I am sick.

Don't worry. It's not contagious.

Besides, most of you suffer from the same affliction.

The diagnosis is easy: Feel stressed? Anxious? Feel like there's not enough time in the day to accomplish everything on your plate? Does it seem as if the world is racing at breakneck speed and all you can do is hang on for dear life?

You, my friend, have a case of what my new friend, Susan R. Johnson, calls "time sickness."

She's a doctor. And not one of these people who slap a "Dr." in front of their names just because they stayed in college too long. Johnson is a bona fide physician (OK, a gynecologist) who has studied the sickness and now leads seminars on it for professionals in all fields.

She says the time crunch we all feel at work is more complex than we think, more problematic than we admit, and more difficult to overcome than we realize.

"It's a feeling of chronic unease," she said. "We feel like there's too much to do and not enough time to do it."

Of course, people have complained about overwork and lack of time since the first clock began to tick. The difference now is that employees in the 24/7 digital workplace are always plugged in and on call. E-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, pagers, personal digital assistants — the office goes home with us, much like those 250,000 or so felt-tip pens from the supply closet.

"We choose to be that way. The world doesn't force us to be," Johnson said. "The problem isn't that we have too much work, it's that we spend too much time worrying about what's ahead or behind."

Regardless, some people think that unease can morph into actual disease.

Johnson said making that connection is "a little tricky," but research shows the symptoms of time sickness — sleeplessness, irritability, etc. — can be linked to poor judgment, traffic accidents and other calamities, all of which threaten to put us further behind schedule.

Time sickness has reached epidemic proportions since Daniel Goleman used the phrase a few years ago to describe our collective sense that time passes too quickly. Goleman writes for the New York Times, a big newspaper where my boss says they eat people like me for breakfast.

The illness has no vaccination, no new medicine with a cool name like Protregra or Tryswallowin (side effects include dry mouth, hair loss and the inability to read fine print). You can wash your hands all you want (in fact, please do), eat your vegetables (we recommend the salad bar at a swank downtown hotel), and do Turbo Jam until your abs fall off.

But none of that will keep the time sickness bug at bay.

Dr. Johnson advises to start simple, by staying in the moment.

"When you're at a stoplight, for example, don't roll through it. And don't impatiently wait for the light to change. Use that millisecond to take a deep breath," she said. "Don't be in such a hurry to rush headlong into the future."

Long story short: We should be killing time. Instead, it is killing us.

So slow down. Stop to smell the cherries in life's bowl of guns and roses.

It's the first step to beating this dreaded disease.

Larry Ballard writes for The Des Moines Register. Write to him at P.O. Box 957, Des Moines, Iowa 50304.