The doctor in me has diagnosed it as one part old age, two parts OCD. As I proofread articles before emailing them to The Times News, I keep getting this unsettling sensation that I just wrote something similar in a recent column.

So I read the article again and again as well as the last few published ones. It’s rare that I find what I fear, yet there’s a good reason to keep indulging in this idiosyncrasy.

It leads to a column occasionally.

For instance, as I triple checked last week’s article about the unhealthy habits that hastened my mother’s demise, I kept wondering why my mom had been so “quarter-hearted” in her exercise. Why would someone intelligent enough to graduate in the top 10 percent of a high school class of 770, who loved her family fiercely, and listened to her son’s pleas to do so regularly, fail to do even a minimal amount of exercise?

It could only be that she never got to the place her son so loves to go. For lack of a better term, let’s call it “the zone.”

You probably know this term as a heightened state that leads to excellence in athletic performance during competition. For what allows a jump shooter to only see the basket and not the defender’s hand as he rises up and releases a shot. For why a batter can be blown away by the first two 100-mile-per-hour fastballs, yet crush the third.

But entering the zone doesn’t require an externally competitive situation. It just requires you to listen, objectively listen, to the signals sent by your body to your brain during exercise and allow them to serve as your personal trainer.

When you do so, you get so deeply engaged in your exercise that time flies.

My best personal example, oddly enough, is not that I do back-to-back, big-mileage rides on weekends and remain mentally engaged most of the time. It’s my recent Friday rides, usually done indoors on a wind trainer and to promote recovery, which in years past have always been one hour.

When these Friday rides are not done as preparation for a race, the pedaling is easy, endless, and that hour can seem like two.

Because of that, I make it a habit only to check my watch when I feel I’m about five minutes from the end and need to start the cool down.

But Friday rides this year have been different. None of my riding has been to prepare for races (I expect all the ones that really suit me to be canceled because of the coronavirus) but to get my legs right after fracturing my left femur in December.

“Legs” is not a typo. I’ve been feeling the rods and screws in both legs (I fractured the right femur in 2009), and too many of my recent rides have been done with a dull, toothache-type ache in my hips and glutes.

So Friday rides have become information gathering in nature. Every time I shift gears or my seat position, I compare it to the previous feeling in my hips and glutes.

Does the discomfort increase with the change in cadence? Does the tension in my hips abate a bit when I stop holding the handle bars and sit up straight?

How does the feel of the pedaling change when I go from “scraping mud” style to “mashing”? Or when I ride knock-kneed?

I try not to judge my feelings but observe them, and soon theories emerge that lead to more experimentation. Now it’s nice to report that this process has led to my last few rides being as discomfort-free as any I’ve had since the injury, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Friday rides used to drag. When I’d check my watch because I thought I’d reached the 55-minute mark, I’d often be 15 minutes early.

But on the last five Fridays, the time checks have been at least 15 minutes late. I have been fully focused on finding ways to undo my discomfort and entered “the zone” each time.

As a result, the time flies by.

While I hope discomfort is not a regular part of your exercise, I do hope you find a way to enter “the zone.”

One of the things that will increase your odds of doing so, it seems to me, is to understand that physical discomfort, mental unrest, or general lethargy inevitably will create the “bad thoughts” in your brain that discourage exercise. Those negative thoughts, though, are no more significant than the thousands of involuntary ones - “Should I have a salad or a sandwich for lunch?”-that enter your brain daily.

If you recognize bad thoughts as temporary feelings rather than permanent facts, you observe your body rather than judge your body as you exercise. Gain interest in those observations and it’s easy to gain entrance into “the zone.”