Why does Slowing Down feel so Difficult?? A Nervous System Explanation for Why Calm can Feel Uncomfortable

We often think slowing down is a luxury, something we do when life is under control. Or we know we need to do it but just don't seem to be able to.

Busyness becomes a kind of armour, and the calm you long for can feel consistently just out of reach. When it is available, you can find yourself avoiding it or becoming conveniently busy all over again.

Often you know what you need to do but just can't do it. You begin to ask: "What's wrong with me? Am I doing something wrong? Why does slowing down feel so difficult?"

The answer isn’t that you’re doing something wrong. You’re not broken, your nervous system is stuck in a loop believing it is trying to protect you. So how does this pattern develop?

When Slowing Down can Feel Threatening.

When your nervous system has been living on high alert, tired and wired, always scanning for what’s next, or potential threat, your brain can become trained to focus on every stimuli, and stillness can start to feel foreign and unsafe.

Our bodies are designed to move between two main states: the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares us for action and threat, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which supports rest, digestion, and repair.

The sympathetic state isn’t bad. It helps us respond to danger, but it was never meant to run all day, every day. In modern life, emails, notifications, and constant demands can keep many of us in this activated state for far too long. We live in a world with constant distractions and constant stimulus, a recipe for a dysregulated nervous system.

Over time, it becomes our normal. Everything speeds up. Thoughts race. Time feels compressed making moments of quiet feel uncomfortable and unnecessary as we begin to believe that to get to rest we need to speed up our productivity to reach the holy grail of finishing our to do list.

Yet here's the hard truth, our to do lists are never ending. So we need to choose to switch off, rest, slow down amongst it all for both mental and physical wellbeing.

“Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.”— Héctor García & Francesc Miralles, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

Slowing down is one of the most powerful ways to send the body a different message: you are safe now.

This is the paradox. When the nervous system feels unsafe, stillness feels dangerous. But slowing down is also how we teach the nervous system that it can relax. Calm isn’t something that arrives once everything is finished. It’s something we have to practice allowing.

The gift that keeps on giving

There is also an amazing reward to feeling safe. When the body begins to feel safe and out of the "threat" zone, something else appears alongside that calm:

We become open to experience awe and wonder.

We tend to think awe and wonder belongs to dramatic landscapes or once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But wonder, or awe, can actually lives in ordinary moments, when we’re present enough to notice them.

When our nervous system softens, our senses open. We begin to see more, the way light moves across a surface, the intricate patterns in ice, the subtle shifting beauty of the world around us.

There is a deep relationship between safety and beauty. When we are in fight-or-flight, our attention scans for threat. The parasympathetic “rest and digest” state also gives the brain space to process and integrate experience. This is where memory, emotional regulation, and healing happen. Without enough time here, we stay cluttered, reactive, and exhausted, even when we try to rest.

When we feel safe, we can become curious. Curiosity allows us to open, to explore, to wonder. Slowing down can feel quietly magical, it gives us back the ability to receive what is already here, we get more not less.

And the beautiful thing is we can also shift ourselves into states of safety by opening up to our curiosity.

Slowing down doesn’t mean withdrawing from life. It means meeting it more fully.

So Where to Begin?

You don’t need a retreat or a perfect meditation practice to begin. You might try leaving one small pocket of your day unfilled, a short walk, a drive, the first sip of coffee and simply noticing, without judgement, what’s already happening in your body and around you. You may be surprised how busy your mind is, or how quickly it tries to escape silence. That noticing alone starts to shift the nervous system, it offers it space to slow enough to become aware.

“Wherever you are, be all there.” Jim Elliot

Over time, these small moments add up. They gently teach your body that it doesn’t have to stay braced all the time. And when the body begins to feel safer, time stretches. Life feels richer. Even the ordinary starts to glow with quiet significance.

So could slowing down give us more time? Maybe not by adding years to our lives but by allowing us to actually live the moments we already have.

The magic has always been here. Slowing down simply lets us see it.

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