15 Ways To Slow Down In Life
Do you feel like you blinked and the year is almost over? Well, you're not alone. Okay, most people are very good at preparing to live but not so good at actually living. You'll spend 10 years to get a diploma, then work 40 years hoping to eventually retire. Some of you are still waiting for your life to start. Before you know it, you'll wake up old wondering where your life went because, well, you don't have much to show for it. The antidote is in this video. Here are 15 ways to slow down in life and live a life worth remembering.
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Number one: Put the damn phone away. All right, the speed of time accelerates in direct proportion to the amount of stimuli lighting up your brain. Social media and the mainstream media have made it their business to keep you as engaged, scared, and mentally exhausted as they can. Everything is a crisis; everything is important. God forbid you ever feel bored for a second! Some of you are scrolling on your phone while watching or listening to this, aren't you? Turns out your parents were right when they said it's that damn phone. You want to gain back control over your life and mind? Well, next weekend, put the phone in a drawer and see how long you can go without checking it. Go offline for a little bit just to see what it was like before. Before you had to fill every single second with some sort of digital brain sugar pill. If something is impactfully important, it'll reach you; if not, just let it pass you by.
Number two: Experience what it's like living your life. You're probably living your life on autopilot. It's time to switch to manual, my friend, because the surprising thing is that you can, in an instant, switch up your life to feel like an adventure. Change where you have your morning coffee, how you get to work. Walk into that store you walk by but never go into. Take a chance, order the chicken with sauce. Pretend your work colleagues are secretly spies. One of the biggest traps of our generation is that the culture has brainwashed everyone into dreaming of careers. "I'll be a workaholic lawyer" or "a pill-addicted doctor" or, more recently, "a social media manager selling moisturizer in Paris." There's more to life than work, and most of Western society has forgotten that. The only reason one should work is to be able to live life more fully. If the second part never comes true, you're doing work wrong.
Number three: Shift from 1.5x to 0.8x. Normal life goes at 1X; that's probably where you grew up. The busy city life is more like 1.5X, but in our experience, New York City is kind of like 2X. But when we travel to Sardinia or Greece, it takes us around a week for our internal clock to slow down to about 0.6X the speed back home. It's in the environment and how stressed and fast everyone around you is. You can slow down your life just by changing locations. Another trick is to stop eating food on the go or eating in your car. Actually, stop ordering food altogether and start cooking. Sure, it'll take you an extra half hour to do it, but a shift will occur. At the same time, the chemistry in your body changes. Instead of deep-fried oil-infused food, you eat vegetables and real food. Once you fix your nutrition, the way you experience your life will change. Even small acts like going from drinking coffee in a paper cup to drinking jasmine tea from a real glass cup will do the trick.
Number four: Reprioritize what you need and find important. You're smart enough to know what you want and what you actually need. Somewhere along the way, you lost yourself, though, so let's get back on track. The worst thing you can do in life is to deploy effort to get something you don't really need in the first place. Wanting something just because somebody else has it or that a celebrity is making you want it is meaningless. There's a beauty in knowing yourself so well that it leads to what we call JOMO: the joy of missing out. Because the truth is, you're not actually missing out because you have different priorities than other people. Once what's important to you becomes the priority, well, everything else falls into place, even if it comes at the expense of societal expectations.
Number five: Have a dopamine menu. So we put together what we call a happiness menu for ourselves. Just let us explain what we're talking about here. So we made a list of all the things that make us happy: reading books, watching old movies, listening to vinyl, engaging with our friends, playing with our dog, taking care of our garden and plants, going for a coaching session. You know, all the regular stuff. This happiness menu, or dopamine menu if you will, comes into play whenever we have any form of downtime. If we find 30 minutes in the day, well, instead of lying on the couch and watching 150 TikToks, we read a few chapters instead. What we found is that at the end of that 30 minutes, not only do we feel happier with our choice, but we take pride in using our time well. For most people, any downtime is immediately absorbed by a continuous opening and closing of the same four apps. Right? But putting together a dopamine menu allowed us to gradually improve our health score in the app. If you didn't know by now, we track what we call the five pillars of a good life: money, health, intellect, relationships, and emotions in an app that we built and called the Alux app. And every three months, we go through a complex survey in order to figure out how well we're doing in each with the sole purpose of maximizing the quality of our daily lives for the longest possible time horizon. Now, the people using the app have known about dopamine menus for over 2 years now because we get international experts to teach you these kinds of things before they become mainstream. So go to alux.com/slapp right now, download the app, and fill in the first survey just to figure out where you are in life on those five pillars. You'll get a score for each pillar and clear suggestions on how to improve. Downloading the app and doing the survey is completely free, by the way. You can even start off with a 7-Day free trial and get the elite stuff for a full week before getting charged. So go ahead and try it; you'll quickly realize why hundreds of thousands of people find this app life-changing.
Number six: Do just one thing that saves the day and makes it valuable. If you do just one thing per day that contributes to your well-being, that's 365 things you do per year. On average, it takes you 1 hour to do it. It could mean writing a page in your novel, creating some art, getting a workout in, cooking a great meal. You know what makes your heart fill up? Here's the most valuable thing that you'll learn from this video: never let the day go by without trying to save it. Some way. Just ask yourself: how can I save the day today? What's a little or big thing that I can do to make today feel like it was a good day? Because that's all you have to do. Sometimes it's buying flowers, sometimes it's calling your mom, sometimes it's going for a run. Even if that little voice in your head is telling you not to, save enough days, and Aluxir, you'll begin saving your own life.
Number seven: Spend more time walking in nature. Nature fills you with energy while slowing down your body to match its frequency. We're big fans of trees, especially the old ones. Okay, looking at something that's been there before you were born and probably will outlive you puts things into perspective, doesn't it? You should take a lot of cues from nature: spend time in the sun, drink water, avoid toxicity, and rid yourself of what you deem unnecessary. Stand tall and strong. You'll quickly realize that nature smells different, sounds different, and that at your core, you were never designed to live in a concrete cage surrounded by dust and smog, entertained by a piece of glass.
Number eight: Read for entertainment. Books are the highest form of slow entertainment. Your brain processes words on paper slower than video input, but it triggers a special part of the brain: your imagination. The more you exercise that muscle, the better you feel about reality because you see it for what it could be, not for what it is. Here's a wild thought: okay, when was the last time you went to a public library? They're one of the few public spaces left in our society where you're allowed to just exist without the expectation of spending money. Whenever we have a little bit of hunger for entertainment, we read books that don't impose on self-development. We separate between learning and reading for enjoyment and found it to be incredibly rewarding.
Number nine: Do new things. Every time you do something new, you expand as an individual. Every new experience polishes your identity even more. You'll find things you never knew about yourself and things that light up, showing you that there's something worth exploring here. So jump headfirst into something new, Aluxir. Go hiking, join a running club, an art club, an improv group, volunteer, go ride a bike, or go fishing. It'll open up a new universe and a rabbit hole for you to dive deep into. In the process, you'll make friends and find communities that gravitate around your shared interest, and you'll finally start to feel like you belong.
Number ten: Reflect and journal daily. Pay attention to your mind, Aluxir, because your mind manifests itself physiologically. Depression is a real illness, dictated by the chemical imbalances in your brain. When you write things down, you pull things from your mind and lay them out on paper or screen. To the individual, it feels like you're removing them from your mind and body. We found journaling to be an incredibly effective tool for increasing our overall happiness, and we have yet to meet someone who journals who doesn't say it's made them feel happier and more in tune with what's happening. Which is why, when we developed the Alex app, we made sure to include a smart journal as a part of the experience. It's a journal for people who don't usually but want to use it as a tool to get better in life. It takes less than 5 minutes a day to do it, just how we like it, but you will find it valuable. And by the way, the journal is also free to use. You can just download the app and use it without a subscription. It'll help you to build discipline, and over time, you'll build up a value vault of small ideas and insights right from your own brain. So here's a challenge for you: download the app by going to alux.com/slapp and try out journaling for 7 days. Let's see if you're able to do it without missing a single one.
Number eleven: Start saying no a lot. Every yes you say implies you're saying no to something else. Saying yes gives away all other possibilities, so be careful to what you say yes to. Whenever you do say yes, a portion of your calendar fills up with commitments and responsibilities, which, at the end, will speed up your life. You'll end up with a full week of things you didn't want to do in the first place. So start saying no to anything that is not conducive to your well-being.
And on a similar note here: number twelve, stop taking on new projects. The hardest thing to do is to say no to yourself. Your life will fill up with shiny objects trying to trick you into pursuing them like little leprechauns. But here's the truth: okay, the most progress in life you'll make is when you focus on your main thing. The reason you're not moving forward is because you keep trying 100 different things instead of focusing on just one. You can make any of them work if only you focused on it exclusively.
Number thirteen: Go to sleep 2 hours earlier. You are not a night owl, okay? Nobody is. It might feel like it when you're in your early 20s, but if you go band for band—screw that—if you go M for M, you'll realize that 80% of your progress in life is made during your peak focus hours. Most successful people see the highest return on their time happening between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. That is your primary window to get things done. When you go to bed at 3:00 to 4:00 a.m., what you're doing is robbing your brain and your body from the day after. Not to mention, you're going against millions of years of evolution that conditioned your body to be up when the sun is up and to recharge when it's dark. Being awake at 2:00 a.m. puts your brain into overdrive, even if you don't feel like that's what's happening. And we guarantee that when you put everything on paper and draw the line, you're not getting that much done. You’ll wake up at 11:00 a.m., all confused, and it'll take you at least an hour to find your footing. Meanwhile, everyone else is well ahead of you at a slower pace that is both healthy and predictable.
Number fourteen: Act like a kid again. Do you miss summer holidays? Three months of unfiltered, unbothered freedom—amazing, right? Do you remember how exciting it was in the beginning, and how by the end of it, you were almost bored and couldn't wait to go back to school? Mostly just to see your friends, though, right? But it turns out that is a superior model to most of the ways we choose to structure our lives. Playing like a kid, learning like a kid, being silly, being funny, getting dirty—literally dirty, okay? Not the other kind. As silly as it might sound, get all of your friends to show up, have a couple of drinks, and play some hide-and-seek. It'll be the best day you've spent all year.
Number fifteen: Declutter your soul, your mind, your house, and your life. At some point in time, you realize that all the stuff in your house used to be money, and all that money used to be time, and all of that time used to be your energy. For years now, you've been spending all of your time, money, and energy making a mess. Along the way, you realize that everything you own ends up owning you. So the only way out is to let them go. Strip down to the essentials in most aspects of your life. Let go of people, let go of desires, let go of things. What you're left with will be a lighter version of who you are, and that'll be a lot easier to carry through life.
All right, at this stage, we're curious to know: do you think that you need to slow down in your life or speed it up? Let us know in the comments because next week we're doing the opposite of this video on how to achieve everything you want in life faster. So stay tuned for that!
And since you watched this video until the very end, here's your well-deserved bonus: Reset your life! Did you know that at any point in your life, you could hit a reset button and basically start over with the knowledge you already have? Back when we were younger, there was this thing that we did called 100 items. So if you were to write down everything you owned in your house, you would end with a list of, let's say, 600 items. So the goal is to slowly get rid of most of the nonsense in your life until you're left with just 100 essential items. It's not about being a minimalist, okay? It's more about understanding how few things actually matter to you. And once you do this challenge, it makes it hard for others to sell you on more material possessions because you've gone through this cleanup once, and in the process, the magic of having a bunch of things you don't need goes away.
All right, now if you think you need your time to slow down, write the word "slow" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are looking to add more life to your years.