The Art of Slowing Down: Finding Balance in a Fast-Paced World

The sun’s beating down on you. It’s a warm morning in late October, and you’re smack dab in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park.

You’re sitting with your toes in the crunchy, rocky sand, squishing, prodding—looking for a spot that hasn’t been touched by the sun yet.

It’s only 9:00 AM and, already, you’ve removed most of your layers. "If it’s this hot now," you muse, "how hot will it get later?" All the while, you're sifting through a plan A, B, and C for acquiring water if you run out. Of course it's a dry campsite. Who needs a shower after spending the entire day sweating among the Joshua trees, rattlers, and wood rats living in and around these monolith-like rocks?

You look at your watch again. 9:15 AM. Thinking takes up more time than it should. You decide it’s time to make breakfast and push up from your lightweight, ground-straddling mesh camp chair. Taking small, light steps, you make your way towards the van.

As you walk, you notice that every step feels different. A sharp rock, under your left pinky toe. Now a melting uphill, sand filling the spaces surrounding your right foot. Ouch! Something that’s not sand or smooth, chiseled stone, presses into the sensitive spot on your left heel. You reflexively lift your foot and continue on in a gentle, thoughtful manner.

It takes you about 2 minutes to get to the van. It’s certainly not a lifetime. But the van is about 12 steps away from the picnic table—a walk that should only take 30 seconds with shoes on, give or take.

But something about the thoughtful walking pattern—cue Chani teaching Muad'Dib (then, Paul) how to disorient the desert worm—has you captivated.

Moving at Warp Speed

The world we live in today is fast-paced, there's no doubt about it. From the food we eat to the social media we consume, we’ve created a space that moves exponentially faster as the days barrel on. Pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, said it best: "Life is flux."

We've come a long way from the conception of the assembly-line fast food system, established by the McDonald brothers in 1948 and the inception of Motorola's very first mobile phone in 1973—one that had a call time of just 35 minutes, and a charge time of 10 hours. Fast forward just 52 years (I'll say it one more time for the people in the back: just 52 years!) to a modern era like no other.

A stretch of time where speed is the priority. Where we fight for that extra megabit per second, minute spent waiting in the drive-through, and inch gained in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. From our food to our social media, and our career progression to our relationships, everything moves a mile a minute.

While there are obvious benefits to a life of instant gratification (is there anything better than laying in bed, watching Dateline, and polishing off a Skip the Dishes order?), our obsession with moving fast—and our incessant dependency on technology in general—has led to shortfalls in other areas.

As Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine mentions,

"Back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds."

And by the time 2020 rolled around, Dr. Mark says, "...the average attention paid to a single screen [was] 47 seconds."

What impact does something as simple as attention span decrease have on our daily lives? For one, it increases levels of stress. "The faster the attention switching occurs..." says Dr. Mark, "We show that stress goes up. We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress, blood pressure rises. There's a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed." And if we've learned anything from Gabor Maté, it's that stress can play a mammoth role in the propagation of disease and chronic illness throughout the body. But that's not the only issue—shorter attention spans lead to more mistakes, difficulty retaining important information, addictive, dopamine-seeking behaviour, and challenges having a genuine, human-to-human conversation with that Bumble date you finally decided to meet in person.

According to Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, "the data shows we’re less and less happy."

And that's something we can see in spades across North America. The CDC's 2019 report on Symptoms of Depression Among Adults in the United States shows that those aged 18 to 29 have the highest prevalence of depression at 21%. In 2023, the percentage of adults in the U.S., aged 18-29, who reported having, or being treated for depression, had gone up to 24.6% from a reported 13% just 6 years prior.

“It’s very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress,” says Lembke. “We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.” Wind the clock back nearly 60,000 years, when our stocky Neanderthal counterparts were making their way across the treeless tundra, wooden spear in hand, on their way to ambush a 6-ton woolly mammoth—a Pleistocene beast roughly 92 times a Neanderthal's weight! The kicker? Dinner relied on a successful hunt. Talk about distress.

Now, I'd be a hypocrite if I said I didn't feel it. The pressing need to check how much engagement my latest Instagram post garnered. The continuous email refresh—"has my tax guy gotten back to me yet?" The tap-to-takeout order on those days when the winter wind and ice-rink sidewalk combo feel like too much.

Slow and Steady Wins The Race

While I can appreciate the gotta-get-to-your-gate airport hustle, or replying to that email as soon as you see it, slowing down can have a number of positive effects on both physical and mental health. The practice of slow living doesn't entail accomplishing less within our limited 24-hour rotation or altering the rate at which we process information. Like Laura Malloy, director of the Successful Aging Program at Harvard-affiliated Benson-Henry Institute says, slow living is about

"doing more with greater focus and purpose and at the right speed. It's about... putting more energy and enjoyment into fewer things."

In short, slow living teaches you to value quality over quantity—putting in your 10,000 hours to become a ukulele virtuoso in lieu of playing "Three Blind Mice" shakily on the recorder, guitar, didgeridoo, and trumpet. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), incorporating the slow living mindset into your daily routine through a practice like mindfulness can help with stress management, anxiety and depression reduction, illness prevention, and overall life satisfaction.

When your internal soundtrack shifts from Rachmaninoff's (iconic) "Flight of the Bumblebee" to something slower, something more mellow, you get to enjoy benefits like:

Lower blood pressure Relaxation techniques are proven to help quiet the mind, reduce inflammation, and widen blood vessels.
Better social interactions Nurturing your connections through slow living allows you to listen more, speak less, and be more engaged in one-on-one chats.
Improved concentration and short-term memory Mindfulness encourages you to be more attentive, while meditation can help reduce cortisol levels and increase neuroplasticity.

So, if after locking your front door you find yourself wondering, "did I turn the stove off?" or "that candle I had going, did I ever put that out?" slow living might be the antidote.

But by far the greatest benefit of slow living is taking in, fully experiencing, the space you occupy within the world. Being more present in everything you do—from the mundane (who says laundry day can't be the best day of the week?) to the exceptional—is the key to combating screen-based depression and making sure you're not one more unfortunate statistic for the National Institutes of Health to report on. Whether your specific brand of mindfulness entails eating chocolate with your eyes closed (yes—this is a real exercise); going on a thoughtful walk through the forest and taking in every vivid color, beautiful birdsong, and musky post-rainstorm scent; or living in a flower delivery van for 6-months while touring the West Coast of the United States; don't let the pressure of production, the "never enough" achievement culture, and the unrelenting speed of today's society keep you from living life at your own pace.

For Fast-Acting Relief, Slow Down

So, spend some time with your shoes off. Squish your toes in the sand. Run barefoot through the freshly cut grass. Extend the hang with your friends by a brew. Take your time making that next meal. Listen to those podcasts at 1x speed.