Slow Down and Enjoy Life

Slow Down and Enjoy Life… You May Just End Up Reinventing Yourself!

Frazzled is a word that perfectly encapsulates some of our feelings about our modern lives. When you’re frazzled, you feel like you’re at your wits’ end. Words like exhaustion, strain, and burnout come to mind. You feel not only fatigue, but like you have things coming at you from so many directions you don’t know what to do. You may not even know the first steps to take to slow down and enjoy life.

This can result from a hectic lifestyle that never slows down. You think the harder and the faster you go, the more you accomplish. What actually happens is quite the opposite. Your productivity can plummet when you don’t take the time to apply your energy with focus.

Once I learned how to slow down and enjoy life, I stepped into a world of being able to reinvent myself… and this continues to this day!

You can enjoy life when you slow down and stop rushing from one thing to the next.

If you’re constantly moving on to something else, your focus is on anything but the present moment. How can you appreciate your life and all that surrounds it if you don’t stop and immerse yourself into your “right now” reality?

Life Is a Series of “Right Now” Moments, so Slow Down and Enjoy Them

An argument can be made that your past really doesn’t exist. It certainly doesn’t exist in the present moment. So how do you know that it ever really happened? The same can be said about the future since it is continually becoming the present.

If all you have are memories of the past and plans for the future, with no control over either of those states of being, why not embrace your present moment?

If you’re constantly on the go and pushing to do something and be somewhere, you can spend your entire life chasing the future. This could lead to regret in your final moments because you don’t remember what happened. You were so busy speeding through life that you didn’t enjoy the journey.

Stop saying yes to all those overtime shifts at work. Don’t make everything in your life a competition, feeling like you must beat someone else to make your life worthwhile. Work on one task at a time. Multitasking is really just multi-stressing. Tell the people you care about that you love them, and spend more quality time with them.

If you’re sitting on a ton of vacation time at work, use it. Enjoy some time doing things you want instead of things you must do. Throughout your busy day, grab a few minutes here and there to stop. Take a deep breath and look around. Enjoy the moment and bask in the truly wondrous nature of your existence. If you don’t slow down and enjoy life, it can slip by without you appreciating what a wonderful gift it is. Slow down and enjoy life, starting today.

Become Blind to Time to Slow Life Down

A recent search for “how to slow down and enjoy life” yielded 432 million results…

Evidently, this is a topic that is on the minds of a lot of people. There is a desire to distance ourselves from the breakneck speed of daily life. Even if you are a workaholic who believes in powering through 16-hour days and always pushing for more effort and more productivity, there are times when you wish you could sit out the rat race and relax for a spell.

We all have our own unique reasons for wanting to slow down. Some people have worked long and hard for several decades. This is the time they feel they should be able to kick back and enjoy their remaining years. Others who long for a less hectic and demanding life are much younger. Yet they still appreciate slowing their racing minds, stepping away from a constantly busy world, and enjoying downtime.

Whatever your reasons for wanting a slower pace in your life, there’s a simple answer. One of my reasons was to learn more about using artificial intelligence – AI – in my business, and now I have expert status in this area.

However, it will require that you do something totally radical compared to what the world expects of you.

To slow down the world and enjoy as much time as possible, you must become blind to time.

How Many Times a Day Do You Look at a Clock?

Think about it. How many times in your normal daily routine do you check the time? For many people, it’s the first thing they do daily. Even though they know when their alarm clock went off because they set it the night before, they still look at their clock.

A lot of people use the alarms on their cell phones. Though they know what time their display will show them when the alarm goes off, they check anyway.

Fast-forward to the end of your crazy, busy, hectic day. You are in bed and about to shut off the lights and go to sleep. What’s one of the last things you do? Yep, you check the time.

Our minds are constantly worried about time. What time do you need to be at work? Is it time for lunch yet? How long before you get off of work? Check the time, and you’ll know.

When we’re not working and our time is our own, we check the time even more frequently. You don’t want to miss your favorite reality show, so you’d better check your phone to see what time it is. You’re meeting your friends for lunch, and you don’t want to be late so … check the time.

For several personal and job-related reasons, we are clock watchers all day. How can you truly appreciate your life and what’s happening if you constantly worry about the time?

Shut Your Eyes to Time

Spend some quality time each day, not worried about the passage of time. When you feel the urge to pull out your phone and check the time, don’t. Get outside with mother nature or somewhere else where there aren’t any clocks. Slow down. When you start to divorce yourself from a sense of urgency to know what time it is, you begin to notice what your life is really about.

You can appreciate all aspects of your life, mundane and amazing when you don’t operate under any time constraints. The most efficient way to slow down and truly take part in your existence is to stop measuring time.

Even the most plugged-in and constantly connected person has time in their schedule to throw clock-watching out of the window for a little bit.

Do something you enjoy doing, that thing you do that always causes you to lose sense of time. Spend some time with your friends. Schedule activities without time limits and remind you about the truly important things in life, like smiling, laughing, being happy, and creating great memories.

Constant clock watchers may not realize it, but they are watching their life tick away, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. Doesn’t it make more sense to live life and enjoy the experience while you can rather than letting the passage of time dictate everything you do? Create a life where you can be blind to time at least a little bit each day, and you’ll have more time to enjoy your life.

Slow Down by Learning to Spend Alone Time with Your Thoughts

People in simpler times enjoyed sitting and doing nothing. This was back before technology refused to allow us much freedom from distractions. We are constantly assaulted with electronically powered messages, whether from companies trying to sell us something or the people in our lives sharing pictures of cuddly kittens and funny babies.

Oddly, people used to crave do-nothing time when they had a lot of it available. We should desire it more now since it’s rarely found.

We can’t seem to allow any time without being spoken for. What do we do when we realize we have nothing to do? We quickly snatch up our phones and get to work busying our minds. Seldom do we relax, shut off all distractions, and enjoy a little free time to rest and re-energize.

By the way, if you would rather fill your life with meaningless activities rather than spend some time just thinking, you’re definitely not alone. The results of a study published in the July 4, 2014, Science magazine show this is very common.

Psychologist Timothy Wilson, a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, led a team of researchers that studied how often people preferred to spend time doing nothing other than contemplating their thoughts. They discovered that most people prefer to stay busy doing anything rather than sit and think.

Here is one of the shocking bits of data taken from that research…

“In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoy doing mundane external activities much more, and that many prefer to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

Give Yourself the Gift of Some Quiet Time and Contemplate Your Thoughts

Isn’t it amazing that in multiple studies, some participants preferred sending a jolt of electricity through their bodies rather than enjoying some quiet time doing nothing? That tells us how much we have bought into the idea that we should constantly be on the move and on the go, striving to achieve more and always seeking the next experience. That becomes the perfect recipe for mental fatigue, the debilitating effects of constant stress, burnout, and mental breakdown.

Instead, spend some time every day with nothing but your thoughts. You don’t have to think anything at all if you like. Prove to yourself that you don’t need to be plugged in and wired up every waking moment of the day. Your body and mind need time to rest and repair to be at your best.

So start scheduling downtime in your day. Do nothing at all. Treat yourself to some well-deserved rest and enjoy the present moment. You find yourself more capable and productive when you plug back into your constantly wired world. You may also discover that this quiet time is enjoyable, and you’ll start scheduling more.

I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author Connie Ragen Green. My goal is to help at least a thousand people to reach six-figures and beyond with an online business for time freedom and passive income and to simplify your life. Come along with me, if you will and let us discover how we may further connect to achieve all of your dreams and goals. This is also why I want you to think about making time to slow down and enjoy life… You may just end up reinventing yourself! Perhaps my “Monthly Mentoring Program” is right for you.