I’m scared of illness. My fear applies to lethal diseases like cancer and heart attack, severely disabling disorders like encephalitis and stroke, mental abnormalities like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, and all sorts of injuries. My imagination easily goes wild picturing a stuffy nose that turns into meningitis and an ordinary cough into pneumonia.

Despite apparently low probabilities of getting life-threatening diseases and complications, I treat them all as likely possible and notably fatal. These obviously destructive thoughts were successfully ruining my life until I realized that hypochondria can be an asset.

I remember that day when I got suspicious of a tiny unhealthy-looking (to me) mole on my shoulder and decided to visit a doctor. I was sitting in the waiting room in front of the doctor’s office when I heard a stern voice of a physician talking to a patient behind the door.

“You say you are pain all this time and decided to seek medical care a year after it started? Do you understand it is too late?!”

I shivered because it was a cancer center.

There’s no such powerful yet non-renewable resource as TIME. Time flies, time heals, time is money. A sad thing is that it goes against us: the more we live, the less time we have.

What is even more sad is the fact that time means nothing before no time is left.

Statistics on global social media usage — 118 minutes each day — prove how underpriced time is.

We eat a lot of fast food saturated with bad cholesterol. We sit at computer desks 24/7 with our backs forming a question mark. We don’t exercise and don’t go for a walk. We are often sleep deprived. We consume too much caffeine during weekdays and too much alcohol on weekends.

On top of that, we put important things off until later because we are in no hurry.

Minor things are always on our prime time.

Consider the stakes: if you lose health one day, there will be no tomorrow. There will be a zero chance of reassessing yourself and your vision, restoring reputation if it’s damaged, restarting relationship if it’s broken and rebuilding whatever remains from the ashes. It will be too late to make changes.

That’s when hypochondria intervenes. We, hypochondriacs, are gifted with the ability to appreciate health and time it grants as if we are about to die. Believe me, no other motivation shapes the schedule for the day better.

I will definitely attribute the portion of my productivity to hypochondria in a sense that I have no time to waste. I have a strong urge to work a lot, to learn a lot, to read and write, to spend time only with people I love. Except for recurrent medical checkups and consultations I am condemned to. But, you know, everything comes at a price.

FYI, that suspiciously-looking mole on my shoulder was just fine.

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My team and I deal with marketing every single day. We’ve discovered a number of secrets and little-known facts and we can’t help sharing them. Visit Kraftblick blog and say ‘hi’ to us. See you there!

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