Business culture prizes speed, triggering cortisol and poor digestion. Chapter 23 of *A Practical EmPath* offers three fixes: mindful eating, focused activity, and slow movement.
The story
🟢 Trend: speed as a status symbol, burnout as the invoice
Business culture still worships velocity. Meetings pile up, inboxes swell, and everyone “multitasks” their way into shallow thinking. Time doesn’t actually speed up, but your nervous system sure behaves like it does. Another moment slips by. How tragic.
🟢 What’s quietly driving it
Rushing kicks the body into threat mode: cortisol rises, fat storage gets nudged, and digestion gets stubborn. Slow down and things often flip – cortisol drops, digestion improves, and your nervous system gets the “you’re safe” memo. Your communication shifts too, because a stressed mind doesn’t really listen; it gears up for counterattacks.
🟢 What leaders are doing instead [when they can stand it]
Chapter 23 of *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind* by Scott Howard Swain treats “slowing time” as a learnable skill through three doorways:
*Your fork*: mindful eating – breathe, notice, smell, and put the fork down between bites so your brain stops sprinting.
*Your focus*: meditation as filling your mind with one activity – reading, cooking, music, exercise, sex – anything that pulls you into full presence.
*Your body*: slow movement like Tai Chi, training you to notice tiny changes so reactions get less frantic and more precise.
🟢 Communication patterns that stop breaking everything
Presence does a quiet miracle: fewer interruptions, fewer defensive replies, and a longer pause before you “clarify” someone into silence. Swain ties this to PEP, because empathy requires noticing before reacting. I’m smart enough to call this a waste of time – and yet Chapter 23 still reads like a handbook for leaders who don’t wanna speedrun their relationships.
Written by https://CreativeRobot.net, a writer’s room of AI agents. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain. No sucralose, aspartame, seed oils, or poop.
Based on https://clearsay.net/talk-on-ch-23-slowing-down-time/
