Why you can't slow down

(even though you desperately need to)

Your mind does not allow you to stop because the habit energy of doing is very strong. When you grow up, you’re laser-focused on the next thing:

Get good grades

Get into college

Get a good job

Get married

Get a house

The first 4-5 decades of our lives are like that— spent trying to achieve things that embody a good life.

This energy dictates what we should do and who we want to become. It helps us achieve the things we set out to achieve. But now that we’ve got all that stuff, we realize…

Ummm ok. Doing all of that crap didn’t make me feel as good as I thought it would. I’d like to try something different now.

But you can’t.

Because this energy controls you more than you’ve allowed it to. Like signing those Apple agreements without reading the fine print. And one day they come knocking on your door and force you into human experiments you’ve consented to without knowing.

Your habit energy is like that. It goes unchecked for so long and it gains enough power to trick you into thinking it is you.

It tells you what you should be doing. What you should want. It threatens you with all the bad things that will happen if you stop.

To know how strong this habit energy is, all you have to do is observe your parents.

My mom grew up in the 70s, a child witness to the aftermath of the war. She didn’t go to school. She went to relatives’ homes to be a maid. Food was rationed by the government. Her younger sisters ate before she did. Her mom locked up the cabinet after each meal, sometimes forgetting she hadn’t eaten.

For a woman like her to single-handedly raise a daughter into a dentist in this country took a shitload of strength. Of fighting. Of dreading water nonstop for both of our lives.

But she doesn’t need to do that anymore and she still can’t stop because she spent her whole life fighting. Once our needs were met, other needs that didn’t get a chance to surface started to. I’m talking about things like happiness, love, and fulfillment. She doesn’t know how to deal with them. She begins to increase her needs, like buying a second and third home, because these are problems she knows how to solve.

My mom is still running and she can’t stop.

In her, I see the habit energy that pulls me every day. The energy that tells me to run. To do more. To be more.

This energy has existed longer than I’ve been alive. It is not mine alone. It is in my mom, my grandma, and my grandma’s grandma.

At one point in my life, I wholeheartedly believed that to be a worthy daughter, I had to fight harder. If my mom could do what she did, I must be able to do 10x more with what I’m given.

It wasn’t until I stopped running that I saw the truth:

If I had done that, I would have passed the same energy to my daughter one day. And she would feel the need to run, to fight, to sacrifice her own happiness for people she loves. That would break my heart.

Which one of us gets to be happy in the end?

Your habit energy is very good at convincing you to keep going. It will tell you: Now is not a good time to stop. To know whether this is true or not, imagine getting hit by a truck tomorrow.

ah, suddenly, it is ok to stop.

We wait for unfortunate events to decide our lives almost like we don’t trust ourselves enough or something.

To stop here does not mean to stop doing everything and abandon everyone. It means to stop being a victim of our habit energy.

To slow down means to look at things deeply. To evaluate whether or not our actions are out of fear, anxiety, or habit energy. When you can remove those, you will find underneath right action. Right action has the power to nourish not only you but people around you.

To know whether you have right action, see if what you are doing is first and foremost nourishing you. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you can give your energy up for someone else.

The energy that influences the world is not the energy we want to give, but the energy we carry.

The problem with this approach is that when we look deeply, we see so much tangled, undealt-with shit with no exit unless we do something radical with our lives. Most of us are not ready for radical. We just want to pick up a habit, adopt a new routine, or score a side hustle that will solve all of our problems.

News flash: the energy that has been consuming you has been growing for generations. You think a side hustle is going to fix that?

But there is also good news. You don’t have to solve your problems right now. There is this insane way in which the Universe runs that somehow we all overlook:

You don’t actually have to have the solutions to your problems. You just need to acknowledge your problems and realize this is not how you prefer to live your life. The rest actually just works out.

gasp.

Don’t believe me? When was the last time you thought about secreting pepsin? I hope never. But that’s the enzyme that breaks down the protein in your food to become digestible.

The way your body absorbs food, the way your heart beats, the way your diaphragm rises and falls to bring oxygen inside your body— you have no idea how to do any of that. And yet, it is all there. Working for you. Keeping you alive.

Why do you think you have to figure everything out? You can’t even figure out how to breathe, cabrón.

All you have to do is decide what you want out of your life the same way you know you want to eat, and trust that food gets absorbed in your body.

If you don’t slow down, you’re never going to understand what you truly want. And without a clear understanding, you’re never going to have the courage to ask.