How to Slow Down and Avoid Burnout
Slowing down has been a key to creating balance in my life — What would the world be like if we are all able to find our own rhythm in life?
These last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the pace I live my life at. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to Portugal for a Slo-Working retreat and it really gave me the chance to ponder deeper into exactly how slowing down has been of benefit to me.
What is Slow Working?
Slow Working is about finding the balance we need in our lives. As the name suggests, it is about slowing down and creating the space you really need to feel nourished and thrive.
We have grown used to working long hours under pressure to hit targets and meet deadlines. We get stuck thinking in terms of short timescales and focusing on the wrong things. When you are living this way it is easy to become lost and disconnected from yourself.
Slow working is not about putting up your feet, shirking responsibility and ignoring your work as it piles up. It is about reframing what is important in your life and creating a workflow that is aligned with your needs.
For me it is a way of helping me ground myself and look after my mental health. The concept of slow working has helped me to focus on longer timeframes and to create more meaning in what I’m doing. I’ve got better at working out what my needs and values are and building my work around that.
I found this quote by Neil A. Fiore very helpful to my reframing of how I use my time:
“There’s a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It’s a nonrenewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, and if you’ve spent it badly, it’s gone forever.”
Why was slowing down important for me?
We live in a world where anxiety and depression levels are at an all time high and continuing to rise. Slowing down has been an important part of my life over the last year. I found that slowing down had a hugely positive effect for both my mental and physical health.
I’ve been trying to find the pace that suits me. It’s a really hard thing to do. For a long time I just followed other people’s schedules — at school, at university, at work. Then I became a freelancer.
The freedom that that brought me was quickly replaced by overwhelm. I think people thrive in different environments. For some people that fast pace is the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning. For me it filled me with anxiety and panic.
I saw everyone else around me thrashing it out to get things done, and I thought I needed to do the same. I was constantly against the clock, needing to reach goals and deadlines, madly struggling to make enough money to pay the rent and bills. I couldn’t really see past the end of the next month. I wasn’t living in the moment. I was trapped. Life was becoming too much. I was struggling to feel anything other than misery and despair.
I was forced to stop, because it got to a point where I couldn’t see any other way forward. I wish I’d realised sooner that I could choose to live another way.
I was terrified of stopping, because I didn’t know what I would find.
However, when I eventually did stop it gave me the time to think and to explore. I realised that I didn’t need to rush to get things done. I actually needed to have the time and space to work out what was important to me. It turned out that the things that are important to me don’t have a tight deadline. It has helped me see that a lot of the things that kept me awake at night and made me feel trapped weren’t really that important after all.
How Can You Slow Down?
There are so many ways that we can create more space in our lives and move at a slower pace. I’ve selected a few of the steps that have been really beneficial to me and may work for you too:
1. Turn off your notifications
One of the greatest things I have done for my wellbeing was to turn off all of my notifications on my smartphone. I did it about 1.5 years ago and have never looked back. It gave me back a degree of control that I thought I’d lost forever. I no longer feel at the whim of my phone. I still get all of my messages, and I get them all in my own time. It was hard at first. I felt guilty that I wasn’t able to respond to people straight away. Until I realised that was the problem in the first place. If people need to get in contact urgently they can call me on my phone — but it is rare that any message I get needs to be responded to within the first 5 seconds of receiving it. I know you may feel you couldn’t survive without your notifications… that was how I felt. But I can assure you it will change everything. Give it a try!
2. Surround yourself with like minded people
One of the reasons I initially found slowing down really difficult was because that just wasn’t the way the rest of the world seemed to function. It didn’t seem possible to slow down when everything around me suggested I should be speeding up. Fortunately for me, once I got into the slowing down headspace I discovered I wasn’t alone. There are whole communities of people who share similar values to me. I soon discovered The Happy Startup School, a vibrant community of people doing amazing things, most of whom subscribe to the philosophy of taking it slow. The Slo-Working retreat I’ve just returned from in Portugal was organised by two of my friends, Hen and Rik, who I met through the Happy Startup Community.
Surrounding yourself with like minded people doesn’t mean that you need to narrow your perspective. If anything, my world view has dramatically opened up by mixing with a group of people who think very differently to what I had been used to.
3. Understand that Self Care isn’t Selfish
Learning this was so important. It seems obvious, but I don’t think it is an idea which is particularly prevalent in our society. It can easily seem that putting yourself and your time first is a selfish thing to do, when there are so many people relying on you to get things done. However, that is the fast track to burnout. The best way you can help others and be more reliable is to be comfortable with creating time and space for yourself. That was you will have so much more energy and enthusiasm for everything you do.
Discovering mindfulness meditation was a real turning point in my life. I also try and go for a run or exercise for 30 mins each morning. I write a journal and try and create time for creative pursuits which really nourish me. Your self care routine may be very different to mine, but whatever you choose to do — creating space for yourself is so important.
4. Just Stop
If things are starting to feel overwhelming don’t be afraid to just stop. It’s much better to do nothing for an hour and recharge than to work away until midnight in a blind panic.
I know it can be really hard to slow down. Our society is not set up for going slow. It requires awareness and commitment. It’s a slow process of unlearning what you have previously accepted as the only way.
Even though I know the benefits of slowing down I often forget and start rushing towards the finish line. It’s a constant process of trial and error.
We all know what the ultimate finish line is.
Are we really in such a hurry to get there?
Listen here to Podcast number 8 with Henrietta Jadin on slowing down and finding your own rhythm in life:
Ministry of Change is a project in which I’m traveling around the UK in my van in an attempt to make the conversation around mental health accessible to everyone. Find out more about my journey here.
