Hurry Sickness: Rushing Ourselves into the Grave

Modern life has produced a peculiar condition in which being constantly rushed is regarded almost as evidence of importance. There is always another email to answer, another appointment to reach, another task that should have been completed yesterday. Even when nothing genuinely urgent is happening, many people feel uncomfortable slowing down. The clock has ceased to be a useful instrument and has become something closer to a supervisor.

There is a name for this: "hurry sickness." The expression is associated with cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman and their work on what became known as Type A behaviour. They were interested in people characterised by competitiveness, impatience, hostility and a persistent sense of time urgency. Such people did not merely have a great deal to do. They behaved as though almost everything had to be done faster.

Some of the classic signs remain instantly recognisable. A person finishes other people's sentences because waiting for them to finish seems intolerable. A queue produces irritation out of all proportion to the few minutes being lost. Meals are eaten quickly, several jobs are attempted simultaneously, and even leisure activities acquire schedules and targets. Someone can return from a holiday needing a rest because the holiday itself became another project to complete efficiently.

Technology has greatly amplified the problem. A letter once took days to arrive and nobody regarded this as extraordinary. Today a webpage taking several seconds to load can produce irritation. Emails arrive instantly and therefore seem to demand instant answers. Mobile phones ensure that work, news and other people's demands can accompany us everywhere. The technologies that were supposed to save time have certainly done so, yet we often seem to have responded by filling every saved minute with another task.

This is one of the paradoxes of modern life. We possess machines that wash our clothes, cook our food, transport us rapidly over enormous distances and transmit information almost instantaneously. By the standards of our ancestors, we should have oceans of spare time. Instead, many people report feeling perpetually behind.

Part of the problem is cultural. Busyness has acquired status. Ask somebody how things are going and the answer is often "flat out," "crazy" or "non-stop." These expressions are complaints, but they can also function as declarations of importance. To be extremely busy suggests that one's time is valuable and one's services are in demand. Admitting to having done very little over the weekend can almost sound like a confession.

The result is that urgency spreads into activities that are not urgent at all. Emails are marked "urgent." Minor administrative matters acquire deadlines. People check messages while eating, walking or talking to somebody else. Work follows them home, and the distinction between working time and private time gradually disappears. The nervous system is repeatedly asked to respond to trivial events as though something consequential were happening.

There are potential health consequences, although these should not be exaggerated into the claim that impatience itself is a disease. Persistent stress and inadequate recovery can contribute to elevated blood pressure, disturbed sleep and other health problems. The older Type A literature became more complicated than its popular presentation sometimes suggested; subsequent research did not establish that every ambitious or time-conscious person was marching toward a heart attack. Hostility and chronic stress proved more important than simply being energetic or productive.

Nevertheless, the underlying insight remains valuable. Human physiology evolved to respond powerfully to genuine threats. The stress response is extremely useful when rapid action is necessary. It is rather less useful when repeatedly activated by traffic, meetings, emails, queues and the discovery that somebody ahead of us at the supermarket has chosen the slowest possible method of payment.

Hurry also has consequences that cannot be measured with a blood-pressure cuff. Constantly anticipating the next task makes it difficult to inhabit the present one. A meal becomes something to finish before returning to work. A conversation becomes an interruption. A walk becomes wasted travelling time unless accompanied by a podcast or telephone call. Even recreation can be evaluated according to how efficiently we extracted enjoyment from it.

This produces a strange inversion. We hurry because time is limited, but hurrying can make limited time less satisfying. A person can fit more experiences into a day while experiencing each of them less completely. Anyone who has travelled with an excessively ambitious itinerary knows the phenomenon. Six attractions are visited, hundreds of photographs are taken, and by evening the traveller can barely remember what he actually saw.

The same problem can extend across decades. Children grow up while their parents are busy. Friends drift apart because everybody intends to telephone when things become less hectic. Books remain unread, gardens unexplored and conversations postponed. Retirement then appears on the horizon and people discover that the great period of abundant spare time they expected has arrived rather later than anticipated.

There is a darker irony here. Hurry is partly an attempt to overcome mortality. We know that time is finite, so we try to squeeze more into it. Yet no amount of efficiency creates another year of life. There is something faintly absurd about reaching old age having answered every email promptly but having spent much of one's life worrying about the next thing on the list.

The answer is not to abandon schedules, deadlines or ambition. Civilisation would rapidly become unpleasant if everyone decided punctuality was an oppressive social construction. There are genuine emergencies, important deadlines and periods when hard work is unavoidable. The problem begins when the emergency setting becomes the normal setting.

Small changes may therefore be more realistic than dramatic lifestyle revolutions. Leaving slightly earlier removes the need to race to an appointment. Eating occasionally without simultaneously reading a screen restores the meal as an activity in itself. Allowing another person to finish speaking is both courteous and surprisingly difficult for someone accustomed to operating at speed. Walking somewhere without turning the journey into another opportunity for productivity can reveal just how uncomfortable we have become with unused time.

Perhaps the most revealing experiment is deliberately to leave some empty space in the day. Do not immediately fill a cancelled appointment. Arrive somewhere ten minutes early and resist reaching for the phone. Sit down with a cup of coffee and do nothing else while drinking it. For someone accustomed to constant activity, these trivial exercises can initially feel remarkably unnatural.

That discomfort tells us something. The problem may no longer be that circumstances force us to hurry. We may have trained ourselves to require hurry, so that quiet itself begins to feel wrong.

There will always be more work. There will always be another message, another article, another job around the house and another demand upon our attention. The list is never going to announce that everything has finally been completed and we may now begin living. We have to make that decision while the list remains unfinished.

Hurry sickness ultimately mistakes speed for living. Sometimes speed is necessary and sometimes it is exhilarating, but it is a poor permanent philosophy. Life does not become longer because we rush through it. It may merely seem shorter when we look back.

The grave, after all, has never complained that anybody arrived late!