Go Slow to Get There Faster
Ways to Lighten Up When Chaos Messes With Your Mind
“If we don’t have light, then we don’t have a story. Light marks time: However quietly, it sweeps through our rooms one day and hides from us the next.
“Light marks time and people. No matter where you are when the day is nearing its end when you no longer have the energy to reach out to people, reach out and let yourself be touched by the hazy yellow curtain that blankets the earth before the sun sets. Golden hour makes you look and makes it easier to put one foot in front of the other. I love the way it changes throughout the year.”
Those opening lines from Rachel Schwartzmann settled my mind in this chaotic week of the daily torrent of seemingly inconsistent news alerts about Trump’s coup pummeling me every 15 minutes.
One foot in front of the other is the primary survival strategy to keep moving forward and finding your way out of heavy situations we’ve experienced before, including the death of a family member, disaster recovery after fires and hurricanes, losing your job suddenly, and medical emergencies. We know how to persist, resist, and survive.
In her 2024 book Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living, Schwartzmann shows us how slowing down positively affects our minds, relationships, and work. The book comes from her lived experiences and contributions from others who have done the research and the work in art, food, design, and philosophy.
Of Course, We Love Brain Science in Our Community
Thinking and overthinking everything is one indicator you have found your tribe among the Gifted Professionals and Communicators. Thinking about thinking is called metacognition and that is the glue holds us together. Too much thinking can feel like a firestorm in your brain to the point you lose focus, lose time, and don’t take care of essentials, like your health, relationships, and work.
Just as light needs both speed and slowness to create the colors we see, our minds operate on similar principles. Scientists have discovered that our thinking process isn't uniform—it's a dance between quick intuition and deliberate contemplation.
In 2011 Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking research and mega-bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. System 1 races ahead with instant judgments, while System 2 takes the scenic route, processing complex information with careful consideration. In our rush to keep pace with modern life, we often override System 2's valuable contributions.
So How Does Slowing Down Get You To Your Desired Destination Faster?
Here’s how we get from science to the productivity paradox. This understanding of how our minds work reveals a surprising truth about productivity: Our instinct to speed up might be working against us. Cal Newport calls this "The Productivity Paradox"—the faster we go, the more we might be sacrificing the quality of our thinking and our work.
Newport's 2024 book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout presents research that shows knowledge workers who embrace strategic slowness often accomplish more meaningful work than those caught in the frenetic pace of constant activity. It's not about working less—it's about creating space for our best thinking to emerge.
Why Is Lightening Up The Secret to Sanity?
When chaos and overwhelm press on your mind and heart, what do most people do? They stand up and move. They take a walk. Sometimes we go around the block. Sometimes we leash up the dog and head out to surround ourselves with nature and the sights and smells that our dog prefers. If it’s a dangerous situation, we run or move as fast as we can to safety.
Light and natural rhythms are exactly what our brain wants and by golly, the survival instinct is the strongest and rules our thoughts and movements. Like the changing light throughout the day, our capacity for focused work follows natural rhythms. Understanding and working with these rhythms, rather than fighting against them, can transform how we approach our tasks.
Seasonal changes matter and we all have our favorite season for reasons known only to our brain.
Some love winter because it is the beginning of everything. While the days get minutes longer starting December 21, we fill the darkness with Christmas lights, candles, and fireplaces. Some love spring because it is nature’s lesson in the power of slow transformation and the longer daylight provides a natural energy boost that aligns with our circadian rhythms. Some love summer for the golden hours that stretch into the evening and provide a languid pace and permission to slow down. Summer is slowing down to walk barefoot in freshly mowed grass and savoring the fresh abundance from our garden. My favorite season is autumn when nature gives a masterclass in letting go. It’s the time of the harvest and the financial security for farmers through the months ahead before it’s time to put in the next crop and sell the livestock. It is a time of annual reports, national conventions, and completing big projects for the year.
Natural Pauses and Slowing Down Get Us There Faster
These natural pauses in our day aren't just beautiful—they're essential. Research shows that what we perceive as "doing nothing" often represents our mind's most productive moments.
Studies of highly accomplished individuals reveal a counterintuitive pattern: their success often stems not from working longer hours, but from mastering the art of strategic rest. Like a photographer waiting for the perfect light, sometimes our best work comes from knowing when to pause.
My favorite photo is the perfect shot of the 2017 Solar Eclipse, which took my husband a month of preparation, four days of travel to the perfect spot on a hill in Tennessee, and two cameras.
Immediate Ways to Put Strategic Slowness Into Daily Life
Understanding these principles is one thing; putting them into practice in our fast-paced world is another. There are concrete ways to incorporate strategic slowness into our daily lives, even when everything around us seems to demand speed.
The people who seem to have the greatest productivity and extraordinary lives, wealth, relationships, and health are the ones who have the best methods for slowing down. In the 1980s Bill Gates made famous his Think Week. He devoted an entire week to slowing down and thinking through the most important questions and then his answers. You can do your version of this metacognition in one day—completely on your own and away from all distractions. You can use Bill’s questions or come up with your own set of questions:
If I repeated my current typical day for one hundred days, would my life be better or worse?
If someone observed my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are?
If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?
What are my strongest beliefs and what would it take for me to change my mind on them?
Sahil Bloom provides 5 suggestions for The Case for Slowing Down.
Embrace the Power of No. Embracing no to everyone else allows you to say yes to yourself.
Take Pride in Unitasking. Multitasking is a myth perpetuated by hustle culture.
Take More 5-Minute Breaks. Short breaks throughout your day reduces stress and improves performance.
Take a Power Walk. Science shows that walking improves creativity and problem-solving.
Find Your Garden. John D. Rockefeller took breaks from a demanding schedule to mill about in his garden. This works for everyone when they find an escape that allows them to create space to think.
These Are the Best Days of Our Lives, Right Now
Like the light that marks our days, the rhythm of slow and fast, rest and activity, creates the texture of our lives. When we trust in the power of strategic slowness, we don't just work better—we live better. We must trust in these natural rhythms to lighten up when chaos messes with our mind
Back to Schwartzmann who says, “The light is running out, and I’m chasing after it. When the day nears its end, loved ones remind us we’ll find our way through the darkness. If we don’t have light, then we won’t see our way to the end of the tunnel. So give me a golden hour, and I’ll give you my trust.
“Because if we don’t have trust, then we don’t stand a chance.”
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Multitasking was never a real thing. It was a smokescreen. Doing three tasks at once? Not possible to do them all well. A perfect illusion for the late 1980s and early 1990s, made popular in offices where people who looked the busiest were looked upon as doing something more important than those who saw no need to fake it.
This is a timely post, thank you. So many pearls of wisdom here. ATM I’m having a ‘strategic rest’ and from now on schedule them into my diary, whether it’s a day or a week.