Have you’ve been thinking about slowing down lately? Has your life been spinning around in circles and you are beginning to feel depleted?
Perhaps it’s time to change your pace a bit, and practice the concept of slow living, where you can find more balance and purpose in your life.
What is Slow Living?
“Slow living is a lifestyle emphasizing slower approaches to aspects of everyday life.” – Wikipedia
We all want to slow down time and capture the moments that truly matter. It’s a difficult thing to do, given the daily demands that we face each day. We all feel SO busy, trying to catch up with our goals, responsibilities, and commitments.
Slow living takes a calmer and balanced approach to life. It’s about being intentional with your time, where you can find that you have control over it, and not allow for time to control you.
Ryan Holiday states “Stillness is what aims the archers’ arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections.” – Stillness is the key. Discover his book here.
Let’s explore how you can apply slow living to your routine, and how it can enhance your life.
15 Simple Ways to Practice Slow Living
1. Practice Patience
Slow living is a way of life that encourages leisurely and patient actions and dealings. This is the first of the 15 ways to practice slow living.
Therefore, being impatient in awaiting outcomes of situations or results of action… will not end well.
Patiently waiting for the right time regarding the right thing is very important if you’ve chosen slow living as a lifestyle.
If you aren’t patient about things, what will happen is that you’ll get stressed out and that stress will in turn harm your mental and physical health, which is completely against the mantra of slow living.
2. Schedule Your Routine
In order to live a peaceful and relaxed life, you need to make sure you’ve made a schedule of everyday activities that you can follow so that you don’t have to rush through multiple things at the same time.
This helps you in maintaining focus on each activity through its dedicated time and not waste any idle time, all the while not being too quick and losing focus by trying to do multiple activities at once.
These benefits make scheduling an important part of slow living.
3. Act Less in More Time
Doing this wouldn’t leave you behind other people in some race to success. The simple thing is to do whatever you do with passion and creativity.
Instead of spending less time on important things to get more things done, try to give more time to a single thing. If you spend more time on something important, you’ll actually get things done.
However, spending less time on important things would only make you more stressed out and you will get less work done.
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4. Spend Time with Yourself
This step is very important when it comes to practicing slow living. It’s true that social interactions are important, but alone time is very productive and valuable.
Spending time with yourself helps you gain a sense of peacefulness and solitude, which makes you think more about relaxation and disconnecting from the hassle of everyday life.
5. Do Everything With Joy
Living a slow life encourages you to find happiness in the little things. It could be anything of a very minuscule level, yet it will bring joy to your daily life.
This happiness will make you want to engage in even more activities like this, and have a positive affect on your overall mental well-being.
6. Cultivate a Positive Attitude
A really important part of slow living is keeping your mind away from stress and anxiety. Stress and anxiety are results of negative thinking, and they keep your mind from achieving peace.
All this sounds very spiritual and dreamy but this actually stands true, the less negativity you engage in, the more positivity you’ll bring into your mind, the better you’ll feel.
The more time you have in being creative and intentional, by giving time to thoughts that are actually important for your growth as a human being.
7. Be Sure to Act Slowly
Whether it is eating, drinking, working, playing, or any other activity, try doing it slowly, in a simple and relaxed manner.
By doing everything slowly and with time, it will make you feel a lot better about yourself.
Acting slowly would actually affect your mind in such a way that you will enjoy what you’re doing much more than when you just wanted to get on with life and get through with it quickly.
8. Immerse Yourself Intentionally in the Environment
To achieve a slower-paced lifestyle, try becoming one with the environment you live in.
Try blending in and appreciating nature around you, listening to the chirps of the birds and the rustling leaves of the trees and bushes.
Realize that apart from the noisy and polluted everyday cities, the world is truly a peaceful and tranquil place, where you can truly rest and think about living a better life – instead of thinking about becoming better than others and obtaining success.
9. Make Your Circle Smaller
At a certain point in your life, you realize that being surrounded by a lot of people is not what you want in your life.
It is simply not the way to happiness or mental peace. You realize that having many friends but less loved ones does not make you feel good.
At that point, you realize you need to make your circle smaller and surround yourself with good people who actually care about you.
It will reduce stress in your life and make you feel more connected to those who matter.
10. Embrace a Hobby or Activity You Enjoy
In order to live slowly, take up some kind of creative and productive hobby. It could be anything.
Give more time to this hobby and make sure you feel happy while you’re putting in effort for it.
Not only will it be rewarding and fulfilling but also take up your time that you would otherwise spend elsewhere.
11. Dedicate More Time to Sleep
People often sleep less or even skip sleep just to get more work done faster. This might give them some kind of temporary advantage.
But in the long run, this is very detrimental, therefore, you should give more time to sleep to make sure to take care of your physical and mental health.
12. Don’t Overwork Yourself
Stop putting in the effort into things more than adequately.
Even if something is important, work for the due time and understand that overworking would only make you stressed out and exhausted, and it won’t be productive.
Just to feel like you’re doing things at a greater pace than others, you sacrifice a better and slower lifestyle.
13. Do Everything Slowly
Make all of your everyday life activities slower and you’ll see that not only will everything be done right on time but also you’ll feel happier and more relaxed than usual.
For example, if you have to go shopping, give it more time than expected and you will see that you will end up being more satisfied with your choices.
14. Don’t Participate in Unnecessary Activities
Do not try to focus on activities that do not have any importance in your life – just for appearances.
Instead of putting up a cluster of activities, work on a few important things and give them your dedication in order to be successful.
This way your productivity will improve and you will reap the benefits of your hard work.
15. Be Intentional With Your Time
In today’s world, time is considered important, yet wasted in the same way.
People waste time stressing out about the future, about their past, and whatnot.
Instead of thinking backward, think about the present, and stop wasting time on such activities. Only then you will truly be able to achieve peace through slow living.
What are some ways you will begin to practice slow living? Share in the comments below: