This is a guest post by one of the UK’s leading experts in digital distraction and digital detox and author of The Distraction Trap: How to Focus in a Digital World, Frances Booth. Find out more about Frances here.
It’s easy to get into the cycle of thinking we need to go faster, faster, faster all the time.
“It’s so slow …”, we complain, if a web page takes an extra half-second to load. “I haven’t got time for this …”, we think, tensing up, if we’re forced to wait in a queue.
We’re busy, we’re stressed, and we’ve got too much to do.
But what happens, if, instead of always trying to go faster, we consciously and deliberately slow everything down?
I’m not talking about huge changes. I’m talking about slowing things down just a fraction.
So you might take a second longer to put on your shoes before you rush out of the door, spend a moment more looking at the scenery as you walk, or consider for a few seconds the task you’re about to launch in to.
One technique that can help you slow down in this way is consciously naming (in your head) each object as you come across it. So “bowl, milk, cereal, spoon” as you have your breakfast, for example.
Of course you don’t have to carry on like this all day long. But it can be a useful technique if you need a reminder or a way to shift down a gear from rush, rush, rush mode.
By slowing things down just a tiny bit, and doing things deliberately, we can shift our awareness. We become focused in the present moment, rather than our thoughts racing ahead or repeating past events on a loop. This can calm us down.
So why do we try and go so fast?
Sometimes we try and go faster, faster, faster just because everyone else is.
Often it’s because we want to cram more in to each day. I’m all for productivity. But there’s such a thing as going too fast, trying to fit in too much. This can leave us overwhelmed and overloaded. We need to know how to keep a balance, and slowing down a fraction is one way to do this.
It’s when we’re most stressed and busiest that we need to step back the most. Yet the challenge arises because it’s precisely at this point that we feel like we have no time at all to stop. We feel like we literally don’t have five minutes to spare, and the smallest task added to our workload can utterly overwhelm us. In this state of mind, it can be hard to catch ourselves long enough to even realise that slowing down would help. We’re on automatic …
Sometimes we operate at top speed for too long just because we’ve become stuck in that mode.
So when we’re stressed, a few seconds here and a few seconds there of slowing down, can shift our awareness and bring us into the present moment.
It can make us wonder; why were we in such a rush?
