O’Neill: Manufactured urgency is a detriment to mental and physical health

Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.

Urgency creates extra energy to deal with the challenge at hand. Emergency and stress offer a manic power that gets things done, but there is a cost to this type of effort. The sense of urgency becomes addictive, and there evolves a tendency to manufacture urgency to experience the manic high. It’s especially true in farming, where things often are urgent, yet we often do it to ourselves with poor planning and biting off too much.