I counted his steps. Seventeen of them, heel-to-toe across the center circle, while twenty-one other men sprinted past him like their lives depended on it. It was the 2022 World Cup final, and Lionel Messi was walking. Again. I later learned he covered less ground than any other outfield player that tournament. Eighty-three percent of the final, he was strolling. Not jogging. Not strategizing in bursts. Just walking.
My heart was hammering against my ribs at 3:47 a.m. when I read that statistic. I was on my couch in a hoodie I hadn’t washed in a week, convinced I was dying of something the doctors couldn’t find. Again. My anxiety didn’t care that I had a good job, or that people called me “put-together.” It had its own schedule. So there I was, watching highlight reels of a man who is arguably the most talented athlete in history, and I realized something that made me sit up straighter than any self-help book ever had.
Being that gifted did not protect him from the pressure. It magnified it. And still, he walked.
I spent thirty-two years trying to outrun my own nervous system. My anxiety showed up as a hummingbird heart and a brain that rehearsed catastrophes like a script I couldn’t put down. The faster my thoughts spun, the faster I moved. I answered emails at red lights. I swallowed coffee while speed-walking to meetings. I treated every task like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
I tried the apps. The 4-7-8 breathing that left me dizzy and more panicked. The cold showers that shocked my body but not my mind. I took supplements with names I couldn’t pronounce and stared at sunsets while forcing gratitude until my jaw ached. Nothing worked because I was still treating my body like an enemy that needed to be subdued. I wanted to conquer the anxiety. I wanted to win.
Then I started watching old Messi clips. Not the goals. The in-between. The moments where the camera pulls wide and you see him in the negative space, hands on hips, strolling through acres of green while defenders scrambled to guess his next move. He looked almost lazy. Critics used to mock him for it. They called him a “walker.” They didn’t understand that he wasn’t avoiding the game. He was slowing it down to a speed he could control.
The human body is wired to mirror its own motion. When you sprint, your heart believes you are fleeing a threat. When you rush, your brain assumes the building is on fire. Messi knew this instinctively, or maybe he learned it the hard way after vomiting from nerves before big matches early in his career. Either way, he had figured out that the best way to meet pressure was to refuse the race.
I decided to try it. Not because I believed it would work, but because I had exhausted every other option and my knees were shaking in the cereal aisle of a Kroger at eleven in the morning.
The fluorescent lights were buzzing. My cart was empty. My chest had that familiar tightness, the one that whispered, Leave now, something terrible is about to happen. Normally I would have abandoned the cart and power-walked to my car, gulping air, hands shaking on the wheel. Instead, I gripped the handle and walked slowly. One foot. Then the other. I counted my steps. I moved at roughly the pace of a man who had nowhere else to be.
It felt ridiculous. My muscles screamed to hurry. The anxiety flared brighter, furious that I wasn’t obeying its command to flee. But I kept my shoulders soft and my stride short. I walked past the oatmeal. Past the Pop-Tarts. Past a woman arguing with her toddler about marshmallows. By the time I reached the almond milk, something had shifted. Not vanished. Just shifted. My heart was still fast, but it wasn’t winning anymore.
I started doing it everywhere. Before presentations at work, I walked the long way around the cubicles. When I woke up at 3 a.m., I didn’t thrash under the covers. I got up and paced my kitchen at quarter-speed. The slowness was a language my body understood better than logic. It said: If we are walking this slowly, we cannot be in danger. Predators don’t meander.
Messi wasn’t just managing his nerves. He was weaponizing stillness in a sport built for speed. While others chased the ball, he let the game come to him. He saved his sprints for the exact ten yards that mattered.
Anxiety is not a defect. That was the hardest thing to accept. For years I thought my nerves were a broken circuit, a factory recall on my brain. But anxiety is just energy looking for the wrong target. It’s a Ferrari engine pointed at a dead end. Messi didn’t learn to stop feeling nervous before the biggest matches of his life. He learned to walk while the feeling was still there.
I had been trying to kill my anxiety. I wanted it gone before I lived my life. But Messi showed me that the best players don’t wait for perfect conditions. They play in the rain. They play with the knot in their stomach. They walk onto the pitch and let the fear burn off like morning fog, one slow step at a time.
The revelation wasn’t that walking cures anxiety. It doesn’t. The revelation was that I could move slowly and still be moving forward. I didn’t have to feel brave to act brave. I just had to slow my feet until my heart caught up.
Last Tuesday, I had coffee with a friend who asked why I seemed different. I told her about the soccer player who barely runs. She laughed and said she thought I was going to mention meditation or medication. I shook my head. Those have their place. But at 3:47 a.m., when the dark feels absolute and your mind is a riot, you don’t need a mantra. You need to confuse your body into peace.
I still panic. I still wake up some nights sure that the ground is shifting beneath me. But now I put my feet on the floor. I walk to the window. I count seventeen steps, heel-to-toe, while the world sprints past me in its sleep. Sometimes I think about Messi in that final, strolling through chaos with the calm of a man who knew exactly when to run.
The ball always finds him. Not because he chases it. Because he refuses to rush for anything less than glory.
And neither do I. Not anymore.
