Hurry sickness

I was reading an excerpt of the book A Geography of Time (fascinating!), and at the bottom came to the following description of hurry sickness. I think I may be on the verge of contracting it.

If you would like an accurate gauge of your own tendency toward time urgency, it is important to look into a wide range of behaviors. You might begin by thinking about yourself in these ten areas:

* Concern with clock time: Compared to most people, are you particularly aware of the time on the clock? Do you, for example, frequently glance at your watch? Or, on the other hand, are you the sort of person who sometimes forgets the time or even what day of the week it is?

* Speech patterns: How rushed is your speech? Do you tend to speak faster than other people? When someone takes too long to get to the point while speaking, do you often feel like hurrying them along? Are you a person who accepts interruptions?

* Eating habits: How rushed is your eating behavior? Are you often the first person finished eating at the table? Do you take time to eat three meals a day in a slow and relaxed manner?

* Walking speed: Do you walk faster than most people? Do fellow walkers sometimes ask you to slow down?

* Driving: Do you get excessively annoyed in slow traffic? When you are caught behind a slow driver, do you sometimes honk or make rude gestures to try to speed them up?

* Schedules: Are you addicted to setting and/or maintaining schedules? Do you allot a specific amount of time for each activity? Do you have a fetish about punctuality?

* Listmaking: Are you a compulsive listmaker? When preparing for a trip, for example, do you make a list of things to do or things to bring?

* Nervous energy: Do you have excessive nervous energy? Are you a person who becomes irritable when you sit for an hour without doing something?

* Waiting: Do you get more annoyed than most people if you have to wait in line for more than a couple of minutes at the bank, a store, or to be seated in a restaurant? Do you sometimes walk out of these places if you encounter even a short wait?

* Alerts: Do others warn you to slow down? How often have you heard your friends or spouse tell you to take it easier, or to become less tense?

Nearly everyone exhibits time urgency on at least some of these questions. But if your answers indicate an overconcern with time and speed in most or all of the categories, or if you are particularly extreme in even a few areas, then you would probably be classified as a time-urgent personality.

When the sense of time urgency becomes extreme and habitual--when people feel compelled to rush even in the absence of real external time pressures--it may lead to what cardiac psychologists Diane Ulmer and Leonard Schwartzburd call "hurry sickness." If you are curious whether your case has progressed to this advanced stage, look for these three symptoms:

Do you notice ...

* ... deterioration of the personality, marked primarily by loss of interest in aspects of life except for those connected with achievement of goals and by a preoccupation with numbers, with a growing tendency to evaluate life in terms of quantity rather than quality?

* ... racing-mind syndrome, characterized by rapid, shifting thoughts that gradually erode the ability to focus and concentrate and create disruption of sleep?

* ... loss of ability to accumulate pleasant memories, mainly due to either a preoccupation with future events or rumination about past events, with little attention to the present? Focusing on the present is often limited to crises or problems; therefore memories accumulated tend to be of unpleasant situations.

Ulmer and Schwartzburd have found that "yes" answers to these questions warrant a diagnosis of hurry sickness. People with this "disease" suffer a wide range of difficulties, ranging from health problems, particularly those related to the cardiovascular system, to the fragmentation of social relationships and to a low sense of self-worth.