The last day of each month is usually a guest post, but I dropped the ball this month so the May guest post is going to be from … me. Well, kind of. This edition of The Anxious Morning is about why learning to slow down is a valuable recovery and life skill. I thought I would pass along some excerpts from my third book - Seven Percent Slower - to help get this point across. I hope you find it helpful.
When we are afraid, most of us tend to start moving through time and space like we were shot out of a cannon. We talk faster, walk faster, and think faster (though not necessarily in a productive way). An anxious, stressed, afraid person is often easily identified by how fast they are going.
When your lizard brain goes looking for trouble and finds it, it will demand that you get yourself to safety. A key part of this strategy involves speeding you up. When anxious, afraid, or stressed, one of the prime directives your lizard brain will issue to the rest of your mind and body is to GO FASTER!
Rushing and going faster are natural and baked-in aspects of the escape and avoidance response. They are attempts to get away from stressors, fear triggers, or threat responses. They are part of fight or flight. If you’re going to run away from a perceived threat, going faster is an advantage. If you are going to turn and fight, being quicker and faster is an advantage. Speed improves survival performance in most cases.
Automatically speeding up when anxious, afraid, or stressed was an excellent idea 30,000 years ago when humans lived in a constant state of actual danger and under constant survival threats. But in 2022, this genius bit of evolutionary engineering has become less important. In many cases it is causing more harm that it is preventing. Speeding up kept primitive man alive. Speeding up keeps modern man stuck in a cycle of threat scanning, false alarms, fear, stress, and anxiety.
When you choose to keep rushing around in an effort to escape your discomfort and unease, you are sending an important signal to the fear center in your brain. By going faster and faster, you are shouting at your lizard brain that there really is a threat that needs dealing with. It will get that signal, conclude that it is still needed, and continue to fire “danger” directives at the rest of your body and brain. When your lizard brain wants to you to speed up to avoid danger, but there is no danger, speeding up rewards it for being wrong! It encourages your lizard brain to keep sounding false alarms.
When you disobey your lizard brain’s demand for speed, when you choose to slow down instead, you are responding to that demand with language that your fear center can understand. This is relatively simple in the end. Your lizard brain needs behavioral signals and experiences to process. Acceleration signals danger. Slowing down signals that everything is OK.
This is why you should learn how to slow down. Making this change in your life is an act of compassion toward your overworked fear center. You should make the effort to teach it that it doesn’t have to be so wound up and on guard all the time.
If you’d like to explore this concept in more depth and learn simple ways to slow down as part of your recovery journey, you can check out Seven Percent Slower in print, electronic, and audiobook format at sevenpercentslower.com.
107. Why You Should Learn To Slow Down