The power of slow

Set your day to 0.75x

You know how in a podcast player you can speed up or slow down the playback speed?

Try this: Set your internal speed to 0.75x for a day. You can go back to rushing through everything tomorrow. Just for one day, do everything a little slower than usual.

Brush your teeth slowly. Don’t be so quick to promote urgent, agitated thoughts.

In slowing down, we disrupt our day-to-day patterns. This provides a novel and potentially impactful shift in perspective.

Much of the time - maybe most, speaking for myself at least - we're propelled through the day by something like an ambient, low-level panic. Slowing it down a notch acts as a control on this tendency by interrupting the patterns responsible for amping us up into states of stress and confusion.

Time and again, you'll notice yourself speeding back up. It’ll be exhausting, but that’s okay - great actually. Every time it happens, you've introduced space in the unconscious trigger-response mechanism.

Part two of the one-two punch involves shifting into conscious concentration by purposefully slowing down again, further robbing momentum from unconscious habits.

If you make a concerted effort to do this for a day, you stand little chance of seeing things the same way by evening as you did at dawn.