Time Sickness

“I’m so tired I don’t know what day it is,” I distinctly remember saying this to my wife over two decades ago, as we struggled to get our newborn daughter to sleep. Without a regular sleep rhythm, your relationship to time gets seriously disoriented! This is the same disorientation we associate with jet lag. Your body is living on a rhythm that is misaligned with your context.  

You feel sluggish all the time.  

You want to sleep when you should be awake.  

You are awake when you should sleep.  

In many ways, our entire culture is living misaligned. We are out of alignment with time, with the rhythms that help us flourish as humans. In his book, The Congregation in a Secular Age, Dr. Andrew Root introduces us to the German term zeitkrankheit, which means time sickness. Root’s hypothesis is that the rapid acceleration of technology and cultural change has resulted in a constant state of time sickness. Time is actually moving faster. Our lives are speeding up, and we are deeply sick as a result.  

The symptoms of time sickness are easily identifiable. We don’t sleep well. There is never enough time to get things done. Our brains have a hard time shutting off. Concentration for more than a few minutes at a time seems impossible. Slow contemplative tasks, such as prayer and reflection, exist outside of us, beyond our capacity.  

Technology is making it worse. Each new iteration of devices, software, and media complicates our lives rather than making them easier. Our expectations for how much media we can consume, tasks we can accomplish, and how many hours we can function in a day continue to grow without awareness of the consequences.  

So that’s the bad news, that we are trapped in communal time sickness.  

The good news is that if we align ourselves with God’s rhythms, we can heal from our sickness and offer healing to a world stumbling through existence.  

Healing Rhythms 

Here are some basic practices that help us realign our minds and bodies with healthy rhythms:  

1.  Give yourself boundaries with your devices. Use screen time limits on your devices to encourage you to put them away. This is especially important before going to bed.  

2. Build your reading muscles! If you find it difficult to concentrate on one task at a time, begin to strengthen your brain by increasing the time you read. If you can only read 5-10 minutes at a time, to start, no worries, just start there! Commit to doing it every day until you can read for 20-30 minutes, eventually working up to longer stretches of attentiveness.  

3. Listen! How could we have a Future of Faith blog without pointing to the power of listening? Sit with someone else, regularly, and listen well. Hear their story, be present to their experiences. Practice good listening skills. Don’t focus on your responses or what you want to say; instead, focus on hearing them and understanding them. This has the power to slow us down and create sacred space for healing.  

4. Pay attention to the birds! There is a moment in middle age when you suddenly begin to notice birds. My family makes fun of me all the time for my comments on the birds. But there is something deeply calming about paying attention to nature, of being present to the world around us. Take a walk in the woods, go to the beach, get yourself a bird feeder, and watch your visitors. It works, I promise. (Jesus even suggested it, so it can’t be wrong.)  

5. Devote yourself to sacred time. God commanded us to keep the Sabbath and to make it holy. This is not a command to go to church (although that is a healthy rhythm too), it is a command to demonstrate our trust in God by ceasing our labor and enjoying God’s presence and provision. This is a command we have grown far too comfortable breaking.