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What do these words have in common? “Savor,” “relish,” ” “luxuriate,” “stroll,” “muse,” “dawdle,” “mosey,” “meander,” and “linger?”

We rarely use them, because we rarely do them. We don’t have time. We’ve got so much to do, so many balls to juggle, so many miles to go before we sleep.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I posted the blog “The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time” three weeks ago. It prompted a passionate outpouring of comments from people feeling overwhelmed by the relentless demands in their lives, and the sense that there’s no way out.

We’re all wired up, but we’re melting down. We’re dancing as fast as we can. Stroll? Mosey? Linger? That’s what slackers do.

I’m not suggesting this is a new phenomenon. “More, bigger, faster” has been the rallying cry of capitalism for more than two centuries, since the advent of the industrial revolution. I first wrote about this subject 25 years ago in an article for Vanity Fair titled “Acceleration Syndrome: How Life Got Much, Much Too Fast.” Even then it was before anyone had cell phones or an email address, and before Google, Facebook, texting, and tweeting existed.

But the acceleration has accelerated — crazily so. The speed of our digital devices now sets our pace and increasingly runs our lives. Any doubt? See if you can turn off your email for a day, or even for a few hours, or try holding the attention of a 12- year-old who has a smart phone in her hand.

I like getting more done, faster, as much as the next guy does. But I also recognize how costly it can be. Speed is the enemy of depth, nuance, subtlety, attention to detail, reflection, learning, and rich relationships — the enemy of much, in short, that makes life worth living.

Last week, my wife and I accompanied my older daughter, a theater director, to a play called “Gatz” at the Public Theater in New York City. The show is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The script is the novel itself, which the main character, Nick Carraway, reads from the stage over six and a half languorous hours between 2 pm and 10 pm. There are two 15-minute intermissions and an hour and fifteen minute break for dinner.

Honestly, this is not the sort of event I would have chosen to attend, but it was a gift from my daughter. To my amazement, I found it riveting. I savored and luxuriated in Fitzgerald’s elegant sentences, and I became so immersed in the story and the era Fitzgerald so vividly evokes, that my attention rarely wandered. I felt enriched and enlivened by the experience. It has stuck with me.

Speed is a source of stimulation and fleeting pleasure. Slowing down is a route to depth, more enduring satisfaction, and to excellence.

How would you feel if you knew the surgeon operating on you was racing through your surgery, while checking email, and writing texts along the way? I notice my own impatience if the Internet doesn’t come up fast enough on my phone when I’m walking from one appointment to another.

Am I nuts? It makes me think of a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song: “Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last.” Why can’t I just take a deep breath when I’ve got a free moment, and appreciate my simple aliveness?

Here’s one reason:

The faster we move, the less we feel, which may be a primary reason we move so fast. Most of us are more worried, uncertain, and insecure than we care to acknowledge, even to ourselves. Moving fast keeps those discomfiting feelings at bay.

So we deify doing. Just think about this senseless but venerable cliché: “No rest for the weary.” Really? Isn’t resting precisely what the weary ought to be doing?

To savor is to enjoy and appreciate something completely. It necessarily takes time and requires slowing down. So how might you build more savoring into your life? Try one of these:

1. Designate one meal a day — or even one a week — during which you take the time to notice the aroma, flavor, and texture of what you’re eating.
2. Curl up in a favorite chair at some point after you return home from work and spend at least a half-hour reading a book purely for pleasure.
3. Take the time to really listen to someone you love — to give that person the space to speak without interruption, for as long as it takes.
4. Choose a place that interests you — it could be in the city or the country — and spend a couple of hours just exploring it without any specific end in mind.
5. Buy a journal, and before you go to bed, take a few minutes to reflect on what you feel grateful for that day, and what went right.

Above all, slowly build more strolling, dawdling, moseying, meandering, musing, lingering, relishing, and savoring into your life.

Reprinted from HBR.org.

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Once again, awesome stuff from Tony Schwartz

Recently, I came across this startling statistic. Each day, we make an average of 217 food-related decisions. Is it any surprise we so often make poor choices about what we eat?

The simple act of making decisions, says the researcher Roy Baumeister, progressively depletes our ability to make them well. We begin to experience something called “decision fatigue.” Worse yet, we’re often not even consciously aware of feeling tired and impaired.

Here’s how the brain compensates: As much as 95 percent of the time, it makes decisions automatically, by habit, or in reaction to an external demand. So what would it take to intentionally make better decisions in a world of infinite choices?

The answer begins with self-awareness. Our first challenge is resist being reactive. Many of our worst decisions occur after we’ve been triggered — meaning that something or someone pushes us into negative emotion and we react instinctively, fueled by our stress hormones, in a state of fight or flight.

That’s all well and good if there’s a lion charging at you. It’s not very useful in everyday life. Most of the time, it makes more sense to live by the Golden Rule of Triggers: Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t.

If you respond out of a compulsion, you haven’t made an intentional choice. It may feel right — even righteous — in the moment, but it’s more likely to exacerbate the problem than solve it.

Here are three keys to making really good decisions:

1. The first key is not to make bad ones. That begins with self- awareness — becoming more attentive to the physical signs that you’re feeling a sense of threat. The most common ones are tightness in any part of your body, more rapid breathing, and the experience of anger or fear. The intensity of an emotion is not a reason to act on it.

Instead, when you recognize what’s happening in your body, take a couple of deep breaths — breathe in to a count of three, out to a count of six. Then feel your feet, which will ground you back in reality.

All you’re trying to do here is buy time. It’s only when you quiet your physiology that you can think clearly and reflectively about how best to respond.

2. The next challenge in making good decisions is cultivating perspective. The primitive parts of our brains aren’t wired to take the future into consideration, and tend to seek out instead the most immediate source of gratification, or the route to the least pain and discomfort.

Too often, we use our prefrontal cortex to rationalize our shortsighted choices, rather than to foresee their future consequences. “It’s ok to have this dessert because I worked out this morning,” you tell yourself, even though it was your first workout in a month and your 10th dessert. Or: “I’ll put off that difficult work because I’ve just got to deal with these urgent emails” — only to find you’re too tired to get to the tougher stuff later.

The antidote is to ask yourself a simple question each time you’re contemplating a difficult decision: Which choice is going to add the greatest value and serve me best over time? Plainly, there are instances when you simply have to do what’s most urgent. But it’s also easy to kid yourself that you’ve always got urgent demands and never have prioritize time for what’s harder to do, but will truly add value.

One solution is to schedule your most important work as early as possible in the day, when you typically have the most energy and the fewest accumulated demands.

3. The highest challenge we all face is doing the right thing — especially when it doesn’t necessarily serve our immediate self-interest. Doing so requires knowing what you truly stand for. Then what you need most is conviction, because choosing the right thing may involve sacrifice and discomfort.

It’s the difference between doing what makes you feel good — a couple of beers can get you there — and doing what makes you feel good about yourself.

If you deeply value honesty, do you warn a client away from a product about which you have doubts, even if it means losing a sale? If you are committed to kindness and consideration of others, do you choose to help out a friend in need, even when you’re feeling exhausted or overburdened?

Once again, you can begin by asking yourself a simple question: What would I do here at my best? Meaning, “Who do you really want to be?” Intentionally embodying your values in your everyday behavior requires the courage to intentionally override your more primitive impulses.

Think for a moment about someone who recently triggered you — pushed you deep into negative emotions. How did you react? Did it get you what you really wanted? Was it consistent with the person you want to be?

We always have a choice about how to behave. The challenge in life is to keep upping our game.

Reprinted from HBR.org.