Hurry Sickness in Digital Age: How Social Media Is Rewiring Our Sense of Time

Frequent interruptions—especially those created by social media—divide our attention in ways that differ from traditional distractions

Imagine you are in the middle of a conversation, a meal, or a very deep thought, and ping!—your notification rings and your phone vibrates. Much before the screen lights up to make you aware of the situation, a wave of restlessness, rather familiar, takes hold. It is probably a physical sensation, a sort of tightening in the chest, which shifts your attention—only to persist until you pick up the phone, swipe, read, and reply. The urgency that accompanies this is worth noting. The text might be trivial, yet the discomfort of not replying instantly takes over, almost making it intolerable.

Social Media and the Basic Human Need
Social networking sites (SNSs) have long enabled people to interact with one another, forming a web of connections across the globe. Through temporary content like stories and feeds, personalised news feeds, the ability to create groups, and the option of staying privately online, SNSs increase relatedness and instil a sense of belonging and popularity in individuals. This, in turn, becomes a fundamental motivating factor in forming and maintaining interpersonal bonds, as suggested by traditional theory (Reich & Vorderer, 2013). SNSs can foster this “need to belong,” only for it to be easily converted into a “fear of missing out,” popularly known as FOMO (Alutaybi et al., 2019).

In this digital age, the need to belong is always entangled with speed. This fear revolves around missing popularity or misunderstanding the causes of an unexpected lack of social interaction. Here, it becomes more about responsiveness: being available, visible, and fast.

This is where “hurry sickness” comes into the spotlight. First related to heart symptoms, Friedman and Rosenman coined the term while describing patients as constantly restless and on edge (McFarlane, 2024). They linked it to Type A personality behaviour. Hurry sickness is a chronic sense of time urgency accompanied by impatience. While it was initially discussed in the context of the workplace and competition, the integration of social media has brought the condition into our social and emotional lives. This pace, in turn, forces us to interpret slowness as disinterest—or worse, rejection.

This phenomenon manifests in anxiety around messaging. If we do not reply quickly, we believe we are ghosting someone. Likewise, if someone does not respond quickly, we assume we have been ghosted. This anxiety may be irrational, yet it is emotionally powerful and demanding. This overinterpretation and anxious expectation of social rejection is termed rejection sensitivity (Banga, 2024). For example, by making response times visible, SNSs intensify this sensitivity, creating more room for comparison and quantification. Read receipts and “last seen” indicators do exactly that.

Social Networking Sites and the Fast-Paced Life
Often in conversations, we mention how the “pace of life” keeps speeding up—and unsurprisingly, contemporary social theory supports this claim. Information and communication technologies are seen as the primary drivers of this acceleration. Social relationships now stretch across opposite ends of the world, yet they are compressed in time. Increased technological intervention in social relationships means that life itself becomes technologised, leading us to the conclusion that digital technologies are accelerating life to an unprecedented degree (Wajcman, 2008).

With technological acceleration aimed at speeding up goal-directed processes, the expectation shifts from our ability to communicate to our obligation to communicate (Kalman et al., 2021).

This fast-paced life has its own cognitive consequences. Frequent interruptions—especially those created by social media—divide our attention in ways that differ from traditional distractions. Interruptions are more frequent and complex, encompassing social use for maintaining relationships, hedonic use for seeking pleasure, and cognitive use, such as replying to messages or even thinking about unanswered ones. They also arise from internal cues. For instance, we often find ourselves thinking about an unanswered text, and this internal distraction leads to attentional failure (Zahmat Doost & Zhang, 2023). This is how we internalise interruptions, allowing SNSs to become a necessary part of our attentional systems.

Constantly fluctuating attention increases cognitive load and hinders sustained focus. Beyond behavioural and subjective consequences, interruptions often interfere with performance and increase mental fatigue (Mark et al., 2008). Over time, this develops into a baseline state of restlessness—feeling perpetually behind, rushed, and anxious.

The Process
Social media carefully constructs social contexts that trigger dopamine release, leading to increased usage. These platforms are known to activate the same neural pathways as recreational drugs or gambling. While dopamine is often misunderstood as a “pleasure chemical,” it is more closely linked to motivation, reward, and desire (Berridge & Robinson, n.d.). Continuous feedback loops driven by dopamine are created and reinforced through notification alerts, likes, mentions, and comments, making us restless in pursuit of gratification.

Social media thus becomes a medium of instant gratification (Amir & Khan, 2024). We fulfil basic social needs, such as reassurance, almost instantly. The unpredictability of texts, comments, and replies—and our inability to anticipate these rewards—encourages a compulsive need for constant engagement. This is why waiting becomes uncomfortable and slowness anxiety-inducing.

The emotional consequences are significant. A fast-paced, technology-driven life and persistent time pressure lead to increased stress, irritability, and restlessness. The quality of conversations deteriorates; interactions become rushed and frequently interrupted. While we remain connected, we are rarely present. The irony is striking: platforms designed to foster connection may ultimately weaken our capacity for meaningful engagement.

This is not an argument for abandoning social media altogether. SNSs have undeniably made life easier, offering community and support. The problem lies not in connectedness itself, but in the ever-accelerating pace of social life. Hurry sickness thrives on speed. The most effective “reply” to hurry sickness is reclaiming and accepting slowness. Allowing delayed responses, sitting in silence, and detaching self-worth from responsiveness help restore autonomy.

In a culture that celebrates immediacy, choosing to pause can feel uncomfortable. Yet this accelerating pace of life risks turning hurry sickness into not just a temporary discomfort, but a pandemic—one notification at a time.

Authors: Shravani Shahane, Undergraduate Student, FLAME University and Prof. Moitrayee Das, Faculty of Psychology, FLAME University.