28 Jan 2022 · 12 min
In this episode of the Brendon Show, Brendon Burchard explores why modern life feels rushed and how we can "slow down time" by cultivating greater awareness and presence. He describes how constant notifications, multitasking, and the pressure to please others overload our brains, leading to stress, a loss of depth, and a sense that years pass unnoticed. Burchard explains that while we cannot literally alter the flow of time, we can change our perception of it by heightening our senses—paying attention to breath, sights, sounds, and emotions. He uses examples like car accidents or meaningful moments (e.g., a child’s graduation) to illustrate how heightened awareness creates a slow‑motion experience. Practical strategies include: practicing deeper, slower breathing; focusing on one task or interaction at a time; learning to say no and reduce distractions; and intentionally tuning back into our feelings during everyday exchanges. Throughout, he emphasizes that these habits not only make time feel richer but also improve relationships, productivity, and overall fulfillment. The episode also includes multiple promotional segments for GrowthDay, an online personal‑development platform offering live coaching, community support, and tools such as journaling and habit tracking to help listeners implement the discussed practices.
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Hello, my friends. I'm Brendon Burchard, host of the Brendon show and founder of growthday.com and I'm honored to be your high performance coach today. I believe that every day we can be inspired. We can live with intention and purpose. We can bring the joy and honor the struggles of each day to push ourselves to grow, to serve, to be a role model, to lead extraordinary lives. I believe that every day is a great day to grow. That's why I started my company, growthday.com it's an online personal growth platform where you can get me and the world's best personal development teachers live coaching you every week, sharing our wisdom, keeping you motivated and accountable, encouraging you to find the aliveness and the connection and meaning of life that we're all after. If you're not a member yet, please go sign up@growthday.com and join our huge worldwide community of achievers. For less than a dollar a day, you get the world's best teachers live every week. And look, you've probably known for a long time that you needed some expert guidance, an inspired community and life changing tools. So please, your breakthrough awaits you@growthday.com now let's get to today's episode. My friends, please listen closely. Maybe you take some notes so you remember these insights of personal growth and share this episode with three of your friends because we all have to share more positive messages in the world today. So share this with three friends just like you who are committed to their personal growth. And also be sure to tag me or DM me on Instagram. Rendon Burchard, Join our million plus community there on Instagram so I can say hi. Thanks again for listening. Now let's begin.
How do you slow down time in a life where we're now so hurried, so stressed, so distracted, so bombarded from every area, every angle with people who want something from us, with the media's attention, with some new thing that's in our inbox that we're supposed to pay attention to. Everybody's completely overwhelmed and their lives are spinning by them and they're barely even noticing or seeing or sensing any of it. And so you've got a whole mass of people who feel very disconnected from life, disassociated from themselves and from other people and they're frustrated with it. They don't feel, feel like life has that depth, that meaning or that beauty. You know, it's like metaphorically they haven't sensed or seen a sunset in their life in so long. You Know, they're just going through the day, lots of busy work, but it's not their life's work. They've got lots of tasks. They're just driven to accomplish more. And they're not lazy. They're working, they're hungry, they're fighting for that paycheck. They're fighting to contribute, they're fighting to be noticed. The day feels like that. It's a fight. It's a fight to get the kids together, get them off to soccer, get them off to the game, get him off the pool. You're doing everything, and yet life starts to feel like it's just spinning by. And the years, it's like you can't even the last decade almost feels unfelt for a lot of people. Matter of fact, a lot of people, the last couple days, it just feels unfelt. They just kind of went through it and they didn't sense it or feel it or if they did, it was. There was frenetic energy. A lot of people's perpetual energy right now is stressed because. Not because they're taking on any more than we took on 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It's because they're paying attention to so many things that their brains are wiped out. They're exhausted. Their brain is truly stressed. Their body is truly stressed because they're trying to. You know, it's like when you're juggling, if you're juggling one or two things, no problem. When you're juggling 50 things, big problem, you're going to freak out, right? And that's what's happening for a lot of people because they're doing so many distractions throughout the day. Their brain feels like it's juggling a hundred things. And so they're freaked out, stressed out, amped up all day long. And of course, what do they do to deal with all that? They drink 60 ounces of caffeine. It's like just watching the bad get badder, the worst get worse. It's like you're stressed, you're freaking out, you're keyed up with adrenaline and overwhelm. Let's pour some coffee on it. Good idea. You know, it's no wonder so many people are missing the moment. They're not feeling and sensing what their life is really about, because they're always on to the next thing because they took on too much. They're always struggling to deal with all these 50 things because they said yes, too much to too many people who had requests for them that frankly weren't relevant or important, but they just want to be people pleasers. So they said, sure. And now what's happened? Now their moments are crammed with obligation. Their moments are crammed with distraction. And just in trying to deal and fight through all of that, they lost sense of the magic of life. And so what I like to tell people is you have to slow time down. Now, obviously, we can't literally slow time down, but we can slow our sensations and interpretations of things down. We can slow our lives down by taking on less. But we can also, even if we take on the same amount, just by learning to be more aware and present to the moment, time slows down a little bit. I don't know. Have you ever been in, like, a car accident or a situation where there was an emergency and it seemed like everything went in slow motion? The reason that happened is because your.
Awareness was heightened, right?
Your awareness became heightened. You started taking all this information in because maybe in that situation you felt like you were in danger, right? And so you were really hyper attentive. Or maybe you watched, you know, your kid walk across the, you know, the graduation stage. And you were prideful and it meant something to you, that moment. So you took it in and you can imagine just slow motion, that acceptance of the reward or the smile or that first kiss. Remember that? Like, it was like slow motion happening because the moment meant something to you. So the challenge in experiencing slow time is deciding to heighten our senses. Let's pay attention a little bit more to how we're thinking and feeling. I mean, are you even aware of your breath right now? Right? Are you breathing? I hope you are, but a lot of people aren't even breathing throughout the day. They're just huffing and puffing and they're not even centered physically. Right? Your breath is the center of your physical reality. So you got to be attentive to how your breath is having deeper breaths, deeper, slower breaths to anchor you to reality a little bit, to your body, to your sensations. Start paying attention more to the sounds and the sights all around you. Because if you heighten your sensations, it's easier to slow the effect. As you broaden your awareness and you take in more, it seems like time slows a little bit more. It's a funny inverse that happens there. So I want you to focus more on your sensations, your breath, what you're taking in, what you're seeing and experiencing. That will help slow time down.
Hey, it's Brandon jumping back in here again. Are you looking to go to the next level in your life right now. The next level of joy, abundance, success, then you already know that you need to journal about your lessons learned in your life. You got to track your moods and your habits. You have to learn from the best personal development coaches and teachers in the world. And you got to stay inspired and accountable so that you can be more focused, disciplined, joyous, and keep growing. That's what the Growth Day app is going to help you to do, my friend. It's the world's first all in one personal development app. It has all of the tools you need, all the coaching and the community that you need to level up to progress every week, to track your breakthroughs, and to keep growing in every area of your life consistently over the long term. So go start your transformation right now@growthday.com or just download the Growth Day app on your phone right now. Every day you can keep improving every day. We are here for you and every day is truly a great day to grow together. So let's make self improvement a way of life. Let's make that self improvement stick. Go to growthday.com right now.
Second thing I think you can do very briefly is to minimize the number of things that you are paying attention to. When that first kiss happened to you, that was the whole world. There was nothing else. I mean, you were aiming for it.
You were hoping it happened, right?
I mean, that was all there was in the world at that moment. And so let's give ourselves that challenge. Let's learn to focus on singular things. When your spouse comes home, go down, meet them at the door and just have a moment there where there's nothing else. There's no kids, there's no sound, there's no crashing around. There's no you haven't do 50 things with your phone. It's just have this moment with them right there. Just anchor in, have a present moment with them and make that moment all there is. And you'll start to notice, you'll have greater depth in that relationship. You'll start to be excited for that moment because it'll be a moment of real connection. Because it's in those moments of connection that it feels like time slows down and frankly becomes more meaningful. Don't pay attention to so many things. Get rid of so many distractions. Focus on 1, 2, 3 things at a time, tops. We also know from productivity studies that the more you try to multitask, the less you do things with excellence, the less fulfilled you feel and the less capable you are of managing what you're supposed to be managing. You miss deadlines. You forget to do something. It's like a whole hot mess happens the more you take on. So learn to say no more. Learn to take on fewer things. Learn to evaluate the opportunities that you have, to pay attention to things, to just those that matter. It will reconnect you with life, and it will feel like life is starting to count again. You'll start feeling it a little bit more. Things will become a little better. And finally, to slow down time, I think it's the most important thing, focus and heighten your feelings, right? It's about being more aware of your feelings again. Sometimes when we're overwhelmed, what we do is we numb out, right? You go downstairs, you kiss your lady goodbye, she goes off to work. Or you kiss your husband goodbye, he goes off to work. Or you kiss each other in the.
Driveway, you both go off to work.
And what ends up happening, you didn't even feel it. You didn't even sense it. You weren't even there in the moment. It was, like, perfunctory. You just. You had to do it. It's like an obligation. Goodbye, honey. There's no feeling or sensation there. And some people, when life starts going by really fast, they're just not feeling anything. Even though their kid could tell them something amazing. And they're like, good, honey, go get the carrots. You know, they completely miss that. That was a moment they could have had. And the more moments you create by feeling the emotions of other people again, by sensing what are your feelings to what's happening again.
Tuning back into your feelings will be.
A greater depth and emotion to life again. And now the days will start counting. They'll start feeling something again.
Okay, my friend, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Brennan Show. Tell some people about this episode. It's on each of us to spread positivity and empowerment during these times of chaos and negativity.
Right?
So I'm asking you to be the dealer of hope and personal growth and education in your tribe. So take a screenshot right now and share the screenshot and this link to this episode with three of your friends today. Post it on social media. Use the hashtag growthday. That's growthday, because that's the name of my company and we're always giving away prizes to our community. If you'd like to help me personally, then please rate and review the podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Give us some stars. Cheer us on. Leave a review. Because, believe it or not, that stuff actually really does help. And I read all of them. So my last thought for today, Please remember you are stronger than you think and the future holds good things for you. Tomorrow can be an inspired day. Every new morning is a second chance. Every day is a great day to grow. We're thankful to have you here in the Growth Day community, so be sure to go deeper with us@growthday.com. Sam.