Why Slow Down? 5 Key Benefits of Reducing Your Pace for Better Health

We live in a fast-paced society and world that rewards us for being busy. But what if I told you that slowing down your pace could improve your mental health? 

Today, in this solo-sode, I'll explore the art of slowing down in life and why it’s more important than ever to prioritize your mental health and find balance. I’ll also explore why busyness is glorified and how to change your narrative for your own well-being.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What can the long-term effect of constant busyness be on your nervous system?
• What is the somatic definition of trauma, and why do you need to know?
• Why you should start listening to the whispers of your 
• Mindfulness practices that you can incorporate into your daily routine starting today!
• How somatic experiencing can help manage stress and enhance self-awareness.
• How our autonomic nervous system responds to the hectic demands of modern life and what you can do differently.
• 
  

Tune in to discover how to start listening to the wisdom of your body and taking small meaningful breaks to manage your stress. 

It will help you find more freedom within!

Laurie 

These guides will help you take the next step in life. 

Click here to learn about my November’s “Somatic Healing” class -RECOVER

Click here for my FREE “Somatic Healing for Beginners Guide”

Click here for my FREE Core Values Exercise

Click here to purchase my book: Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL, MEDICAL OR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED THERAPIST IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING SUICIDAL THOUGHTS. YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN LEGAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL WITH RESPECT TO ANY MEDICAL ISSUE OR PROBLEM.

Transcript

Hey, there. It's Laurie. And before we get started on today's podcast, two quick announcements. Don't forget, there's two weeks left to enter the drawing. If you leave a review or this podcast, you could be entered into receiving either a $50 Target gift card or $50 towards one of my classes or a one on one coaching session. So don't forget to go to Apple podcasts. Search for Confessions of a free bird. Scroll down until you see the stars, click how many star reviews you'd like to give me, and then below that, it says, write a review. Click on that, even if it's just one sentence, it's greatly appreciated and helps others find this podcast so they can find more freedom too. Second, I hope you'll join me for my next monthly somatic healing class recover. The next class will be November 6, from four to 515 and the topic that I will be covering is navigating uncertainty using somatic experiencing and practices. It's the day after the election. So no matter what happens, we are going to be experiencing some uncertainty. And I think this could be very valuable. It's $48 and you can click the link in the show notes to sign up for that, and I hope to see you there.

Welcome to Confessions of a Freebird podcast. I'm your host Laurie James, a mother, divorcee, a recovering caregiver, the author of Sandwiched A Memoir of Holding on and Letting go, a therapy junkie, relationship coach, somatic healer, and now, podcaster, I'm a free spirit, and here to lift you up on this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired, because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose driven life, one confession at a time. 

Hello, there free birds. Today you're going to hear from me without a guest, and I am going to talk about a topic that is something that I've been working on for years and continue to work on, and that is slowing down. I'm sure you've heard the phrase burning the candle at both ends, or work hard, play hard, another phrase that I used to often hear a lot from my then husband was sleep when you're dead. 

I am a person who has always needed her sleep eight to nine hours when I was younger. Now it's closer to eight, and my kids are sleepers too. But I know between raising four children, taking care of my parents, trying to be the wife that my then husband wanted me to be, I used to often say that I'm on a treadmill, and it's on high and I don't know how to turn it off. So if you have ever felt this way or feel this way and don't know how to get off the treadmill, this podcast is a great one, and know that you are in good company when it comes to learning to slow down. 

So today I'm going to talk about how our culture rewards our busyness, why it's important for us to learn to slow down in our fast paced society, and ways that you can start slowing down by taking small breaks throughout the day and using some somatic exercises that I will discuss towards the end of this podcast. 

I've talked about this before, but my dad would often say, Well, into his 90s, I gotta get out to the garage and start working, otherwise my boss is gonna fire me. He always felt this internal pressure to do something, even till the very end. His last few years, he would go out in the garage. He would sand something. He would watch TV, he would fiddle with something. And on one hand, I think that was really great, because it gave him purpose, but I also think that he didn't allow himself to just slow down and relax. 

Then I saw my mother, who raised myself and my two older brothers, she taught special needs, now called neurodivergent kids, for 30 years, held our household together, helped my dad run his business, and she rarely sat down, and when she did, I'd often just see her collapse on the couch. And when I really think about it, in many ways, I adapted similarly. But I don't know about you, but I'd feel guilty if I just sat around and did nothing. 

In fact, I went for a hike with a friend this past weekend, who said something about that, she's like, sometimes if I just sit and watch TV for two or three hours in a row, I feel like I'm wasting my time. But what if we changed that narrative and said it's okay to allow myself to slow down, because what I've often thought and felt is if I wasn't doing something productive, I told myself that I was lazy, or if I didn't get 10 items on my to do list done, I would beat myself up and not give myself permission to relax, or give myself permission to sit and watch a show, and, God forbid, give myself permission to sit down for an hour in the afternoon or evening and read a book. 

It didn't help that my then husband would also question my activities and accomplishments throughout the day, not really appreciating or respecting what I was bringing to the marriage. So what did I do? I did more because I figured then maybe he'd see and appreciate what I was doing after years of raising four daughters, overseeing the care of my parents for 14 and a half years, finally leaving my unhealthy marriage writing a book, it all caught up to me about a year and a half after I left my marriage, as many of you might know who have been longtime listeners and again, not once, but twice, I landed in the hospital within two weeks.

My symptoms ranged from severe pain to lack of oxygen to my blood pressure dropping. I was passing out. I finally left the hospital, and it felt like I had stuck my finger in a light socket. And if you want to hear more about the story, you can go back to one of my first podcasts that I recorded early on called from loneliness to belonging my personal journey. There's a lot more detail in that about my struggles and my recovery, but it was after my body shut down, because I didn't know how to slow down, but my body did is when I discovered somatic experiencing, as I've said before, and working with a somatic experiencing practitioner has truly been life changing, and It has allowed me to slow down, be more attuned to my own body. Know when I need to stop and take a break, instead of overriding those messages and those whispers that my body is giving me. 

And don't get me wrong, I still struggle with my to do list, and I still struggle with wanting to accomplish a lot of things. Sometimes it's even easier for me to go away so I can relax, because I feel like I always have that proverbial to do list that's ever evolving. Once I get through the first five things, it creates room for the next five things. I don't know if you guys experience that too, but again, I am so much better at checking in with my body and asking it, what does it need to feel nourished? 

Sometimes that means, if I don't have clients in the morning, taking a morning off and running errands or just walking my dog and sitting and having coffee with a friend, hanging out with my kids when they're in town, something as simple as just making sure I'm getting up away from my desk and walking my dog around the block a couple of times, walking slowly with intention to stop and smell the flowers, feel the breeze on my face. I'll share more specific exercises in a little bit that you can incorporate in your routine to slow down, but it's really checking in with your body and noticing what are the sensations I'm feeling, and as I do this, that helps me really drop in to my body, just as I'm telling you this right now. 

Martha Beck, the founder of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, which is the program that I was trained in. She's also a New York Times best selling author, multiple times over. Often would quote Lao Tzu, who is a spiritual leader, who often said, when nothing is done, nothing is left undone. And I used to hate it when she'd say this in our trainings when I first started, but now I'm getting it, and now I'm allowing less to be done in my life. And what is the meaning of this? What it really means is go along with the true nature of the world, letting things take their natural course. 

I often use this analogy when I'm working with clients, and try and use it with myself too. But think of yourself floating in a river, either as yourself or maybe a piece of driftwood, floating down a river. You're bouncing off the river banks, going back and forth, going with the flow of the river, going with the flow of life. Sometimes it's smooth sailing. Sometimes you're just cruising along. Other times you might hit some rapids, and you might need to get a little bit more activated and move into what we call our sympathetic nervous system to fight with the rapids, or run away from something that's happening in life, or maybe we just freeze and hold on for dear life and hope we make it through the rapids. 

But when we try and fight that true nature of the world, the universe, divine, timing, however you want to look at this, we are only making it harder on ourselves. I even think about when I was starting my coaching practice, I equated how many clients I had to my self worth, and I thought, No, my practice is slowly building, and I would often even ask for signs that I was on The right path, which my sign is a hummingbird. So if I was out walking my dog, I would look for this hummingbird. And if I was feeling a little down on myself or wishing that I had something more, I would all of a sudden see this hummingbird, and in that moment, I knew that I was going to be okay, and I knew that my coaching practice was building slowly, and that was okay. I didn't need it to come all at once, because typically when things build slower, we're able to adjust easier to them. It's when something feels like too much, too soon, too much, too fast, too much for too long, or not enough for too long, that in the somatic world, is a very simple definition of what can become trauma if we don't work through it. 

So like I said, I have been on this journey of slowing down probably for at least five and a half years because I used to equate my self worth to my to do list, and sometimes that still creeps back in, but it's something that I continue to work on. I do still struggle with slowing down. Maybe it's a little bit of FOMO that my friends are doing something that I want to be part of, or I feel like there's, like I said, so much more I still want to do while I can I'm pushing 60, but I'm also continuing to learn to listen to my own body and to take time out for myself when needed. 

It's also important to note that as we age, research shows we don't handle stress in the same way as we did when we were younger. We don't have the capacity in our bodies. Have a harder time recovering from stressful events and experiences, and in addition, it may be more challenging to cope with the mental stress as we get older, and can we accept that about ourselves? Look, I don't want to get older as much as you don't, but I also don't want to end up back in the hospital again like I did, and have it take me six months to recover. 

So I did a little research on why our culture rewards busyness. There was a Harvard Business Review that found that busy people were perceived with a higher status. And interestingly, these status attributions are heavily influenced by our own beliefs about society. So what do I mean by that? The more we believe that one has the opportunity for success based on hard work, the more we tend to think that people who skip leisure and work all the time are in higher standing, and that could be true, because our society does reward those that work those 60, 7080, hour days. But at what cost? 

I had a lawyer recently on my podcast, and she said, if you want something done, ask the busiest person in the room. And I thought, yeah, that is true, but I don't want to be the busiest person in the room anymore. One of the other things that I notice that so often people now, when you ask them, how are they, instead of saying I'm fine, everybody says, I'm busy, like it's a badge of Honor. So what's changed in our society that has created this. So in this Harvard review, it talked about busyness and lack of leisure were also being more celebrated in the media. I mean, the advertising that's happening around busyness. Back in the 90s, they used to feature wealthy people relaxing by the pool or the yacht. Today, those ads are often replaced with ads featuring busy individuals working long hours and having very little leisure time by telling others you're busy and working all the time, we are implicitly suggesting that we are sought after, which enhances our perceived status in our society. But the reality of it, most people are exhausted. We created technology to make our lives easier, but it's only made everything more accessible, so people feel like they need to work 24/7 check their emails constantly. Check their texts, especially if they're entrepreneurs. But the bottom line, most people in modern society are tired and exhausted. A third of people are sleep deprived, according to the CDC, and when we're chronically working all the time, the body's first response is to rest. So how do we do that. How do we learn to slow down?

Well, like most things, and I often say, everything first starts with awareness. So we want to become aware that our bodies need to slow down to survive, to live longer, from a somatic lens and our nervous system when we are running on high all the time, our adrenals and cortisol is what helps to mobilize us, and we cannot continue to live in that state for too long. We only have so much adrenaline and cortisol in our bodies, and it will eventually catch up to us. It may take time. It may take months, years, even decades, in my case, but it will. And here's the thing, slowing down signals to our nervous system to move out of that sympathetic or fight flight, and signals that it's safe to come back to the present or to come down into a rest and digest state, down into a parasympathetic place. 

Slowing down is really a key principle in somatic experiencing, because it helps us attune to what's happening in our body. Move between that parasympathetic and sympathetic state of activation, and then rest and digest and developing more capacity and tolerance of maybe the unease that we might be experiencing in our body, or uncomfortable body sensations that may be staying busy all the time. Might be us running from I'm going to get into the biology of our autonomic nervous system a little bit here to make a point. And our autonomic nervous system has three circuits. It has our dorsal which is 5 million years old. That's when it was formed. Our dorsal circuit is neuroception. It's shut down. It's freeze and fawn. It's our parasympathetic. It allows us to go into rest and digest immobilization. 

Then we have our sympathetic nervous system, which is 400 million years old. That's when it was formed. That is our fight and flight response. We get an increased appetite. Oftentimes, it's what mobilizes us when we see danger, to do something, either to fight the animal, or if there's a fire, to flee or to run away from something that feels threatening. And then the third and most recent is our ventral circuit, and that evolved 200 million years ago. That is the state when we are very comfortable in social engagement, we're hopeful. We're in that state of creativity. I have the energy to be with or without people. It feels safe. We feel connected to ourselves, but when we are running in this busy, sympathetic state constantly that we have constant cortisol and adrenaline rushing through our veins, and we don't allow ourselves to slow down. No wonder we feel exhausted, burned out, stressed. Insert your word here. 

We need to give our bodies and nervous systems time to rest, so that way we all can experience better mental health outcomes. And the other point that I want to make about the biology of our nervous system is our nervous system hasn't been able to catch up to all the technology that we've created, all the stimuli that gets thrown at us throughout the day. We are flooded with information, flooded with technology, flooded with ads, flooded with articles and political campaigns and you name it, our nervous system needs to slow down so it can catch up. 

Now that you know this, I want to share with you some ways to slow down. And honor those whispers in your body so it doesn't need to get bigger and louder and eventually scream at you to slow down like mine did when I landed in the hospital. So how do we do this? Well, it has five different tips for you. The first one is, put less on your calendar. I just said no to a yoga class this week. And I love yoga, and it's very regulating for my nervous system, and that's rare, but I was gone this past weekend. I had I had a busy week, and I'm out multiple nights this week, and I knew I needed to sit down and just rest. And what I did instead, which felt more nourishing to me, was to make a big batch of soup and just veg and watch one of my favorite shows, which happens to be the bachelorette and the bachelor guilty pleasure there, but it's mindless, and I can just kind of check out and live vicariously through somebody else. 

Number two, a great practice is, if you grab a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle. On the left side, write down all the external resources that help you regulate your nervous system, and on the right side, all the internal things. So external things might look like going for a walk in nature, using your five senses as you do walk around, locate five things that you can see, stop and touch four things. Listen to three different sounds, smell two different things. Is there one thing that you can taste? 

Another suggestion is coregulation or connecting with others, someone who feels really safe. Last night, I just hung out with a couple girlfriends. We grabbed some takeout, and we just caught up. For me that feels really comfortable and safe with two people that I adore, and we can just sit around in sweats, have a glass of wine, playing with your dog, maybe pickleball, maybe turning on some music in your house and dancing. Dancing is so good for our nervous system. Join a meetup group and get out so those are variety of external things, getting some exercise. Think about what works for you and regulates your nervous system that's external, and on the other side of the page, write down things internally that help you regulate. So that could be meditation, that could be cooking, like I talked about earlier, it could be doing a little Yin relaxation yoga class, or maybe it's just taking five minutes, two to three times a day, and just sitting and noticing the chair underneath you, notice where your feet are touching the ground. Notice where the back of the chair is supporting you, and then just take a minute and then orient around to your space. Look around your room, let your eyes wander where they want to maybe you notice a picture of a vacation that you went on. Maybe you notice the leaves that are moving in the wind or the clouds that are passing by in the sky, anything that gets you into your body and notice the sensations that are you're experiencing or feeling within, instead of moving away from them. 

And if emotions emerge validate them. We are human beings. We are entitled to feel a full range of emotions. We don't have to be happy all the time. We don't have to be in a good mood all the time. That's not realistic. Can we move towards being happier and being happy the majority of the time. Absolutely. Another thing that you can do that's internal is just savor the good things in your life. Think about a recent vacation that you really enjoyed, or a past vacation one of your favorite family experiences. Notice how that makes you feel. Can you just bask in that and cherish that for a couple of minutes? And lastly, focus on what you can control in terms of your internal things. 

So for I know when I give myself a break and slow down and just be with myself, that's when ideas pop up and I feel creative. That's that ventral state that I mentioned earlier with the autonomic nervous system. So maybe you find something that you've been wanting to do, a hobby. I have a ton of friends that do creative we have a craft day, and we some gals knit, and some gals put together jewelry, and some people just sit there and color in a mandala in a coloring book that's very comforting and allows us to become more present and rest and be creative. 

And lastly, the goal isn't to live in a state of calm and peace every day and make your stress disappear that is impossible. Let your goal be to become more connected to your nervous system and allow it to stretch but not stress, so it can expand and contract with life's ups and downs, with the good and the bad and the ugly that comes to all of us in our life, because that will allow us to find more resiliency within in our life. And in order to do that, it takes slowing down. It doesn't mean you have to get rid of everything on your plate. It just means maybe taking one or two things off your plate and taking five to 10 minutes a day to check in with yourself. Our nervous system and our sensory pathways are 80% of the information that gets sent to the brain. Only 20% of the information in our brains go to our body. So let's start spending a little bit more time connecting and becoming more embodied. Because here's the thing, we are all worthy of just existing. We don't have to be tied to a label, to a title, we are worthy of just being. 

So we covered a lot of things here today. We talked about why it's important to give yourself permission to slow down, why our culture rewards busyness and why is it changed in the last century, and ways for us to slow down and connect with ourselves and the biology behind our nervous system. So I hope you take a nugget or two away from this podcast today, and I hope it helps you find a little more inner freedom. Don't forget to leave a review, and if you're interested in learning more and joining me for my somatic class on November 6. Click the link in the show notes. I'd love to see you there until next time. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Freebird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a free bird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at laurieejames.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act also. Until next time.