Slow Down And Achieve More

Do you find it hard to switch off? You’re not alone.

It’s an increasing problem compounded by technology. Mobile phones, laptops and all the other gadgets we use regularly mean that we can be in touch anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

In his fabulous book “In Praise of Slow” author Carl Honore makes reference to “the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, and so modern. Yet, it often means doing two things not very well… and we have lost the art of doing nothing.”

Losing Touch
The danger of never slowing down and reflecting is that we lose touch with our real selves. I have been attending yoga retreats for ten years and I can confirm the high numbers of us who are looking for a balance between fast and slow.

When thoughts of work regularly spill over into private time, people can get sick. This has been well documented over the years and was first brought to our attention by the pioneer of body/mind research, Hans Selye, over a century ago.

Families suffer, activities that you enjoy doing get shelved, usually the same activities that actually promote good mental health – and left unchecked you can become chronically tired and vulnerable to physical illness.

Stress
Every year in the UK ninety-one million days are lost to work-related stress.

A study carried out by the Mental Health Foundation in 2002 made some interesting findings:

The more hours people worked, the more they spent time thinking about work outside working hours.

As a person’s weekly hours increase, so do their feelings of unhappiness.

The number of people working more than 60 hours a week rose from one in eight to one in six over a two year period in the UK.

Prince Charles had this to say in a recent interview: “The aim seems to be to go faster and faster but I often wonder, how much faster can we all go?”

He was recalling his childhood spent in Caithness where the pace of life was slower. He continued: “I think it’s terribly important for any human being to have a time for silence, and for things to slow down just a bit. It’s a balance, it seems to me, we have to try to find.”