The Tick-Tock Syndrome

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Like many reformed addicts, Santa Fe physician Larry Dossey is determined to help others avoid his mistakes. For years Dossey was addicted to racing against the clock, desperately trying to see how much he could get done as the minutes ticked away. And like many other driven people, Dossey began to pay a price for his single-minded pursuit of success. Migraine headaches started while he was in high school and grew worse as he hurried through medical school and began his career as an internist in Dallas. Nothing if not resolute, Dossey managed to keep pushing despite the pain. Then he heard about something called biofeedback, gave it a try, and his life was never the same--and not only because the migraines vanished. "I didn't even know I had a mind-body relationship before that time," he says. "It was like turning on a light."

At the time Dossey was on the staff of the Dallas Diagnostic Association clinic, which was located near two major high-tech manufacturing centers, both full of time-racing engineers who ended up in Dossey's office complaining of migraines or chest pains or sleep disorders. When Dossey introduced these anxious superachievers to biofeedback, the results were impressive, and he began to think in greater depth about time and our relationship to it. He concluded that time battlers' stress-related illnesses, ranging from heart disease to nervous exhaustion, constituted a distinct pathology he called "time-sickness," which he described in his book Space, Time and Medicine (Shambala, 1982).

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