The Shriver Report – 3 Steps to Slowing Down and Saving Your Sanity
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3 Steps to Slowing Down and Saving Your Sanity
Credit: Abundant Mama

Credit: Abundant Mama

Two summers ago, I was that mom driving all over town.

Work was crazy. The kids’ summer camp was clear across town and I was the sole parent all week long. Even vacations that summer were not possible due to work obligations.

And, of course, I was trying to do it all mindfully and intentionally so I could “be there” for my kids’ on their summer break.

I would make failed attempts to meditate in the mornings, eagerly trying to whoosh away all those crazy to-do list thoughts that were clouding my mind.

But, no matter how much meditating I did, the to-do list never seemed to go away.

By August, I was burned out and overwhelmed and ended up in the emergency room.

Once the kids were back in school and I started taking better care of myself, I realized something had to change. We needed to do things differently so that our family life wasn’t just filled with obligations. We needed slow moments mixed in. We needed more downtime, not less.

From that moment on, I vowed to do things very differently.

But, let’s face it, being busy isn’t all bad. There’s actually a fine line between being overwhelmed and burned out because of all that we’re doing or feeling bored and isolated because we’re not doing anything at all.

The magic is in the balance beam between both and that’s the area of productive yet slow living that I like to walk as a mother and as a creative business owner.

My first step to owning my hours was understanding what I wanted our family life to really be like and how we needed to do things differently. I couldn’t quit my job at that point so I still needed to work.

And I couldn’t take the kids out of summer camp even if they did whine every day for me to do so.

But what I could do was reframe our perceptions of time and how our days flowed.

And while I ended up making drastic changes just six month later to live a slower life, I began taking baby steps toward that life right away. That’s when I began understanding how to actually create a feeling of balance in the chaos.

Here are a few of the steps I took:

1. Embrace Busy.

In her really great Slate article recently, “You’re Not As Busy As You Say You Are,” Hanna Rosin talks about the latest books on being busy. She suggests taking one thing off your to-do list right now — and that is saying that you’re busy. I love this because it was exactly how I learned to redirect my own idea of what my busy life felt like. While I’ve never been one to profess how busy I am — even when really busy — I’ve thought about it in my head entirely too much. It’s really important to accept our busy lives. This is our life and while it may be a tad overwhelming at times, it also means we are living fully. So, stop thinking of your life as being so crazy busy and just embrace it.

 

2. Define What Slow Means.

It’s really easy to tell ourselves we’re too busy and think we want to slow down but what does that really mean to you? Some people feel really bored and restless if their days aren’t busy. Understanding what a slow life looks like for your happiness is a key way to create more meaningful moments in your busy life. Once I was able to define how my busy life could look in a slower, more intentional way, I was able to seek out those kinds of relaxed moments in our busy days. Being able to articulate what we really do want — as opposed to what we don’t want — is essential to changing our busy routines.

 

3. Change Really Bad Habits.

There are, in fact, many things we do in a day that are completely habitual and we do them without any thought at all. And those things, whether it be spending too much time on Facebook or spending too much time worrying about things we cannot control, really do take away from those slow moments we desire so much. Understanding how these unintentional time stealers were influencing my free time was key to creating a more intentional slow moments in my days.

There are so many ways to a slower, more intentional family life. And everyone’s family cultures are so amazingly, beautifully different. That’s what makes this world a special place.

But the secret to starting to ban busy from my life — at least the baby steps — truly were all in one nice, easy place for me to tackle.

My mind.

Shawn Fink is a Reporter for The Shriver Report.
Shawn Fink is founder of the Abundant Mama Project.
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