I tried slow living for one year. This is what I learned & what I’m doing now.

A little over a year ago, I uploaded a video on my channel called Everything is Changing. In it, I shared about the burnout I was experiencing and the changes I was making to pursue a slower, softer, simpler life. In the years since, I've documented different parts of that journey on my channel. There have been times I've brought you with me through days or weeks in my life and showed you how I was practically introducing this. Other times where we just sat and chatted and had little heart to hearts on how things were going. And today, I want to give you kind of the one year update on what this journey has looked like, where I'm at now, and what I wish I had known when I started a year ago. My initial draw to slow living was the lifestyle. If you go to Pinterest and you type in those words, you're met with images of sourdough bread and long linen dresses and there's English countryside homes and reading in coffee shops and all of it looked so wonderful, especially to a girl stuck so deeply in anxiety that I had forgotten what it felt like to just enjoy the day to day experience of life. It's not that my life was terrible by any means, I have a wonderful life and I had a wonderful life then, but I didn't know how to be present in it and that kept me from enjoying and partaking in so much of it. And so, without any hesitation, I really jumped into pursuing a slow, simple life. I decluttered our home, I decluttered my routines, for a while I tried to eliminate pretty much any and all structure to my life, which I think was a cool experiment, but not a great long term plan. For a few months, I didn't set any goals, I got rid of my morning routine, and I kind of just tried to lean into myself, tried to start listening to my body and my mind and my soul, pay attention to the cues it was giving me and really try and meet myself where I was at in every single moment, just live wholly inside of it instead of thinking 10 steps down the road. That was a really important time for me. Early on in the process, there are two relatively big mistakes that I have really learned from this year. The first of which is how much I overemphasized the lifestyle in the beginning. There were aspects of this that were really helpful, for example, this definitely prompted me to declutter and to start doing things that really do bring me a lot of joy, things like baking, reading. But there's a part of me that I think was trying to take this vision, this aesthetic, this version of life that really doesn't match my own and impose it onto my life or figure out how to turn my life into that, and I don't really think that's the point, nor was it particularly helpful. Anytime that I felt stressed or overwhelmed, I would look around at my life and find things to point out and say, this is the problem, rather than paying attention to what was actually going on internally that may have been causing that overwhelm or the other ways in which I was overstimulating myself. The other thing is something I've briefly mentioned in videos before, but I am somebody who tends towards an all or nothing mindset. I can view the world through a very black or white lens, and it's that tendency that causes burnout and anxiety for me more than anything. When I made the transition to slow living, I took that framework which I had been applying to productivity and accomplishment and always needing to be and do more, and I put that onto a slower pace of life. I didn't really notice this at first because there were so many benefits to moving slower, living slower, that I was just feeling better. This didn't really become an issue for me until I went through some really hard stuff this year. Parts of 2024 were very dark for me. And when crap hit the fan and life got hard, I had not been practicing slow living for very long, and I had not really developed any great coping mechanisms to help me deal with that crap. I slipped back into old habits that were really unhelpful, and all of a sudden, the shame and guilt that I used to feel for not completing a to-do list or accomplishing a certain amount of tasks came rushing back in. I had found a much better pace of life, a much better rhythm, but I was still telling myself that if I got off-beat or off-kilter at all, that there was something wrong with me. Which is exactly the same problem that I had had before. Goal setting doesn't drive burnout, to-do lists don't drive burnout, but constantly feeling like you have to measure up to some perfect standard, yeah, that will suck the life right out of you. Once I kind of started to put that together, I have started what I guess I'm now considering my second act of slow living. I want to be careful that in sharing these things I've learned from this year, I don't give you the impression that this has been a negative shift in my life by any means. Simplifying my habits, routines, my priorities, as well as the physical belongings in my home have enabled me to reflect on these things enough to see the patterns in a way I couldn't before. I've been able to identify a lot more of my own tendencies and patterns. To be honest with you, this has been an incredibly hard year for reasons that have nothing to do with slow living. But even in the midst of that, slowing down has allowed me to be present. I don't think I had any idea how rarely I was two feet into my own life until I started trying to do it on purpose. Something I want to share with you that I have been really meditating on and thinking about over the last little while is a quote I read recently. I'm currently reading this book called In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore. I'm not very far into it yet, but in the introduction he quotes a man named Carlo Petrini, who is the founder, I believe, of the slow food movement. In a conversation they had, he said, If you are always slow, then you are stupid. Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast. If tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos. The amount of peace and clarity and freedom that I got the moment I read those words is hard to overstate. It sounds so simple, and I realize that for some of you hearing that, it might feel like the most obvious statement in the world, but for me, it was someone giving me permission to make slow living fit my life, not the other way around. And I didn't know I needed that. While I don't regret the mistakes that I made this last year, because I really do feel like I've learned so much about myself and life through them, I guess if there's one thing that I would hope I could give you from this video, if you are looking to simplify your life or to slow down, find a better pace, to spend more time reflecting on how slow living feels than on how it looks. And I don't just mean that in terms of aesthetic. I think it's easy to get caught up in theory about what does this look like in my life, which is in no way a bad question to ask. It's really an important one, but it's also not helpful to live inside of that question. There's no way to know what is going to work with you and bring you peace in a sustainable way without just trying some things out. 12 months into this, I am now pregnant with my first baby. I'm about to go through the biggest life change I have ever gone through. And I realize that my version of busy days now are probably nothing compared to what my life will look like in a couple years when I've got toddlers running around. I don't want to fear that. I want to create space to find peace and slowness and joy and simplicity in whatever season of life I'm in. A year ago, I named that chapter of my life the pursuit of less. Now I'm in a new chapter, and if I had to pick a name, I think I would call it figuring it out, which is far less poetic. But honestly, right now, I think it's the state I most want and need to make peace with being in. One year into slow living, I'm currently focusing on adding meaningful structure into my life without moralizing it, giving myself grace. If the systems I'm trying aren't working, then I need a new system, not a new brain. Continuing to pursue minimalism, but also giving myself permission to be in progress, know that it takes time, and in particular as my life is changing so drastically this next year, knowing that I'm not going to get it all right. I'm continuing to pursue less, but not just for the sake of less. Less but better, less but deeper, less but richer. You had asked me back at the start what my reflections would be and what my thoughts would be one year in. I think I would have felt very confidently that I would be living in the after portion of my life. Everything was messy before, and then I fixed it, and now everything is all good. And I no longer think that exists. I am learning to be okay with that, and with accepting and embracing not fitting my life or my person into a box. Slow living has changed my life. I have reconnected with so many parts of myself that I didn't know were there. I've experienced deep joy in the everyday in ways I don't even know if I knew how to a year ago. I've become much more content with being alone, being in silence. I feel like I've recaptured some of the joy that I had in childhood. And I don't know exactly when I lost it, but it wasn't normal for me to delight in my everyday life. And it's becoming a lot more normal. That's something that I am so endlessly grateful for. I could make a whole other video specifically just listing the benefits of slow living and everything that it has done for me. But for today, I really just wanted to kind of sum up this last year, the big things that I've learned, and I really hope that they are in some way helpful. These videos feel like FaceTime calls to me. If I was chatting with one of my girlfriends and she said, okay, you've been doing this slow living thing for a year, what are your thoughts? This is what I would say. It's really sweet and special to get to connect with people over this shared interest and way of life. I'm going to link at the end, I have a playlist of all my videos on slow living so you can see my three month in update as well as other videos I have shared on the process of simplifying my life. If you're interested in following more of my journey with this, I'm going to be continuing to document my journey of slow living now as I'm entering motherhood through vlogs, structured videos, and a good old heart to heart FaceTime vibes chatty video every once in a while. I so appreciate you watching this video and being here. I'm truly so grateful for the opportunity to be able to film and share. I would love to know what your experiences have been. If this is something that you resonate with, definitely leave a comment and let me know until next time. I hope you have a good day because today is a good day to have a good day and that's it. Bye.