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4 Ultimate Tips on How to Slow Down and Enjoy Life

By Operation-Meditation

It’s ironically funny when you stop and think about it: there is now a dizzying array of gadgets purportedly designed and invented to help us “save time and do things much more efficiently” than ever, with the implicit benefit of giving us more time to ourselves, but still the grand result is anything but. You buy the new iPhone 5, for example, and download all the apps that are supposed to make you work more efficient and faster and, therefore, live better, but at the end of the day, you’re still the same burned-out shell of a person, your dreams still unrealized and much of the life you want unlived.

Buying new and more gadgets is not the solution, not the universal panacea to our life’s woes. But rather, we need to change the way we think and just slow down and enjoy life. For starters, you should check out and take the following list to heart.

1. Instead of buying a gadget, buy a vacation

When depressed, under stress, or just feeling antsy, many people resort to shopping—they buy new clothes, new stuff, new gadgets in the hope that the exhilaration of new purchases can fill that void in their heart and cure them from their burn out. This doesn’t work, as many people come to realize. So instead of buying new stuff, buy a good vacation—even something as brief as a nice weekend get-away can have a great positive impact in the long term.

2. Stop being an octopus

Ever since the personal computer was invented—and more as new generations of these machines become more and more powerful—the slogan has been “multitask and do more.” But although humans are capable of multitasking, they are able to do so only for a limited time—stretch it far enough and you’d suffer a burn-out. After all, most of the things you try to multitask are probably not even important—that Facebook private message does not need to be responded to NOW, right? So in order to slow down and enjoy life, you should learn how to discern which is really important and prioritize them.

3. Live in the now

Remember when you were a kid out on a Sunday afternoon—you go out the backyard and enjoy the sights, the sounds surrounding you? You look at a bird and you actually see only a bird. You look at the leaf-dappled meadow and you actually see a leaf-dappled meadow. These days, that no longer happens: you look at a rainbow and all you think is that presentation you’re supposed to finish tonight. You wake up to a beautiful Sunday morning but all that’s in your head is that looming deadline. Stop that. Be in the present. Be present. Be mindful and aware of what you’re doing right now. This might be difficult to do now, but the effort of relearning to be in the present is worth it.

4. Meditate

We can’t emphasize this more: the power of regular meditation has been demonstrated in countless studies, especially in terms of how meditation can give you deep, inner peace and calm. There’s nothing more effective in letting you slow down and enjoy life than integrating a few minutes of deep meditation in your daily schedule—even a five-minute daily meditation is enough to work wonders with your mood, your memory, your mind, your general disposition, and your personal perspective. Meditation also causes your brain to produce stress-fighting hormones, such as GABA, melatonin, serotonin and DHEA—all of which are responsible for making us feel good and helping us get ready for another round with what we call “real life.”

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