Slowing Down

Reading a book right now (surprise!) called “Slowing Down to the Speed of Life” by Richard Carlson and Joe Bailey. Their primary premise is that our thoughts are what create stress and frantic-ness in our lifes. It is our thoughts that make us think we need to do things faster and more efficiently. It’s our thoughts that keep us stuck. They also say that our emotions are created by our thoughts. That it is our thoughts that create our emotions... So if we are experiencing “uncomfortable” emotions, like anger or irritation or impatience... or whatever, we need to take a look at our thoughts and alter them. They say that we have two types of thinking... analytical/processing thinking (sort of left-brain) which gets us certain things in life. It helps us figure out things when we know all the variables. But when we don’t know all the variables, analytical thinking just keeps us stuck, keeps us going around in circles with no solution, and actually spirals us deeper into a thought attack. The other type of thinking is free-flow thinking (sort of right-brain), in which we experience something different. It’s the type of thinking where we allow something to sit on the backburner and the answer will just pop up for us. We don’t analyze it, we let it go free-flow. This is a place of wisdom and creativity and opportunities and possibilities. We see things differently in this type of thinking. We can come to an answer without having all the variables, because something other than analyzing is at work...


It’s a very good book, very readable and it makes so much sense to me. This link between emotions and thoughts... They say that uncomfortable emotions are like a warning sign, a red alert that our thinking is probably on the wrong frequency... on the wrong channel. We are stuck in our analytical thinking... and it is that thinking which gets us stuck in those nasty emotions... So, alter our thinking... alter that conversation that we are having in our heads...