Do you approach a stoplight and quickly scan the cars in each lane to get behind the ones you believe will go faster when the light changes to green?

Do you choose to stand in the grocery checkout line that you’ve calculated will move faster? Then do you feel a sense of either victory if it does move faster or depression if your line lags behind?

Do you tell your children to race to see who can get their bath finished and pj’s on the fastest — every night — so the bedtime ritual can be compressed and you can have more time to finish the zillion other things you have to do before you can go to bed?

If so, you’re probably suffering from hurry sickness, according to John Ortberg, author of The Life You’ve Always Wanted.

“The hurry-sick lack simplicity,” Ortberg says. “But the most serious sign of hurry sickness is a diminished capacity to love. For love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.”

He didn’t coin the phrase “hurry sickness.” That came in the 1950s when two cardiologists were researching different personality types. Fifty years later, physicians recognize hurry sickness as very real. Dr. Robert Hales, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Davis, describes the physiological signs: “Your mind is stressed. Your body is stressed — your muscles, your heart, your lungs. You’re breathing faster. It affects everything.” Long-term effects can lead to heart attacks, depression, a depleted immune system, digestive problems, migraines and insomnia.

“Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers — they all run faster now than ever before,” says James Gleick, former science writer for the New York Times and author of Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.

Hurry sickness isn’t confined to the secular world. There are many Christian pastors, laypeople, husbands, wives and children with too much on their “to do” lists. There is incredible irony in the fact that we have more laborsaving devices than any previous generation by far — even combined shampoo and conditioner so we can save those extra seconds of rinsing — and yet we are, as Gleick says, busier than ever.

So what’s the answer? Cardiologists and others say that it is simple and yet hard: Slow down. Build five- and 10-minute breaks into your day just to rest. Take your vacation days. Spend more than 15 minutes a day in the presence of the Time-Giver. See if Ortberg is right, that more time will allow more love.

Judy Howard Peterson, 34, did that a few years ago when she walked across America from Seattle to Miami as part of her work toward a master of divinity degree. A self-described “type A” personality, Peterson didn’t want to do the traditional internship of a year serving a local church.

“I had a sneaking suspicion that Jesus did more walking around than He did setting up shop in church and asking people to come and make an appointment,” says Peterson. “I decided to figure out how to walk like Jesus walked.”

It took some time to do that, Peterson admits. For the first 1,500 miles, she focused on walking 20 miles a day, five days a week. By the end of her 4,200-mile odyssey she had gone through 11 pairs of shoes.

“When I was mileage crazy, I worried most about where I was going and how fast I would get there,” she says. “But walking like Jesus walked meant there was enough time for everyone who needed it.”

The moment of illumination came when she walked into a tiny town in South Dakota and went into a general store. The man at the counter gave her a free cup of coffee, and after listening to her for a while (she’s a fast and prolific speaker), he told her, “You’d be in Miami if you didn’t talk so much.”

Peterson smiled, acknowledging the truth of his comment, and then walked over to chat with a group of farmers.

“I told them they have more faith than pastors because they plant every year and, harvest or not, they plant again the next year, believing it’s not about what comes up but about what they plant,” she says. “They have faith that the harvest is sure to come up eventually.”

She asked if she could pray for them and their families. She prayed for a sick wife and other requests, then thanked the man at the counter for the coffee on her way out.

“You’d be in Miami, but what would be the point?” he asked with a smile.

“I realized that it was not about Miami; it was about the people I met along the way,” Peterson says. The person she met at mile four might be more important than reaching mile 20.

She recounts the way God used ordinary people to drive home spiritual truths. Like the woman in Montana who told her about picking up spare change and adding it to her offering envelope. After that conversation, Peterson began looking for coins along the road, picking up all she saw. It wasn’t much, usually less than 40 cents a day.

“Although pennies had little worth in my economy, I believed that God valued them and would in turn give them value,” Peterson recalls. “I often muttered, ‘Multiply this penny. Grow it, God,’ as I thought of Bible stories of God taking something little and multiplying it.”

Then one day, while praying about her finances (Peterson began the trip with $400; God provided the rest), she found several pennies, then nickels and dimes, and five quarters. She was so excited by the quarters — thinking that God was going to do a miracle and give her some big money — that she stepped over the next penny she saw, deciding to pick up only the larger coins from then on.

But she heard an increasingly familiar voice saying, “If you don’t pick up every one of My blessings, I will cease to bless you.” She heard the words a second time and went back to pick up the penny.

Walking on, she mused about how people are like coins — people who are more educated, more powerful and have more important careers are like quarters, valued more than the “less successful” people, the ones considered to be just pennies.

“Some people, like pennies, are stepped over as we make our way to the quarters — people who may benefit us in some way or another,” says Peterson. “Maybe this is why we don’t experience much of God’s blessing. Maybe we’ve stepped over one too many of His pennies.”

Today Peterson — who spends about 40 weekends a year speaking to women’s conferences, church congregations and other groups — still walks eight miles a day and sleeps eight hours a night. “It’s good for my health,” she asserts. “And I know when I’m disconnected from God early on, when I’m out of sync. I put things down and let things go. I’m not nearly as productive as people would like me to be, but I’m OK with that. I’m not to be a workaholic; I must be connected with God.”

In this age of the Internet, real-time stock prices, faxes, multitasking cell phones and instant everything, hurry sickness seems to have reached epidemic proportions. But let’s not blame our culture entirely for this “sickness.” Instead, let’s try to alleviate the worst of it in our lives. Here are a few suggestions:

Schedule 15 minutes a day to simply sit back. Don’t let thoughts of work to do, thoughts of your family’s needs or anything else distract you from relaxing.

Go for a walk. Not a march, but a stroll. You can have a purpose in mind, such as going to the grocery store, but look for people to wave to along the way. Or begin a conversation with a neighbor. Look for God’s surprising moments — an unexpectedly beautiful tree in bloom, the delight of a child’s laughter.

Break for three to four minutes every hour. Pray for someone or read a Scripture passage. Perhaps you could read a couple of verses in the morning before heading out to work and then think of them throughout your day.

As a family, sit down and review your activities. Is it really important to take all those classes, go to all those meetings? Start small; eliminate only one activity. But keep cutting back over the next several months until you can honor all commitments without feeling stressed.

Turn off your cell phone for an entire day. No fair looking at text messages!

Allow time in your prayer life to listen. Ask God for help trimming your “to do” list and open your hands to allow Him to put into your day — or take out of it — whatever is on His agenda.

Don’t expect to see changes overnight. Don’t make simplifying your life yet another thing in your day planner. Instead, fill in any open slots with these words: Rest. Pray. Wait on God.