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As she took the resolution to slowdown in order to speed up, Sarah Fleihan, Creator Strategy Manager at TikTok MENA, wonders why is she so obsessed with speed.

Why am I so obsessed with speed?

I have been asking myself this question for the past year every time I sit down exhausted.

We now live in a fast-paced world where we are always chasing after everything. I want to be faster, more efficient, and more productive in all that I do. I hustle and jam things together in the hopes of getting more done in a day. I'm interested in what's going on in the construction industry, the stock market, NFTs, startups, global warming, politics, my family, and, of course, my job. I'm hyper-focused on hurrying through every section of the day because I'm terrified that I won't be able to keep up with the pace. Although there are 24 hours a day, I make a to-do list that needs 30 hours. I even tried home meditation and ended up searching for relevant videos that were a little more than five minutes long.

Even mindfulness meditation sessions are broken up into smaller chunks of time. And this is all became so stressful this year that I came to a point where I was unable to deliver to my standards and simply unhappy.

But that's because, in our day, speed is rewarded by performance appraisal and even our own awareness that we're doing something right. We're under pressure to perform at a significant level because if we don't, someone else will.

Another issue is that we don't know how to be motivated without simultaneously being anxious. Unless we put pressure on ourselves and rush, we don't know how to be smart and efficient at work. While it's true that short episodes of stress may be a healthy motivator, this stress must come to an end before it can have a greater impact that may be hard to reverse.

Many of us, on the other hand, do not imagine being able to slow down. We aim to be millionaires and able to retire at age of 35, forgetting that what we are insuring is to be burnt out by that age when we should have been at the peak of our health and well-being. Again, we are pressured to conform in order to be successful and unique.

Here is what I picked up from all of this…

It’s not a bad thing to be unique and successful. But what’s the point if you don’t have the desire? What’s the point if you’re only motivated to succeed because others are far ahead of you in the race? What is the point if you are running trying to catch up with something that will be irrelevant to your own personal growth and long-term happiness?

So, as we transcend to 2022, I have decided to do nothing that doesn't feed into my own purpose or desire; leave some space for creativity, playfulness, and time to look around me.

I will slow down so I can speed up. Let’s see how that goes!