Slow Down to Speed Up | The Power of the Pause
© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive, LLC. Author’s photograph of Marc Chagall, I and the Village. On Exhibit in 2019 at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
What’s your pause practice? When we watch athletes of all levels, we expect them to take breaks to maintain optimal physical performance. For those of us who work predominantly from the neck up, that pause can feel optional or be forgotten all together. But small interludes can make the difference between a day that exhausts us, and one that exhilarates us, between a problem that we’re stuck on, and one that intuitively solves itself as we relinquish our grip. Science has yet to design an elegant study to reflect the benefits of the pause for knowledge workers, but overall, as a recent meta study puts it, “the data support the role of micro-breaks for well-being, while for performance, recovering from highly depleting tasks may need more than 10-minute breaks.”
I can already hear you protesting that you don’t have time. I invite you to notice that when the visible tumult in the world increases, it can be easy to fall into bad habits of reflexive checking: news feeds, social media, messages, whatever our favorite flavor is. When events feel as though they are speeding up, our cadence can easily follow suit if we aren’t paying attention. As I noted last week, smartphone interactions may feel like a break from our workday, but they are a long way from the pause that refreshes. If our devices don’t offer a reliable break, what does? Every time you catch yourself unnecessarily checking your phone, I invite you to try an intentional pause practice instead.
Here are a few of my favorites, in order of the time they take:
20 seconds | 20/20/20 – The video call eyeball break. At least once every 20 minutes, look 20 feet or more away for 20 seconds. This allows the eyes to reset, and mitigates pervasive eye and facial muscle strain.
30 seconds | Breathing in I know I am breathing in – This is a favorite I always teach my mindfulness students. It takes about two seconds for the pre-frontal cortex (“PFC”) to catch up with the older, quicker, survival-oriented parts of our brain. When we’re under stress, pausing for an in breath and an out breath, saying silently to oneself, “breathing in I know I am breathing in, breathing out I know I am breathing out,” provides both time for our PFC to catch up, and brings us back into awareness of our bodies.
1 minute | Upright and centered – If you can, stand up, with feet about hip’s width apart. If you use a mobility device, bring yourself physically or mentally into a position of upright dignity. Take a deep breath or two. Find the center of your body from top to bottom, from side to side, and from front to back. Use your intention to bring your attention to rest at your felt sense of your physical center. Rest there and breathe in the strength of your back body. Feel the vulnerability and openness of your front body. Resume your day centered and with dignity.
3 minutes | Hourglass practice – If you are comfortable doing so, you might want to close your eyes for this one. If not, rest your eyes on a neutral surface (no writing or electronics) or even try bringing your awareness to the back of your eyes so your gaze is softened. Take a minute and slowly survey your present experience: What does my body feel like right now? What sensations are there? What mental objects are floating around? How is my mood? How has my day thus far left my mental and physical state? For the next minute, narrow your attention down to just the bare sensations of your breathing, letting go of everything else except the sensations of movement, temperature, and cadence of your breath. For the final minute, widen out your awareness once more and try to hold your entire body in awareness, feeling your skin holding your body together, the pull of gravity, any and all bodily sensations.
3-5 minutes | Reorienting in nature – One doesn’t need to be outside to remember we are part of nature. I like to tune in with an ancient practice: sit like a mountain, breath like the ocean’s waves, mind like the sky. There are various versions of this floating around the internet, but you don’t need a recording. Just sit or stand, feeling yourself embedded in gravity’s embrace. If you can’t sense gravity, try lifting any extremity and holding it up … eventually gravity wins over even the most toned muscles. As you feel your way into gravity, feel yourself part of the earth, as though you are a vast mountain, sitting, unmoved, amidst sunshine and storm, heat and cold, clarity and dense fog. Feel yourself rooted and stable. From that base tune into your breathing, gently, as though you attention is a leaf resting on a spring breeze. Notice the breath breathing you, inexhaustibly, like the ocean’s waves. Allow the breath to be as it is without adjusting it in any way. With body and breath stable, tune into the mind … it may feel chaotic, like a stormy sky, or more relaxed, like a steady stream. Regardless of the contents, tune into the context: notice that just as the sky isn’t bothered by a bird or an airplane, a cloud or a lightning strike, so we too can rest in the sky-like nature of mind, open to everything, recognizing that we are not our thoughts.
5-10 minutes | Mindful Movement – As I sat at my desk or in meetings on Wall Street for all those years, hour after hour, my inner athlete bristled, as did those of many of my colleagues. Humans are not designed to be sedentary, as the Mayo Clinic started warning about a decade ago. We hear the advice: Sitting is the new smoking! Take 10,000 steps! Do walking meetings! Good luck if you are a trader, a banker, a lawyer, an academic, a tech start-up team-lead, head of sales, anyone in the C-Suite, etc. etc. etc. When urgency feels too real to question, and work is like drinking from a fire hydrant, it’s quite hard to step away. However, we all need to stay hydrated, to get lunch or a snack, to use the bathroom. In those moments where we are forced by our bodies to pause anyway, try walking, or rolling mindfully as you go. Set your intention as you move away from your desk or the conference room to feel the ground under you, to feel the temperature of the air on your skin, to take in the aromas – even that dull, clean office non-smell. Hear any sounds that accompany your movement, Feel the musculature in your legs, hips, back, and arms as you move. When you notice you’re thinking about something, or have otherwise become distracted, that’s great! That noticing is the hallmark of mindfulness practice. We notice when our attention has wandered away, and gently, with curiosity and kindness, return it to the task at hand: in this case mindful movement.
10-12 minutes | Core Mindfulness Practice – If you can take 10-12 minutes, try one of the core mindfulness practices which, practiced regularly (10 minutes a day for 6 weeks) and in combination, yield staggering physiological and psychological benefits. Here are recordings to get you started. Mindfulness gets so much hype these days, but really, it’s simply the opposite of mindlessness. Every moment of our day when we are aware of ourselves, aware that we are present and functioning, is a moment of mindfulness.
30 minutes | Awe Break – Once a week I used to schedule a 30-minute meeting with myself in my work calendar – wherever I could squeeze it. My old office was a 10-minute walk from the Museum of Modern Art, one of NYC’s treasures. I discovered that, armed with a membership and some self-discipline, I could walk to the MOMA, go and visit a single work of art for 5 minutes, and then walk back. I love art, and so often found myself moved to awe that the artist could have captured such a complex set of emotions and thoughts with some canvas and a few basic paint colors. The Chagall pictured at top was one to which I returned again and again. The deep gaze of the cow and the man always captured me … this idea of intimacy with the natural world that can feel so alien in cities. When I worked downtown, my awe break was frequently walking out to the harbor just outside my building that looked across the Hudson from Battery Park City to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. As a child of immigrants, although they came in through a different port, I often found myself moved by the sheer tenacity that has emboldened generations upon generations to migrate to these shores. The experience of awe kicks a pause practice up to the next level, magnifying and amplifying the health benefits. I’ve written on the multiplier effects of nature as well.
So what’s your pause practice? Can you commit to converting even 10 minutes of time between meetings or tasks to refresh your mind and body? You’ll notice that almost everything listed above takes less than 10 minutes. Want to chat about how building a pause practice into your day might improve your stress tolerance and take your leadership to the next level? Reach out — you might be amazed with the results.
Research: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272460