Avoid Hurried Woman’s Syndrome

I’m sure many of you can relate to this:  some days you just feel like your life is on permanent fast forward.  Everything goes too darn fast.  And yet, there’s still no time.  No time for hobbies, for love, for real relationships… Certainly no time just to sit and do nothing (without feeling guilty!)

This kind of hurried life can cause plenty of problems, too.  For me, it added to health issues.  I had to slow down because my body just couldn’t keep up.  For others, it may mean you don’t have the same quality relationship with your spouse, or even that your kids are as stressed as you are.

I caught this interesting article that talked about the effects of a life zipping by too fast, and one of the things it mentioned was Hurried Woman’s Syndrome.  It said:

“Women who try to do too many things at once—juggling work with hectic home life—complain of chronic stress, tiredness, weight gain, sleep problems, guilt, knackered self-esteem.

They suffer, according to Dr. Brent Bost, from hurried woman syndrome.”

The remedy for this is simply slowing down.  But it’s easier said than done.  It takes a concentrated effort.  But once you master it, you won’t want to go back.

I had to adjust my life at first because of health reasons.  But now, I protect my time and that of my family.  I don’t over schedule.  In some cases, that’s meant we don’t socialize as much as we used to.  We had some friends that we saw once in a while that constantly caused us stress.  But we worked to fit them into our social calendar.  Now, we don’t.  (And haven’t missed them.)

Instead, we focus on those rare friendships that are special.  We spend quality time with people that care about us.  We work to make our holidays less hectic.  We even use caution when it comes to getting into new TV shows or hobbies.    We also purposely don’t schedule activities as often as we did before.  We choose plays or flea markets (or whatever we truly love) over those things that would have us stuck in traffic and feeling rushed.  We rarely schedule anything for during the week.

Basically, we guard our schedule as if it’s the most precious thing around.  It’s not something I’ve always done.  But now that I have this mindset, I really see the difference in how much calmer I am.

What about you?  Are you suffering from “Hurried Woman’s (or Men’s) Syndrome”?  If so, what steps can you take to slow down?

Image from Morguefile.