Slow Down in the Physical World While Speed Up in the Digital World

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Life is like a human hamster wheel that runs faster and faster. At work, there are ample amount of incentives to motivate us to achieve more. After work, there are gazillions of entertainment and media products to compete for our attention. If we don’t take control, we will likely lose ourselves in the ever accelerating laps inside the hamster wheel.

Escaping from life is not the answer. Slowing down to take care of ourselves is. Digital world runs on the Moore’s Law. However the physical world that our human body is based on doesn’t. So we need to do ourselves a favor by slowing down in the physical world while speeding up in the digital world. We are all experts in the latter (willingly or not), so I’ll only cover the former here.

Slow Down and Reflect

When life is too busy to have a moment to reflect from time to time, it’s a signal that we need to slow down. It’s fantastic if you are already able to reflect. The next question is whether our reflection is effective. To determine that we may try asking ourselves the following questions:

• Did this reflection help me connect at least 1 more dot?
• Did this reflection give me at least 1 action item that I can measure improvement a month from now?
• Did this reflection raise my confidence towards my goal by at least 1%?

Slow Down and Enrich

Take time out of busy life to enrich ourselves with new learnings and new experience will keep our curiosity strong. The world is connected and lots of domain knowledge share the same roots when you dig deeper enough. So connecting those dots will provide us a whole new fresh and deeper look at our own domain and propel us to excel and joy whatever we do.

Slow Down and Meditate

Mental wellness is broad, e.g., stress level, emotional support, social relationships, psychological functioning. A concrete yet simple practice that has been proven all over the world in the past thousands of years is “meditation“. It is to mentally slow down and enter a heightened state of awareness and focused attention. It has a long list of psychological, emotional, and physical benefits. You can easily start this with just 5 or 10 minutes a day.

Slow Down and Exercise

Simply elevating our heart rate and breaking a sweat will not only help us build a healthier and stronger body but also equip us to beat stress, lift mood, sharpen intellect, and function better. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain shows more fascinating research of this topic.

Slow Down and Sleep

Sleep is usually the easiest chunk of time we tend to resort to when we need to squeeze out more time to deal with busy life. Burning the midnight oil is often associate with diligence. However the long term harm of cutting corners on sleep outweighs the short term benefit. Slow down and make sufficient time for high quality sleep. We will thank ourselves later.

Conclusion

All the above things are important but often times not urgent (well, until it’s too late). First Things First would be a great method to adopt in order to prioritize these correctly, slow down in the physical world, and take good care of ourselves.