How to Slow Down Life

“I wanted to figure out why I was so busy, but I couldn’t find the time to do it.”

Todd Stocker

 It seems we all need to learn how to slow down life. 60% of United States adults said they at least sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life, and 12% said they feel this way most of the time, discovered a study from Pew Research.  

There is nothing innately wrong with being busy, mostly because Americans are often multi-tasking and work is so central to life in the United States. In the same research study, 70% of Americans find meaning in their work. Which explains why finding a job that provides meaning is so important in life.

The problem arises that to maintain this fast-paced lifestyle, busy has become synonymous with a hard-working, good life. Being busy is a badge of honor. If we aren’t active, we are less than others. Busy people are the ones achieving, hustling, and getting their happiness, at least that’s how it looks.

Why are We so Addicted to Speed?

“Speed is fun and sexy,” said Carl Honore in his Ted talk. Honore is a journalist. Without that urgency and speed, he would be left behind in his industry of breaking news. We all carry this into our careers. Teaching has to be more with less, the delivery has to be faster, and energy spent always can be more efficient. 

Speed also prevents, the sometimes scary, deep thinking. When days are filled with meetings, work, and networking – there is no time, let alone need for deep contemplation. Questions like, “Is this the life I want to be living?” never surface, because it is already time to give a presentation on the third quarter metrics, and then it’s off to rush home to walk the dog, clean the apartment, pass-out, and repeat. Being in survival mode is sexy, fun, and makes us feel productive, without ever having to ask the tough questions.

Technology has made the feeling of speed even easier. You can work from home 24/7 and can always occupy your time. The ping of email at 9 PM is another thing to do and encourages that busy feeling. We are inundated by technology to always work, and the culture encourages that sense of busyness.

The Detriments of Being Chronically Busy

Learning how to slow life down is super counter-productive in American society. Harvard Business review found Americans are so impressed by the busyness that we even seek it from businesses. Which explains why people tip more whenever the waiters are literally running around the restaurant.

However, by being chronically busy we take negative impacts on our lives.

• Emotional health
  • Increased anxiety
  • Constantly feeling inadequate, ironically feeling like we aren’t doing enough
  • Frustrated with a lack of progress
  • Guilty feelings for not being busy enough 
  • Feelings of incompetent when compared to others that are getting places faster
• Physical health
  • Muscle tension/pain from stress
  • Weight-gain (skipping the gym and having fast food)
  • Restlessness from cramming in one more thing before bed
  • Fatigue and restless sleep
  • Increased risk of cardiovascular disease from a lack of exercise  

• Relationships
  • Deuteriation of existing relationships
  • Lack of developing new relationships
  • Limited emotional connection in daily life

Working hard is critical in achieving goals. However, being busy can be detrimental to over-life and how you feel. Learning how to slow down life can lead to many benefits.

The Benefits of Slowing Down

1. Reduced burn-out

With this drive to be more productive and busier, Harvard was getting applications from ideal students. In high school, they were president of multiple clubs, they played varsity sports, they volunteered, had perfect GPAs, high standardized test scores, and did everything but walk on water. Then the students started at Harvard. Harvard found these students lacked creativity, experienced chronic stress, were unhappy, and became burned out by the first weeks of the semester.

Harvard started issuing letters encouraging the Freshman students to slow down, enjoy their time, and even do nothing at times. The message is clear, even Ivy Leagues that pride themselves on cultivating over-achievers are recognizing that slowing down is important to stop burn-out. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.

2. Increased productivity

Being busy does not mean being productive. The US average workweek extends into about 33.6 hours total of work time. In Norway, the average is 27.2 hours worked. When that is broken into GDP per hour worked, the United States produces $69.3 per hour, while Norway produces $81.3 per hour. The United States does produce a higher GDP and has more employed individuals, yet the point stays the same. In studies on a macro country scale, and even on an individual scale, working long hours has a diminishing effect on productivity.

By going slower, higher quality work can is done with less hours.

3. Slowing down makes room for asking the important life-altering questions

Sitting at a desk staring at a screen, Kimi Werner asked herself what she wanted. Instead of filling her time to be busy, she stepped away and had an important revelation. She wanted to go back to her family roots of spearfishing. She started spearfishing as a hobby, and developed into a nationally ranked, competing Champion Spearfisher. However, into one year of her spearfishing career, she felt overwhelmed. Werner felt that every contest she won was another championship to defend.

She again made room, when life was telling her to speed up, to enter more competitions and make a bigger name for herself, she slowed down once again. What happened was she realized what she wanted. Which was walking away from the competitive scene, even amid cries of people calling her a quitter, a failure, and a waste of talent.

Werner now travels the world, experiencing different cultures and spearfishes while promoting environmentally sustainable and ethical hunting. She is happier and loves what she is doing. She even has more followers and sponsors than when she was a National Champion because she is aligned with what she wants to do.

By slowing down instead of speeding up, she found her life passion.

4. Deeper Relationships

Carl Honore was looking at 1-minute bedtime stories to read to his son when he realized what he was doing. Bed-time reading with his kid was another thing to do, instead of precious bonding time with his son. He went out on a quest to learn how to slow life down and summarized his findings in his best-selling book, In Praise of Slowness. Mainly, documenting the slow movements around the world, from slow cities, slow eating, and even slow sex-life movements.

All of these slow movements focus on building deeper connections with those in your life in whatever capacity that means. Whether a stranger at a park bench, a romantic partner or even a son who wants bed-time stories. The movement to slow-down focuses on fostering relationships with all those in our lives.

5. Increased emotional mastery and happiness

Being busy and working hard now leads to happiness in the future. That’s the idea at least, but does it work? Not really, there is always something else to strive for. Something else to have, some other title to be, something else to be done that will make us “truly” happy.

The Buddhist Monk, Matthieu Ricard has devoted his life to studying happiness. What he found is that the external forces don’t lead to happiness. External forces lead to short-term pleasure. Focusing on fueling that hedonic treadmill.

Inner forces are what dictate a happy life, mastering of emotions being this underpinning.

Mastering your emotions does not mean that you can’t feel anger, it means instead, that when you feel anger, you need to slow down and take a look at it. At first, it is an angry dark cloud, ruining everything it touches. However, by slowing down and getting above the anger, you see it is just dark mist. With time and repetition, just like muscle training, it becomes easier to both recognize, and handle anger. Eventually, it will be just like a fleeting bird.

With this emotional master, it is easier to acknowledge the negative emotions robbing you of happiness and embrace the emotions that promote a happier life. Such as gratitude, joy, relaxation, mindfulness, and connection to others.

How to Slow Down Life

Do less. Pick the main objective and two sub-objectives that must be done each day. Work on those. Do not overload the to-do list with twenty different things. It won’t get done and will lead to feelings of guilt and anxiety. Just focus on your priorities. If you need help making your to-do list, check out the post here on how to keep an effective to-do list.

Practice mindful flow. Whatever you are working on is the most important thing. Don’t answer emails when making a PowerPoint. Do one thing at a time with mindfulness and develop a sense of flow. Even making coffee can help you enter into a flow state.

Do things slower. Eat slower, walk slower, and even drive slower. Besides just saving the waistline and speeding tickets, this will encourage savoring. Savoring is the practice of slowing down to enjoy life, by slowing down, you get to appreciate the little joys that are happening in everyday life that you would have missed by speeding through it. Such as seeing the corgi in the first photo, or seeing a chipmunk on your daily afternoon work with your dog!

Practice self-care. Make time for yourself like you would an important client. Treat yourself right too. Exercise, enjoy nature and get some sleep. Whatever self-care means for you.

Schedule ten-minutes a night for yourself.  Sit, don’t even meditate. Just practice slowing down and enjoy hanging out. Hanging-out can be spent calling a friend, looking out a window, or enjoying a cup of tea.

Meditate. Meditation is all about slowing down, seeing emotional states, and connecting with the body.

Make time for weekly reflections. Set aside time each week for some time to reflect on life. On goals, relationships, hobbies, and how you are doing emotionally. By slowing down and making time for these reflections, you can prevent burn-out and realign to the life you want to be living.

Main Take-Aways

• Society pushes us to be busy, to wear being busy as a badge of honor. As fun and sexy as it is to be busy, being chronically busy can be determinantal to our emotional, mental, and physical health while also eroding relationships.
• By slowing down, we can do more in less time, enjoy the activities we are doing, and perform higher quality work.
• Slowing down leaves time for important self-reflection and personal development, leading to continual course-correcting life to something we want to be living.

Action items

• Slow down this week. For the next week, do less. Do everything slower, while focusing on the high priority tasks. Make time for hobbies, relationships, exercise, and self-care. Build the week focusing on having a slow, enjoyable life instead of trying to constantly fit something else in.
• If this is too much of an ask, I get it. Instead, for the next week, focus on carving out ten minutes at the end of the day for nothing “productive” for work. Instead, use that time for self-care or improving relationships. See at the end of the week how you feel about the strictly busy weeks. Slowly start adding a slower pace each week until it is more natural.