Hold your horses! Discover the secret of slow

By Hugh O'Neill

updated 4:52 p.m. ET Sept. 5, 2008

It was one of those shining days. The azaleas were peeking out as spring came to the Chesapeake. I was in my car, tearing it up in hopeful duet with Canadian crooner Michael Bublé, when I noticed something interesting. Throughout "Come Fly With Me," I was just a little bit out in front. Bublé held each note a nanosecond longer than I did and waited just an extra half-instant before sliding into the next phrase. Though my voice was every bit as velvety and my attitude even more ring-a-ding-ding, I was always a shade faster than the master. Hmmm ... a voice inside me said.

Later, that night, I noted Letterman's patience as he ambled through a scripted joke. His easy pace, his confidence, his willingness to meander toward the punch line seemed central to the mirth. Hmmm... the same voice purred.

And then, sleepless with incipient insight, I stumbled on the last note of my eureka chord in Bob Dylan's memoirs. "I did everything fast," wrote the troubadour of his early struggles to marshal his skills. "I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say."

"Aha!" I muttered to the 2 a.m. silence. All these years, I had been searching for the same thing every man desires: fast answers to all of my dilemmas. And therein lay the problem. Apparently, slower is the secret to success.

While I've got no beef with the easy-goers — the meditators with their mantras, the slow foodies with their local yams — let's be clear that, from its first flicker, my slow wasn't theirs. No, my slow was less about savoring than succeeding. I didn't want to stop and smell the roses. I wanted to tear out the garden and replace it with a sweet post-and-beam cabin in which I could pursue every conceivable form of excellence and pleasure. And so, in the past few years, I've traveled my own private road to slow in search of more: more money, more muscle, more laughs, maybe even more satisfaction. I've found that professionals across many disciplines had found that immense benefits accrue to those who ease off the accelerator. This is how I left the hurried go-go-go path to which we've been habituated in search of the most highly evolved man I could possibly be ... at any speed.

Romance: Score slowly
Mae West was right that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly... very slowly. "Women l-o-o-o-n-n-n-n-g for slower sex," says sex therapist Lori Buckley, PsyD, of Pasadena, California, as emphatically as possible. "Often, the first thing to disappear from a sexual relationship is the long, lingering, teasing kiss. Lots of women miss the run-up to arousal." If you want great sex on a Saturday night, Buckley suggests starting with brief, soft, tender kisses throughout the day, offered as if there's no agenda. Try the back of the neck.

Slow is also female-friendly once the cuddling commences. "A slower penetration and withdrawal often leads to more stimulation for both her G-spot and clitoris," says Buckley. And don't just slow your hips. "If I could give men one piece of physical advice that would improve their partner's pleasure, it would be to slow down their fingers and tongues."

Of course, it's tough to go slowly when Barney is almost over and the kids will run in any minute. But slower sex is a win-win. In one of nature's sweet coincidences, what appears to be unselfishness (deference to her arousal rate) is actually self-serving. If you can render her pie-eyed with lust, your chances of getting another at-bat soon — maybe even later, after SportsCenter — spike. Incidentally, if you'd ever like to keep the party going, remember this: "If, just before orgasm, a man slows and deepens his breathing, he can delay ejaculation," according to Buckley, thus prolonging the pleasure for both of you.

Wealth: Succeed slowly
"The secret of investing is to get rich slowly," says Jeff Fischer, cofounder of the Complete Growth Investor, an investment advisory service. Our gender's need for speed can undermine our plans. High levels of testosterone may make men impulsive and prone to trading too frequently. A study by the University of California at Davis showed that, on average, female investors outpaced men by 1.4 percentage points a year, mainly because they traded less often. "Men see the market as a game, and our taste for gambling leads us to chase the quick score," says Fischer.

Instead of jumping in and out of the market, dollar-cost average your way in. Every month, without thinking, put the same amount of money into a well-balanced index fund or two. "You'll end up buying more shares when they're cheap, and fewer when they're pricey," explains Fischer.

Consider this counterintuitive thought. "Do your best not to take advantage of the streaming information that's everywhere," suggests Fischer. "Don't check quotes every hour or day, or even every week if you can help it." Remember the wisdom of Warren Buffett, who aspired not to trade. A celebrated study done a few years ago found that successful traders didn't do as well after they switched over to online trading. Why? Overconfidence and "the illusions of knowledge and control" led them to trade too often, wrote the authors.

"If you're confident enough to admit you know nothing and plod tortoiselike along," says Fischer, "you'll end up with a significant net worth."

Health: Breathe slowly
Doctors who embrace both Western medicine and Eastern healing often point to slower breathing as the simplest way to better health. "Humans have two nervous systems: an accelerator, or the sympathetic nervous system, and a brake, or the parasympathetic nervous system," says Mehmet Oz, MD, director of the Cardiovascular Institute at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and coauthor, with his wife, Lisa Oz, of a new CD on optimal breathing. "In our hectic lives, we spend more time hitting the gas than the brake, and our breathing becomes quick and shallow." Consequently, we don't draw optimal amounts of oxygen deep into our lungs, down to the smallest airways, the alveoli, where oxygen exchange is most efficient. "If our breathing is quick and shallow, our bodies release less nitrous oxide, a vessel dilator that helps oxygenate our organs and tissues," says Dr. Oz. The fix is called belly breathing.

Place your hand lightly over your belly button. If you're like most bad breathers, when you breathe in, your stomach goes in. Wrong! It should puff outward a bit. If you fill your lungs fully, your diaphragm, which sits between your lungs and your stomach, is pushed down by your expanding lungs, forcing your gut out. On exhalation, your diaphragm moves back and, in the process, helps your lungs move air and your heart pump blood. Practice breathing so that your abs rise toward your hand on slow inhalation and deflate as you slowly exhale. Start small. Make a point of doing some belly breathing now and then, maybe when you feel especially stressed. Over time, try to add a few more daily sessions. Gradually, you may teach your body to take care of itself by breathing more slowly. (If I didn't know how angry it would make you, I'd recommend studying meditation and breathing technique. But never mind.) The list of health benefits that radiate outward from slower, deeper breathing is long. A study done at Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago, shows a correlation between how much time patients spent practicing slow breathing and a drop in systolic blood pressure. "It's clear that by managing the stress response," says Dr. Oz, "proper breathing can slow your heart rate and control hypertension. It also enhances lymphatic drainage, the removal of toxins from the blood."

Nutrition: Eat slowly
Slowing down can help you shed the 20 pounds standing between you and the ramrod you were when you played strong-side safety at A&M.

Our stomachs are lined with nerve endings called stretch receptors. When our guts are filled by that filet with gorgonzola, they signal the brain to step away from the feeding trough. "But there's a time lag between the signal and the translation of the message by the brain," says David Katz, MD, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. So our forks keep right on moving.

You can cut calories by eating slowly, especially toward the end of a meal. Pause now and then to tell a charming story about how you crushed a colleague today. Get up and walk around. Use a smaller spoon. Somehow, slow your intake. "There's also reason to believe that the more pleasure you take in each bite, the more full you feel," says Dr. Katz. "If you chew food well and take care to savor it, you may want less."

Want some numbers? Research done at the University of Rhode Island at Kingston found that, on average, people who ate slowly consumed almost 70 fewer calories per meal than people who didn't. Multiply that by three squares a day and you'll drop 20 pounds by this time next year.

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