This Better You, Backed by Science is about taking your time and is inspired by my own week.
How often do you find yourself hurrying through something you usually enjoy?
Drinking your coffee.
Walking your dog.
Eating lunch.
Having a conversation.
Even showering.
We’re often so focused on what comes next that we rush through what’s happening now.
It’s understandable. I get it. I used the above examples because I’ve rushed through every single one of those things over the past week.
Modern life rewards efficiency, doesn’t it?
We celebrate getting more done, responding to more emails, crossing more things off our to-do lists.
But here’s something I’ve been thinking about:
Efficiency and experience aren’t always the same thing. Efficiency often reduces experience, because we forget to notice what (and who) is staring us in the face.
Ask yourself – what is really more important in life?
Efficiency and experience sometimes pull in opposite directions.
The opposite of rushing isn’t wasting time.
It’s experiencing it.
The faster we move through an experience, the less opportunity our brains have to notice it fully.
We miss the small details.
The warmth of the mug in our hands.
A child asking us a question.
The sound of birds while we’re walking.
The expression on a person’s face as they’re speaking (because we’re too busy thinking what we’ll say next).
Neuroscientists know that attention is the gateway to experience. What we attend to becomes richer, more memorable, and often more enjoyable.
And slowing down – even just a wee bit – naturally gives our attention somewhere to settle instead of skipping over things.
Then, it’s not really that coffee tastes better, or the walk becomes more beautiful, or the conversation becomes interesting, but that we are giving ourselves enough time to notice what was already there.
Try This
Here’s something to try today.
Choose one ordinary activity and do it about 25% more slowly.
Not dramatically – not in slow motion.
Just enough to notice more of it.
For example:
-drink your tea a wee bit slower
-walk without rushing
-listen without thinking of how you will respond
You might be surprised by what changes.
Not so much in the activity itself, but in your experience of it.
Because maybe life is trying to tell us that we don’t always need more time.
Sometimes we just need to stop rushing through the time we already have.
References
The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions. Fredrickson B.L. (2001). ‘The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology’, American Psychologist, 56(3), 218-226.
It supports the idea that positive emotional states broaden awareness and attention. Link.
Lutz A. et al., (2008). Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163-169.
This paper is about mediation, but it’s relevant because it explains how deliberately directing and sustaining attention changes the quality of experience. Link.
More
Want to read more like this? Subscribe to my free Better You, Backed by Science weekly email (sends every Wednesday).