What Is ‘Hurry Sickness’?

Many families fail to eat together now because of shift work or hurrying around, not to mention fast food options for busy people on the move. The series of American books titled ‘One Minute Bedtime Stories’ have become best sellers, as it enables busy mums to fit in at least a minute to read to their children. Motorists rushing from place to place are prone to road rage or curse other motorists under their breath. What is stress in hurry sickness? Read on . . .
The term ‘Hurry Sickness’ was coined by a well known cardiologist about 45 years ago who noticed that all of his patients who were suffering from heart disease showed similar behavioural characteristics.

Hurry Sickness also involves rudeness, increased aggression, together with stress related illnesses, such as high blood pressure for instance. It is brought on by the population explosion and increasing competitiveness. Technology that is irresistible to use, and that we are pressured to use to keep up with modern times brings work home with us. How many people do you see walking around chatting on a mobile phone or playing a game, oblivious to what is going on around them. You sometimes even see couples sitting for a meal with one or both of them tapping away at facebook or some other app.

Many people have lost their sense of belonging to a community, in favour of more worldwide social trends, and with that our personal lives are more public than ever before. Many people are lonely because of Hurry Sickness as they feel apart from other people. They may go shopping and not really recognise the people as people, just other shoppers getting in the way.

Hurry sickness may be one of the key elements to the question “What is stress?”

Social media sites become a place of ‘belonging’ instead for people with Hurry Sickness, as they join groups and gain little rewards through email for playing games, so that they feel some sort of accomplishment and accepted into these groups.

People with Hurry Sickness start to get annoyed when anyone or anything slows them down in their hectic day’s regime, just look at the faces of people standing in a queue at the supermarket and you can see.

New vocabulary has sprung out of Hurry Sickness, such as ‘multi-tasking’, which basically means getting blood out of a stone, and the usual target is an overworked employee. There is also the ‘change is good’ cliche used by businesses intending to axe middle management and stack all the work on the senior manager’s desks. This usually involves a few in-house condescending leaflets sent to employees before carrying out the ‘change is good’ cut backs. This may also involve cut backs for employees, more multi-tasking or a bar code scanner to track employees for instance. There is no more feeling proud that you’ve worked for a company for many years these days. Most companies will tell you that you are only as good as your last 6 months track record. Then, when you become older, they’ll sit in a back office somewhere and work out ways to lay you off. As if you are just a statistic instead of a real person.

So, what can we do about all this hurrying around and being carried along with the hurricane of Hurry Sickness?

Reading though treatments of people suffering from stress due to their hectic lifestyles, one idea is to re-examine your belief system. Hurry Sickness is so widespread that you feel that it is normal, as everyone else is doing the same. However, just because it is a popular belief system, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is right. For example, people used to believe in witches in Europe and religious fanatics burnt or drowned thousands of innocent people on ‘witch hunts’. I bet it seemed normal back then to believe in witches, just like it’s normal now to rush around, feeling cut off from other people and not noticing your surroundings half the time.

So take a few days off – go fishing, or take more breaks and do something that you love to do. Turn off the computer and don’t even think about the 1000 or so friends on facebook, let’s face it, most of them you don’t even know anyway. Re-examine your routine and weed out what is really unnecessary in your life.

I have been one of the worst for cramming my time with productive activities and work lately, which is why I picked this subject to blog about. I have recently halved my workload and take more regular breaks and feel a lot more ‘whole’ because of it.

Please leave a comment with any ideas you may have for escaping ‘Hurry Sickness’ and any answers to the question of  “What is stress?”as it will be interesting to compare different peoples methods and to hear your opinion.