything will be easy. To understand that healing isn’t about reaching some perfect state—it’s about becoming more whole, more integrated, more yourself.

And it needs you to give yourself permission to take as long as it takes. Not because you’re weak or broken or doing it wrong, but because you’re human and transformation is slow and there’s no shortcut through the fire.

The Gift Hidden in the Long Game

Here’s what nobody tells you about slow healing: it’s not just that it takes time. It’s that the time itself is part of the healing. The waiting teaches patience. The setbacks teach resilience. The repetition teaches trust. The slowness teaches surrender.

When healing happens quickly, it’s often fragile—a band-aid on a wound that needed stitches. When healing happens slowly, it goes deep. It rewires. It transforms not just your symptoms but your entire relationship with yourself and your pain.

Fast healing asks: how quickly can I get rid of this discomfort? Slow healing asks: what is this discomfort trying to teach me? Fast healing wants to escape the process. Slow healing wants to be changed by it.

This is the still at work. The patient, consistent application of just enough heat, maintained over time, until what was undrinkable becomes pure. Until what was painful becomes wisdom. Until what was broken becomes whole in a completely new way.

Trusting Your Own Timeline

You will heal at the pace you heal. Not the pace the books promise. Not the pace your therapist expects. Not the pace your family wants or your culture demands or you desperately wish for.

Some things transform quickly. Others take decades. Some wounds close in months. Others remain tender for years, healing in layers, revealing deeper work as you’re ready for it.

None of this means you’re failing. It means you’re healing in the only way that will actually last—slowly, thoroughly, deeply. It means you’re playing the long game. And the long game is the only game worth playing when it comes to becoming whole.

So stop rushing. Stop forcing. Stop demanding that your healing happen faster than it can. Trust the distillation process. Trust the slow work of transformation. Trust that you’re exactly where you need to be, even when—especially when—it doesn’t feel like enough.

The saltwater will distil when it’s ready. Not a moment sooner. Not a moment later. Your job isn’t to speed it up. Your job is to tend the still and trust the process.