Description: This week, Dr. Tina Boogren invites you to slow down—literally. From walking and eating to conversations and daily routines, she explores how intentional slowness can bring a sense of calm, presence, and even delight into your life.
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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Self Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren. This is episode 25, and this week's invitation is to slow down. As always, uh, I usually record these podcasts as a nudge for myself, I tend to think about what is something that I want to work on and by recording this, I offer it up to you and it's a really good reminder for me to get really clear on what I mean by something I want to work on and play with something for the week.
So when I say slow down, I mean like literally slow down. Slow down your walking speed. Slow down how quickly we type an email. Slow down how quickly we write a list. I mean, slow down. As always, this may or may not work for you, right? Remember, we take the things that work for us and we let some things go. But I had a recognition in myself that I was just rushing all the time. I'm a fast walker. I do things quickly. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but I just realized, my goodness, everything is going at like warp speed. I was walking with someone who was walking more slowly than me, and it forced me to slow down, and I thought, huh. Well, this is kind of nice, right? I mean, it's one thing to, you know, walk quickly if I'm trying to burn some calories or if I'm late for an airplane. But to just slow down, it like calmed my entire nervous system down and I just started paying attention to things around me, which is a beautiful thing.
And so, when I had that recognition, I thought, my goodness, I am actually rushing through everything in my life. It's like, I try to get things done as quickly as possible so that I can rest. And the reality is, what if there was more of a balance, right? Instead of going a thousand miles an hour in order to get all the things done as quickly as possible so I can just do nothing or do what I really want to do, like read or watch a show or do something along those lines. What if just my whole life, it just kind of like spread out? I'm doing this thing with my hand of like moving it horizontally where I'm just thinking about this slowness across all areas. Not painfully slow, but enough where I just, again, feel my nervous system calm down.
So here's some things I'm working on. See if any of them appeal to you. I'm going back to making sure that I have lots of extra time in the morning. I know, some of you were like, oof, absolutely not. But, I'm setting my alarm about a half hour earlier than I normally do, which just allows me to slow down. Now listen, I take a lot of time in the morning, because I, I'm kind of a slow start person, and I don't like to be rushed in the morning, but I was finding myself, eh, like, less time in the morning and finding myself, rushing a little bit more than I like to and getting away from, some of the practices that I hold sacred in the morning, like journaling. And I was just kind of losing that so by getting myself back an extra 30 minutes, which is a lot of time I'm actually recording this early morning before I head out for a workshop because I gave myself a lot of time and I got my journaling done and this came up in my journaling and I was like, oh, let me record a podcast on this right now and I don't normally have time to do that in the morning.
Even walking more slowly. As I said, unless I'm running for an airplane, just slowing down when I'm moving through the world. Slowing down as I'm walking through the grocery store, or my beloved Target, or I stopped at the bookstore last night after my workshop. There was one right on the way home, and I loved it, and I would just, ah, slowly, moved throughout the whole bookstore. In fact, I found sections of the bookstore I didn't even know they had. I am not a romance reader, but apparently they have a whole romance section, which of course I knew, but then they have a special subsection, which is called dark romance. And I was like, well, what is this? So I discovered new things and I just read this study that novelty in our lives increases our happiness. And so I thought, huh, well, there it is.
Thinking about even slowly eating lunch and dinner. We know how important that is just for our digestion in general, but savoring the food that we're eating, even slowing down as we're having that coffee in the morning. Slowing down when we're having conversations, right? I stopped when I got into my, when I got to my hotel last night. It's my second night here. So the same desk person was working and I had to stop by and get I don't know soap or something and he was very chatty. And normally at the end of a workshop I am done peopling and so I try to speed those conversations up and instead I leaned into it and you know what, of course no surprise, it was delightful. He Loved the fact that I was from Colorado. He had all sorts of questions for me. Colorado's like his number one place to come visit. He wants to go to a show at Red Rocks. He wanted to know all about it and we just had an incredible conversation rather than rushing through that and getting up to my room. Leaning into that felt so good and brought delight.
And you know, I'm always seeking delight. So anytime that I can just check in with myself and recognize that I am speeding through life, I am consciously making a choice to slow down. Even when I get done with my workshop, when I get to my car, pausing and taking some deep breaths. Maybe even doing a meditation to kind of close out that portion of the day and slowing down feels really good rather than rushing to my car and rushing to my hotel and rushing to go check all the emails that I missed and rushing to get all the things done so that then I can rest. Instead it feels really good to incorporate rest throughout the day. There's a calmness associated with that.
I'm kind of a high energy person, which I love. I run hot, I run fast, well, not like literally when I'm running, but you know what I mean. And so this is a challenge for me, but it's one that's feeling really good this week. And so I wanted to offer it up to you as well.
Are there opportunities for you to just kind of slow down? Again, not, not adding, I don't want you to add getting up super early in the morning or, and I know busy, busy, busy schedules where it's hard to do this, but I'm talking even just slowing down by like 30 seconds. One minute. Time yourself. How long does it typically take you to eat lunch? And can you challenge yourself that the next day you're going to add two minutes to that? And then maybe three minutes to that.
Just these small things that when we calm our nervous system down, find that sense of calm, I think we approach the world in a different way. We make different decisions. We see the world differently. And that so far for me has felt really good to the point that this is a practice that I really want to continue to the best of my ability.
So there you go. That's what I want you to do this week. I want you to slow down. I feel like I'm even talking slowly, more slowly in this episode. Like we're at, I'm at eight minutes right now and I'm like, Oh, I got to wrap it up. And I feel like, cause I've been talking pretty slowly, which you know what? That feels good too.
So make it a great week, everyone. As always, thank you to Adrienne. Thank you to Solution Tree and Marzano Resources, all such good stuff in my life, good people. And to you, my badass self-care squad, I invite you this week to slow down. I’m cheering so hard for you. You're amazing.
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