The Importance Of Slowing Down

Why are we so obsessed with speed?

In everything we do, we want to be quicker, more efficient and more productive. This is really just to say that we want everything to be faster.

Speed is rewarded in our society by career promotions, praise from peers, and even our own personal belief that we’re doing something well.

We rush and cram things together so that maybe we can get more accomplished in a day. Hell, even mindfulness meditation sessions get chopped up into smaller, faster chunks of time. Just look at this post from Psychology Today about mindfulness exercises that take less than one minute. We’re so hyper-focused on rushing through every part of our day that a full minute of mindfulness might be too long for some people.

And yet, despite all this rushing around, we don’t seem to be accomplishing anything extra. Instead, we expose ourselves to more tasks and ideas that we pay less attention to.

Rushing around doesn’t help you do things better. If anything, it only increases your chances of being stressed and negatively affecting the people around you.

What our culture of speed needs is a sedative. Just a taste of something slow to calm us down…