MOST PEOPLE I know (including myself) spend their daily lives fluctuating between states of stimulation and states of exhaustion and fatigue.

With the omnipresence of smartphones, work has invaded our personal lives leading many of us to be working outside of work hours, thinking about work nonstop and treating our personal lives as if they were work, ticking off to-do lists with our exercise, catching up with friends, cooking the dinner and so on. We fall into the trap of viewing our lives through the lens of deadlines and tasks completed rather than the quality of our experience.

We are increasingly finding it hard to relax, rest, and reflect. When we have free time, many of us jump on our devices and scroll through social media feeds, read the news, watch entertaining videos and while this is totally understandable, it is fast replacing our rest, relax and reflect time entirely. What are the consequences of this?

‘I can’t relax’ is something I hear often, across generations.

Neuroscientists, physicians and a whole host of other scientific experts can explain the harm done to the body and mind if it remains in a perpetual state of stimulation, activation, alertness. My interest at the present moment is the existential losses we face in a culture of oscillating between being ‘too stimulated’ or ‘too tired’ for us to partake in the aspects of life that provide us with true meaning and nourishment.

Our relationships

When our attention is constantly being pulled away from our internal landscape, we can lose the vital connection with ourselves. We can complete all of the necessary tasks at work, enjoy our exercise and sporting activities, consume our favourite media, spend time with our friends and family, but without a regular check in with ourselves, our access to the profundity of the human experience is limited.

The level of connection we have with others can only be as intimate as the level of connection we have with ourselves.

Through this lens, we might start looking at our own quiet time differently.

There is robust research that suggests the quality of our relationships is the biggest indicator of our longevity. This, to me, highlights our deep, innate need to belong. In a culture where we are highly critical of ourselves and others, this deep need struggles to be met.

Many of us haven’t linked in with our deepest selves in years or decades. When people decide to begin a practice of sitting with themselves or intentionally being with themselves without any other distractions, challenging emotions and sensations can often arise. We might also notice a general feeling of numbness.

These moments can be the build-up of years of unprocessed grief and is best navigated with the support and guidance of an experienced and trusted individual.

Gradually, over time, we can build our tolerance to be present to our internal world.

If we can breathe with our difficult experiences non-judgmentally rather than avoid them or suppress them, we can begin to engage with life in a fundamentally new way, one which is directed less by a fear of feeling certain emotions and more by a curiosity and adventurousness with life that is grounded in our felt experience of emotional resilience.

Consistent time with our internal world can also open up a door of compassion for ourselves and understanding and accepting why we feel certain emotions in particular situations.

Due to repeated experiences of acknowledging, witnessing, and abiding by the parts of us that feel fear, anger, shame, and jealousy, we can connect with the fear, anger and shame in others in a less judgemental manner. This is a truly revolutionary act in a society that seems to be increasingly divisive.

Contemplation

Contemplation is also a valuable aspect of pause time. What do I mean by contemplation? Very simply, I am referring to the moments in which we can view our lives through a wider context.

We can be so determined to reach a certain goal in our daily lives that we forget that we are walking and breathing a miracle. We are the culmination of a wonderous evolution of life cells which began billions of years ago and the place we call home is a massive rock orbiting the sun in a solar system we know almost nothing about. Sitting with this is truly awe-provoking, and yet so many of us are deprived of moments of awe in our lives despite being all around us.

Awe at its best reminds us that we are part of an incredibly intricate system of interconnected forces and that our influence on this interconnection is simultaneously enormous and tiny, depending on our applied context.

Frequently zooming in and out of the daily context of our lives can prove deeply beneficial for our wellbeing.

This practice can help us accept something relatively small that we’re resisting while it also might incite a change of job or lifestyle as we spend more time considering what exactly do we want our lives to embody and reflect.

Time

Another existential gain to consistent intentional pauses is a profound reorientation of time. In our modern culture, it can feel like we are fighting against time, like time is slipping away from us.

I remember a former manager of mine used to joke that he was applying for a 25th hour in the day so he could get more work done. Needless to say, my former manager’s application was unsuccessful. Even if we all got an extra hour every day, I’m sure we’d still feel like it wasn’t enough.

Without dedicated pauses, our entire lives can feel like the blink of an eye. The beautiful (but challenging at first) realisation that we come to when we begin setting aside time for ourselves to just be, is that time actually moves quite slow and that it is us, our minds and our lives that move fast.

For anyone doubting this, I would strongly recommend taking a camp chair to a local forest and sitting there for the afternoon with no other distractions. With no books, no phone, no smartwatch, no journal, just yourself and time. I am very confident that you will relate to time differently after this experience.

Our society expects us to cram so much in every day and then provides us with endless distractions if we need a break from the to-do list.

Living like this can easily lead us to feel like days and months and years are flying by.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the pace of modern life reducing anytime soon, but if we do wish to develop a different relationship to time, consistent pauses from the chaos can be deeply life-affirming. You can begin living your life with the knowledge that when it all feels too much and too fast, you can pause and allow time to remind you of it’s true pace.

These are just three aspects of the more subtle human experience that I fear we are rapidly losing as a collective. These experiences can profoundly enhance our engagement with life however, without consistent moments of intentional pause, they could continue to be drowned up by the relentless expectations of modern culture.

James O’Connell is a writer, podcaster and the Programmes Manager of the Sanctuary, a meditation centre and charity in Dublin 7 providing affordable and accessible opportunities to pause both online and onsite.