Slow Down or Speed Up? Wellness Is About Having the Choice

Back in December, Nick Sternberg posted a piece on the Organic blog about Slow Media and the larger Slow Movement. For those of you who haven’t heard about Slow Media, I would sum it up as deliberately opting out of the regular use of the technologies that consume much of our time. Cell phones, social media, e-mail, DVR all conspire to create an environment in which we are on all of the time, bombarded constantly by information and at the same time spending less and less time connecting face-to-face or in-depth.

If you’re like me, you’re under the basic assumption that this ongoing transformation is largely out of your control. Technology advances at an ever-faster pace, and you really can’t do anything but roll with it. Relationships are becoming byte-sized and hyper-speed.

Slow Media challenges this assumption. Slow Media opts out. Slow media chooses hand-written letters over e-mail, vinyl over CDs, and face time over Twitter and Facebook.

Personally, there are parts of this ideology that I find appealing, especially when you consider recent evidence about less stress being tied to longevity. However, I’m also thrilled by the immediacy of information that results from the technologies condemned by Slow Media. I love being able to read what hundreds of parents have to say about their experiences with a drug my son was just prescribed. I love that I can get work done (like writing this blog entry) in my pajamas at home. I love that the brilliant speakers at the TED conferences are free to me any time I want them.

In the end, everyone has to find their own balance. But as Nick’s post reminded me, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that finding that balance is up to us. That even the most -- seemingly -- inevitable parts of our lives can be changed if that’s what we decide we need to do.

Sometimes the wellness choices we need to make are choices we didn’t even know we had.

Jacob Braude

VP, Planner