Life on the fast lane is affecting our health and wellbeing

We are living in a world where the pace of change has accelerated at a dizzying speed. Indeed, the speed of this unprecedented change has begun to affect the human condition, be it in our own personal lives or in our societies as a whole.

Many of us have reached a point where we find it difficult or perhaps even impossible to adapt to our external circumstances. Amidst all the speed and turbulence we have forgotten how to get off the treadmill, or how to stop just to take a breath. Yet the more we hasten the pace of our lives the less we seem able to reach our destination, whatever that may be.

Below the surface of our fast daily lives the pressure of impatience is building up. We witness road rage; we run red lights; we jump queues or change lanes at customer service counters, checking our watch every minute.

We seem to be in a constant race with ourselves and with each other. It’s a race against time but time never stands still so the race just gets faster.

Indeed, we have become obsessed with speed. Every minute and every second counts. We can even learn how to get faster still: Let’s read the latest book on ‘How to get more done in less time’ and attend a seminar that teaches us to ‘Work faster in less time’. 

There is speed-reading, speed-dating, fast food, fast weight loss and fast everything else. Even in our daily language we make excessive use of speed-related expressions. I’ve got to dash. I must run. You are late. Hurry up! It’s life in the fast lane. What for? So that you have more time to speed up even more!

As the world speeds up and becomes increasingly uncertain, we suffer from high levels of stress and we find it increasingly difficult to slow down and to reduce our constant busyness. For many of us, stress has become like a pressure cooker from which we seem unable to escape. We feel strapped in and eventually burn out.

It has been reported that people who are close to burnout often further accelerate their already hurried modus operandi, as if to avoid even a short moment of the very thing they need most: rest.

In this hyped-up, complex and interconnected world we may feel increasingly disconnected from it, from others, and, most significantly, from ourselves.  The fast pace and this disconnectedness has become the source of our stress, our anxieties, our feelings of anger and our restlessness. And all of this may have begun to affect our health and wellbeing.

We may find that we are often tired or perhaps even feel exhausted. Maybe our body is giving us clues that we tend to ignore: An inability to switch off? Anxiousness? Headaches? Insomnia? Muscle tension? Back pain? Digestive problems? High blood pressure?

Symptoms such as these are warning signs alerting us to slow down.

Stress, in all its disguises, can almost always be dealt with when we learn how to think less, when we change the relationship to our thinking, and when we take time out every day to unwind, relax and do nothing.

When you are in a hurry, slow down, is an old Chinese saying. We should use this as a daily reminder to ourselves when everything gets too rushed. Paradoxically, slowing down often means getting results quicker. Of course, it also means that our health and wellbeing will improve.

Dr Christine Maingard, Author of "Think Less, Be More"  -  http://www.thinklessbemore.com