You slow down in life by cutting stimulation, choosing what matters to you and filling your time with fewer, richer experiences: less phone, more nature, more no, and a lot less stuff. Most people are good at preparing to live and bad at living. You spend ten years earning a diploma, then forty years working toward a retirement you may spend wondering where your life went.
The argument here is that time speeds up in proportion to the stimulation hitting your brain, so the fix is to turn the volume down on purpose. These are the 15 ways, plus a bonus reset.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 ways to slow down at a glance
- Put the damn phone away (0:41)
- Experience what it is like living your life (1:42)
- Shift from 1.5x to 0.8x (2:43)
- Re-prioritize what you need and find important (3:53)
- Have a dopamine menu (4:44)
- Do just one thing that saves the day (6:51)
- Spend more time walking in nature (7:53)
- Read for entertainment (8:40)
- Do new things (9:29)
- Reflect and journal daily (10:12)
- Start saying no, a lot (11:32)
- Stop taking on any new projects (12:04)
- Go to sleep two hours earlier (12:39)
- Act like a kid again (13:48)
- Declutter your soul, your mind, your house, your life (14:33)
1. Put the damn phone away
The speed of time accelerates with the amount of stimuli lighting up your brain. Social media and mainstream media are built to keep you engaged, scared and mentally tired. Everything is a crisis, and boredom is treated as a threat.
Try next weekend: put the phone in a drawer and see how long you last without checking it. Go offline long enough to remember what life felt like before every second got filled with a digital sugar pill.
If something is important, it will reach you. If not, let it pass.
2. Experience what it is like living your life
You are probably living on autopilot. Switch to manual. You can change a day in an instant by moving where you drink your morning coffee, taking a different route to work, walking into the shop you always pass, or ordering the dish you never try.
The script also takes aim at a cultural trap: the idea that a career is the point. The only reason to go to work is to live life more fully, and if that second part never happens, you are doing work wrong.
3. Shift from 1.5x to 0.8x
Think of life as playback speed. Normal life is 1x, busy city life is 1.5x, and New York feels closer to 2x. After a week in Sardinia or Greece, the internal clock drops to about 0.6x of the pace back home. Environment sets the speed, so changing location can slow you down.
Smaller tricks work too. Stop eating on the go or in the car, and stop ordering food altogether. Cooking takes around 25 minutes, but real food changes your body chemistry and the way you experience the day. Even swapping a paper coffee cup for jasmine tea in a real glass shifts the tempo.
4. Re-prioritize what you need and find important
You are smart enough to know the difference between what you want and what you actually need. The worst use of effort is chasing something you never needed, like a product a celebrity is selling or something you only want because someone else has it.
Knowing yourself leads to JOMO, the joy of missing out. You are not missing out, because your priorities differ from everyone else’s. Once your own list comes first, the rest falls into place, even when that costs you some social approval.
5. Have a dopamine menu
Make a list of everything that makes you happy. The one described here includes reading books, watching old movies, listening to vinyl, time with friends, playing with the dog, tending plants and going for a coaching session. Ordinary stuff.
The menu comes out whenever you have downtime. Find 30 minutes and, instead of 150 short videos on the couch, you read a couple of chapters. You finish happier with the choice and proud of how you used the time. For most people, downtime gets swallowed by opening and closing the same four apps.
The same thinking sits behind the Alux app, which tracks five pillars of a good life: money, health, intellect, relationships and emotions. A menu like this is how the health pillar improved for the people who made the app.
Decide in advance what you do with free time, and free time stops disappearing.
6. Do just one thing that saves the day
One action a day that adds to your wellbeing is 365 a year. It might be a page of your novel, some art, a workout or a good meal. It takes about an hour on average.
The question to ask is how you can save today. Sometimes the answer is buying flowers, calling your mother, or going for a run when the little voice says no. Save enough days and you start saving your own life.
7. Spend more time walking in nature
Nature fills you with energy and slows your body to its frequency. Old trees are a favourite here: they were around before you were born and will probably outlive you, which puts things in perspective.
Take cues from them. Spend time in the sun, drink water, rid yourself of what you do not need and stand tall. Out there the air smells and sounds different, and you remember you were not designed for a concrete cage with a piece of glass for entertainment.
8. Read for entertainment
Books are the highest form of slow entertainment. The brain processes words on paper more slowly than video, but it fires up your imagination, and the more you exercise that muscle the better you feel about reality, because you see what it could be instead of only what it is.
When did you last visit a public library? It is one of the few spaces left where you can exist without being expected to spend money. The suggestion is to separate reading for learning from reading for enjoyment, and to pick books that do not push self-development.
9. Do new things
Every unfamiliar experience expands you and polishes your identity. You find out things about yourself, and some of them light up and ask to be explored further.
Go hiking, join a running club, an art club or an improv group, volunteer, ride a bike or go fishing. Each one opens a rabbit hole to explore, and along the way you find communities built around a shared interest, where you finally feel you belong.
10. Reflect and journal daily
Pay attention to your mind. Writing things down pulls them out of your head and onto a page or screen, and it feels like removing them from your body.
The script calls journaling one of the most effective tools for happiness, and says nobody who journals has told them it did not help. Inside the Alux app sits a smart journal for people who do not usually journal. It takes under five minutes a day, and the challenge on offer is seven days in a row without a miss.
11. Start saying no, a lot
Every yes is a no to everything else. Each one fills a slice of your calendar with commitments, and that is what speeds your life up.
Say yes carelessly and you end up with a full week of things you never wanted to do. Start saying no to anything that does not contribute to your wellbeing.
12. Stop taking on any new projects
The hardest no is the one you say to yourself. Shiny objects keep showing up, like little leprechauns, promising a better path.
The most progress comes from focusing on your main thing. Most people are stuck because they try 100 different things when any one of them would work if they gave it their full attention.
13. Go to sleep two hours earlier
You are not a night owl. It may feel that way in your early twenties, but about 80% of your progress comes during peak focus hours, and the highest return on time for most successful people sits between 9 AM and 1 PM.
Staying up until 3 or 4 AM robs the next day, and it fights millions of years of evolution that tied our bodies to daylight. You wake at 11, confused, and spend an hour finding your footing while everyone else moves ahead at a healthy, predictable pace.
14. Act like a kid again
Remember summer holidays: three months of unfiltered freedom. It was exciting at the start, and by the end you were almost bored and ready to see your friends at school. That rhythm beats most of the ways adults structure life.
Play, learn, be silly and funny, get dirty. Get your friends together, have a couple of drinks and play hide and seek. It might be the best day of your year.
15. Declutter your soul, your mind, your house, your life
At some point you notice that all the stuff in your house used to be money, the money used to be time, and the time used to be energy. For years you have been spending all three on making a mess to clean up.
Everything you own ends up owning you, so the way out is to let go: of things, of desires, even of some people. What remains is a lighter version of you that is much easier to carry through life.
Bonus: reset your life
At any point you can hit reset and start over with what you already know. One exercise from the script is called 100 Items. List everything you own, say 600 things, then slowly get rid of the nonsense until 100 essentials remain.
It is not about minimalism. It is about seeing how few things matter to you. Once you have done the cleanup, it gets harder for anyone to sell you more stuff, because the magic of owning things you do not need has worn off.
FAQ
How do you slow down time in life?
Reduce stimulation. Put the phone away, change your environment, cook instead of ordering, spend time in nature and say no to commitments that do not serve you.
What is a dopamine menu?
A list of things that make you happy, such as reading, old movies, vinyl, friends, pets or gardening. You use it in downtime instead of defaulting to scrolling.
What does JOMO mean?
JOMO is the joy of missing out. It comes from knowing yourself well enough to see that you are not missing anything, because your priorities differ from other people’s.
Why go to bed two hours earlier?
The script says about 80% of your progress comes in peak focus hours, and for most successful people the best returns on time fall between 9 AM and 1 PM.
What is the 100 Items challenge?
List everything you own, then gradually remove items until you have 100 essentials. The point is to see how few things matter to you, not to become a minimalist.
Keep reading
- 15 Ways To Declutter Your Life
- 10 Ways to Understand What Fine Living Is All About
- 15 Ways to Live a More Interesting Life
