Week 4 Crit: Deliberately slow

We rush without deciding to. This crit halves the speed of three ordinary actions and finds out what that does, including the one where the evidence says the opposite of what everybody assumes.

15 March 2027

Before the crit#

Notice, without changing anything yet, how fast you do three ordinary things. Getting out of bed. Eating breakfast, if you eat it. Putting the shopping away. Just clock the speed.

Bring something small to eat.

The claim we are testing#

Almost nobody decides to rush. You wake up already behind, so you eat standing up, walk faster than you need to, unload the groceries as though someone is timing you, and get through a day at a pace you never chose. A meal you were supposed to sit down for happens in four minutes over a sink.

There is decent support for the general shape of that. Wood and Neal (2007) describe habits as context-triggered responses marked by “efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionality”, and Wood, Quinn and Kashy (2002) found roughly 43% of daily behaviour is habitual rather than deliberated. So much of what you do is not chosen.

The step from there to “and therefore your speed is a habit you never chose” is mine, not theirs. Nobody has studied pace as a habitual parameter in the way this crit assumes. Hold it as a hypothesis you are about to test on yourself.

One more finding, and it is a strange one. Robinson and Godbey’s time-diary work (Time for Life, 1997) found Americans had gained around an hour a day of free time since the 1960s while reporting feeling more rushed. Feeling hurried and being busy are not the same variable.

In the crit#

Forty minutes. Three rounds, no talking during them.

1. Eat, at half speed. Whatever you brought. Put it down between bites.
2. Put something away, at half speed. We will have a crate of odds and ends to unpack onto a table and repack. Deliberately unglamorous.
3. One action of your own choosing, done at half the speed you clocked this week.

Do not narrate it to yourself. That instruction matters and the reason is below.

Eating in front of people is not neutral for everyone. Pass on the first round and do a different action twice if you would rather, and you do not have to say which one you swapped.

What the evidence actually says#

This is where the folk theory gets sorted into three piles, and one of the piles will annoy you.

Eating is the strong one. Robinson and colleagues (2014, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) meta-analysed 22 experimental studies and found a slower eating rate reduced energy intake, with a standardised effect of about 0.45. That is a moderate effect, consistent across different ways of slowing people down. Two honest caveats. Heterogeneity was high and the samples were mostly healthy-weight young adults. And there was no significant effect on how hungry people said they were, either at the end of the meal or hours later. So it changes intake. It does not, on this evidence, change appetite. Nobody in that meta-analysis measured enjoyment, which is the thing the folk version promises.

Walking is the one that contradicts us. Michalak, Rohde and Troje (2015) manipulated people’s gait using biofeedback and found that a reduced walking speed is part of the sad gait pattern, while walking in the “happy” style produced more positive memory recall. Mood ratings themselves did not shift. One small study, 39 people, and it is the only relevant experiment we could find. But it points the opposite way to “walk slower and feel better.” We are keeping it on the syllabus as the counter-example rather than quietly dropping it, because a course that only cited the studies agreeing with it would be a worse course.

And the rest is my hunch. There is no research on unloading groceries slowly, showering slowly, or waking up slowly. If you find some, the forum is the place.

The strongest objection to this whole crit#

Take this seriously, because it comes from the same literature the course is built on.

Mor and Winquist (2002, Psychological Bulletin) meta-analysed 226 effect sizes and found that self-focused attention is associated with negative affect. They also found that rumination produced stronger effects than non-ruminative self-focus, with private self-focus most closely tied to depression.

Now read the instructions above again. “Attend closely to what you are doing with your own hands” is a request to increase private self-focused attention, in a course whose entire premise is that too much attention on your own interior is the problem. It is possible that this crit is a rumination exercise with better branding.

The course is betting on a distinction here, and it is a bet. Attending to the action is not the same as attending to yourself doing the action. Noticing the weight of a jar is outward. Monitoring how well you are noticing the weight of a jar is the trap. That is why you were told not to narrate.

Whether that distinction survives contact with a real room is one of the things we find out today.

Discussion#

• Which of the three rounds was hardest, and was it the slowness or the silence?
• Did anyone tip from attending to the action into monitoring themselves? What did that feel like from the inside?
• Given Michalak, should the course tell you to walk faster?
• If pace really is a habit, Wood and Neal’s work says the lever is the context, not the intention. What would you change about a morning rather than about your resolve?

Afterwards#

Pick one of the three and keep it at half speed for a week. Log it in the log. A week of “made no difference” is a result worth having.

The sandwich, next week, is this crit at full length with nothing else running.