As early as 1974, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman coined the term “hurry sickness” in their book Type A Behavior and Your Heart. They conceived this idea because they noticed that many of their patients suffered from an obsessive sense of time urgency, which they defined as “a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.”
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Behavioral signs that you may suffer from hurry sickness include always moving, walking, talking, and eating quickly; rushing through tasks; frequent headaches; constantly reviewing your to-do list in your head; and always feeling behind schedule. Other signs include having a constant sense of urgency, continuously multi-tasking, feeling irritable or angry when there’s a delay, and feeling vaguely guilty when you relax and do absolutely nothing for a while.
In fact, when hurrying becomes an ingrained pattern in our lives, we will, at a minimum, start experiencing a constant undertone of discomfort, fatigue, anxiety, fear, and restlessness. Over time, that can ultimately lead to serious health issues such as depression, heart attacks, strokes, digestive disorders, or nervous hypersensitivity.
Negative health conditions may arrive gradually — with each new illness or affliction slowly eroding our well-being and possibly leading to burnout — or they may strike as a sudden, deep crisis, such as a nervous breakdown.
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Therefore, to protect our health and happiness, we must simply stop hurrying. However, doing so requires us to understand why we hurry, what triggers this behavior, and how it impacts our body and mind. Once we recognize these negative effects firsthand, we can build the inner energy and determination to change our ways.
In addition, we also need to be able to consciously and continuously recognize when we are hurrying, which — every time it occurs — gives us a starting point to practice being unhurried.
Afterward, to actually slow down, we will need a set of practical techniques to “unhurry” and the discipline to turn them into habits. Our goal should be to make life calmer, more pleasant, and healthier — not only for ourselves but also for the people around us, whether they are colleagues, family, friends, or even complete strangers.
