The Twenty Guidelines for Slowing Down

Your Behaviour

1. You ask for help; you seek a mentor who believes in slowing down for guidance and support.
2. You develop a recovery action plan.
3. You begin to make small steps toward change.
4. You learn to pause, to reflect on your behaviour, feelings and thinking.
5. You ask yourself, “What am I doing?”

Your Feelings

1. You feel the reality of limits and face the feeling of failure.
2. You become aware of feelings, and learn to listen to them,
3. You trust that the high of impulsive action is not the feeling you seek.
4. You develop a wider range of new feelings.
5. You come to trust that deep, intimate human “connection” exists in a slowed down, quiet state.

Your Thinking

1. You behave in the reality of limits.
2. You learn to recognize and challenge your belief in entitlement.
3. You challenge your belief in willpower.
4. You believe in the value of small steps and a slower sense of time.
5. You believe in a new definition of success: your best effort within a structure of limits.
6. You believe in the value of delay, endurance and the concept of “enough”.
7. You believe that growth and the change are not instant; that “quick fixes” reinforce the thinking of fast and impulsive action.
8. You believe in the value and necessity of reflection as a part of health and success.
9. You challenge your all-or-none thinking.
10. You give new meaning to “service”.

Adapted from Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster – And Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down, by Stephanie Brown Phd.