#67: The Science of Slowing Down: Breaking the Produce More Mindset

For years, we’ve been told to produce more, optimize more, multitask more. And somewhere along the way, we started believing our value lives in how much we get done.

In this episode, I’m diving into the science of slowing down — and what constant productivity is actually doing to our nervous systems, creativity, and dreams. Because if you’ve been feeling wired, tired, distracted, or disconnected from what you really want… this might be why.

We’ll explore the research behind task-switching and switching costs, how chronic low-grade stress keeps your nervous system activated, and why multitasking isn’t the superpower we’ve been told it is. I’ll also share practical ways to break the “produce more” mindset by creating white space, slowing your hurry, and learning to single-task again.

If producing more has quietly become tied to your sense of worth, this conversation may gently remind you that you are already worthy — simply because you are.

3 KEY TAKE AWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE: 

1️⃣ Exhaustion is a symptom of nervous system overload. 

2️⃣ Multitasking isn’t helping you move faster — it is training you to break your focus 

3️⃣ Your dreams don’t need more effort — they need more space.

This isn’t about doing nothing.

It’s about slowing down enough to remember what matters — and making room for the dreams that have been waiting for you.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:20

Hello my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm your host Carlene, and today we're talking about something that often gets completely ignored when it comes to our dreams. So what if the answer isn't doing more? And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean doing less, but what if it's not about constantly producing? What if it's about simply being? So I wanna start with a question today. What's the opposite of being productive? Is it laziness? Is it drifting? Is it being unfocused? Because for years now, maybe even decades, I don't even know how long we've been doing this, but we have been bombarded with how to be more productive, more efficient, more optimized, more effective. There are apps for it, morning routines for it, hacks for it, and somewhere along the way we absorbed this belief that our value. Lives and how much we produce. So we stay busy, we multitask, we hurry, and we fill every gap. And here's the part that's been really sitting with me lately, is we say that we don't have time for anything for our dreams, but we do have time to be constantly productive somehow. And we've optimized our calendars, but we haven't optimized our nervous system. And, and here's why that matters. Harvard Health explains that when we stay in chronic stress, even low grade stress, our sympathetic nervous system stays activated. That's our fight or flight system, and it was designed for short bursts, not all day. But constant busyness, constant notifications, and constant urgency, your body reads that as stress, your cortisol stays elevated, your heart rate stays slightly higher, and your system doesn't get the signal that it's safe to relax. And research published in the Journal of Frontiers and Psychology has shown that stress actually reduces cognitive flexibility, which is a key component of creativity. When we're constantly amped up, we're less imaginative, we're less expansive, we're less able to connect ideas, right? We can't connect the dots and dreams. They don't grow in fight or flight. They grow in safety, and we are so busy producing that. We've stopped imagining. We're so busy responding that we've stopped to reflect on things. And we are so busy moving that we've stopped noticing what we actually want. I want you to know this episode isn't about doing nothing because that's just not realistic and who wants to do nothing, I love getting things done, but productivity without pause, that becomes pressure. And pressure suffocates our dreams. Because dreams don't grow in urgency. They grow when we have some space. So maybe the opposite of productivity isn't laziness. I was thinking maybe it's presence and maybe presence is what makes room for the dreams again. How do we make room for simply being. Well, I don't think I have all the answers here, but I do think that there are three ways that can help you get started today. And the first way is to create white space. Here is what I mean. Have you ever opened a book, turned to the page and it's just one giant paragraph, there are no breaks, there's no spacing, it's just dense text from top to bottom. And before you even start reading your body, it kind of reacts and you're thinking, oh boy, that's a lot. And it might even feel. Heavy or overwhelming, and it's like your eyes. They don't even know where to land, and you almost need a breath before you begin. Now compare that to a page with white space where there's short paragraphs, where there's room between thoughts, where there's places for your eyes to pause. It feels calmer, right? It's inviting. It's even easier to absorb in the white space. It doesn't mean that there's less content, it just means that there's room to process it. And I think our calendars are the same way. When every hour is packed, when your phone reminds you what's next, before you finished what you're in or when your evenings are commitments, instead of choices, our lives start to look like one giant paragraph dense. Relentless. No place to land. No place to pause and think, and certainly no place to breathe. And you know what? We move from meeting to meeting without even transitioning. And we answer messages. Well, we're standing in line at the grocery store and we squeeze errands into the margins of already full days. And here's the thing that really gets me, is we treat unscheduled time like it's a problem that we have to solve. If there's a gap, oh, we gotta fill it. If there's quiet, we have to interrupt it with some noise and slowly without meaning to, we somehow remove every natural pause from our lives. And here's what happens when we live that way long enough, our nervous system never gets the signal that it's safe to slow down, to simply be our thoughts, never fully settle. And we don't just lose rest, we lose time to reflect. We lose the slow connections between ideas and we lose the subtle nudges of our intuition and we lose the moments when a dream says, Hey, what about this? Because you know what? Our dreams, they don't shout over packed calendars. They surface in Open Ones. Dreams show up in 10 minutes after a meeting. Dreams show up in the slow morning that you didn't rush, or in the evening that you didn't overbook. And if every inch of your life is spoken for, there's nowhere for something new to land. So what if you treated white space like it was as important as the meeting? What if you protected it because you are creative, because you are human, because you want space for something bigger than your to-do list. And once you start creating white space on your calendar, you'll start noticing something else. You'll realize how fast you've been moving, which brings me to the second shift. And this is about taking the long way home is what I call it. I call it that because it's about not hurrying, and I have a story to share with you about it. I've just been noticing we are constantly hurrying all the time. We hurry through traffic. We hurry through conversations, we hurry through the checkout lines, we hurry through our meals. And I really wonder why, why do we do this? What exactly is waiting for you if you arrive three minutes sooner? Like is there a trophy at the end? Is somebody handing you a medal or do you just start hurrying toward the next thing? So the other day I was driving my husband home after a medical procedure and he's, he's the destination guy. He's, you know, the first one there wins the fastest route is always the best efficiency above all. But you know what, he was still a little loopy from the anesthesia. And so I said, Hey, we're gonna take the back roads home. And he looked at me like, why would we do that? And I told him, I'm like, oh, this is part of my self care. And he just kinda laughed at me. But we went the long way anyways. And as we were driving, he said, oh, wow. Look at that log cabin up on the hill. I've never noticed that before. And I was like, yeah, it's hard to notice things in the distance when you're speeding along. And then it hit me. Hurry makes your world smaller. It narrows your vision and it keeps you focused on arrival instead of experience. And when you're always hurrying, your body stays slightly activated. Like it's not panicked, but it's just always braced, right? It's like you're leaning forward all day long, and if your nervous system is always leaning forward, you never fully arrive anywhere. So what if the long way home isn't inefficient? What if it's intentional? What if slowing down isn't falling behind or being last? What if it's actually participating in your life? Because here's the truth, the long way home isn't about getting home. It's about being alive on the way there. And once you start noticing your hurry, you start noticing something else. It is not just how fast you're driving, it's how much you're trying to optimize every moment. Which brings me to the third shift, we've been taught that multitasking is a strength. We praise it. We think that this is how we optimize everything, we say things like, oh, I'm great at multitasking that if you can juggle five things at once, you're impressive, efficient, you're capable, you're high performing, as if being fragmented is a superpower. And it's not just at work that we do this, we multitask our entire lives. We listen to podcasts while we walk or drive. We answer emails while we're eating. We scroll on our phones while we're watching tv. We fold laundry during that work call. We text while we're half listening to someone talk. And I just think about that and I'm thinking a, a lot of these things when we're multitasking are actually disrespectful to the other person. But what we do is we stack stimulation on top of stimulation, and we call it productive. But what we're really doing, we're training our brains to stay in a low grade state of activation. We're always slightly amped up, but here's what we don't talk about. Your brain doesn't actually multitask. It task switches. Every time you switch from one task to another, there's a restart cost. It's that tiny moment of, wait a minute, where did I leave off? And that mental friction, it adds up. And there's research that shows that task switching increases the time it takes to complete things. It doesn't make you go faster, it's not more efficient, and it raises stress. It increases mental fatigue. And guess what else? It lowers the quality of your work. So psychologists, David Meyer and Joshua Rubenstein and their colleagues at the University of Michigan, they studied task switching in the early two thousands, and what they found, it was very clear when we switch between tasks, it takes longer to complete them, and we make more errors because every time we switch, our brain has to reorient and there's a cost. The American Psychological Association, the a PA, has summarized this research and calls it a switching cost. And it's that tiny moment of, wait, where did I leave off? And that is not harmless. Your brain is burning extra energy just getting back on track. And when you do that all day long, it adds up. It's more mental fatigue, more friction, more stress. So when we say I'm great at multitasking, what we might really mean is I've trained myself to constantly interrupt my own focus. And here's the bigger issue. When divided attention becomes your normal state presence becomes harder. And you know what? Dreaming requires sustained attention. It requires quiet long enough for ideas to connect. It requires space long enough for something new to surface. If your brain is constantly switching, nothing ever lands and neither do your dreams, and after years of that calm, it actually starts to feel really uncomfortable and silence, it feels really foreign. And stillness. Ooh, that feels really inefficient. So let me ask you something. Are you comfortable not being so efficient with your time? Like, are you okay taking the long way? Are you okay doing one thing at a time? Are you okay eating a meal without your phone? Are you okay taking a walk without your headphones? Or does all of that just make you a little twitchy? Because it did for me. I mean, I noticed this when I started driving without music. No podcast, no distraction, just the view. I started doing this when we moved to Tennessee and when I started doing this, I started taking in things like the log cabins and barns on a distant hill and the horses with their blankets on in the morning error. And the more I did this, the more I craved it and now 20 or 30 minutes will pass and I feel. Calm, I'm relaxed. I'm not worrying about anything, and I realize something, and that is that silence. It isn't empty, it's spacious. And I think sometimes we clinging to efficiency because it makes us feel valuable. Like if we're always optimizing, oh, we're worthy. But I gotta tell you this, efficiency, it's a tool. It's not your identity, and it is definitely not your worth. So what if you stopped trying to optimize your life and started experiencing it instead? I wanna close this episode out today asking you again, what is the opposite of productivity for you? It's, it's not laziness and it's not apathy. And I don't know if this is true, but for me, I think it's presence. It's the white space, it's slowness, it's singletasking. It's letting your nervous system settle back to neutral. What is the opposite of productivity for you?'cause you know what? Here's what constant overproducing is costing you. It's costing you your imagination. It's costing you clarity. And it's costing you the quiet moments where your next idea might have surfaced. So you know the dreams. They don't shout over all your notifications pinging at you all day. They kind of just nudge you and tap you on the shoulder in that white space. They show up when you're driving the scenic route, or when you're in the shower or when you're sitting on the porch with your coffee on a Sunday morning, completely unplugged. If you're always rushing toward the next thing. You're not leaving room for what wants to emerge, and I don't want you just checking boxes. I want you connected to what you actually want. So this week, don't just get things done, get quiet enough to hear yourself again. Take the long way home. Leave space on your calendar. Do one thing at a time because you are not a machine built to produce. You are a human built to create and to be in your dreams. They need room to breathe. So tell me what landed with you today during this conversation. Click on the Send Carlene a text link in the show notes and let me know. And thank you so much for tuning in today, and I'll be right here next week to welcome you into our next conversation as soon as you hit play. Bye for now.

Carlene 17:10

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.