Slow living tends to get filed under lifestyle aesthetics, something associated with cottages and unhurried mornings rather than hard data. Two studies looking at pace and presence from very different angles, one spanning dozens of countries, one tracking daily life moment by moment, suggest slowing down carries real, measurable benefits, both physical and emotional.
The clearest evidence on pace comes from a 1999 study by Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan, published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. The researchers measured the pace of life in downtown areas across 31 countries using three concrete indicators, average walking speed, how quickly a simple transaction got completed at the post office, and the accuracy of public clocks, combining them into a single pace-of-life index for each country. A faster overall pace of life was significantly correlated with higher rates of coronary heart disease, and with higher smoking rates. This replicated an earlier study by Levine and colleagues covering 36 U.S. cities, which found the same significant link between a city’s pace of life and its rate of heart disease deaths. The connection between hurry and physical health risk wasn’t a one-off finding tied to a single country or culture, it showed up again across a much larger, more varied international sample.
A second study helps show that slowing down doesn’t just protect against harm, it actively produces more of the good feeling a moment has to offer. In a 2012 study by Paul Jose, Bee Lim, and Fred Bryant, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, 101 participants reported their positive events, their savoring, and their happy mood every day for 30 consecutive days, generating enough data to model how these three things related moment to moment. Positive events did predict happier mood, but the researchers found that savoring, the deliberate act of pausing and lingering on a good moment, was a genuine mechanism in between, not just a byproduct. Roughly half of the total emotional boost that a positive event produced ran specifically through savoring it, rather than through the event alone. People who habitually paused to relish good moments, rather than moving past them quickly, got measurably more emotional benefit out of the same positive events than people who didn’t.
Together, these two studies point toward slow living as something with real consequences on both ends. Levine and Norenzayan’s research shows that a hurried pace of life carries a genuine physical health cost, tracked and replicated across dozens of countries and cities rather than a single sample. Jose, Lim, and Bryant’s research shows that slowing down in the moment, specifically pausing to savor something good rather than rushing past it, captures roughly half of the emotional payoff that moment had to offer in the first place. Between the two, rushing looks less like a neutral tradeoff for efficiency and more like a habit with a real cost on one end, and a real, forfeited benefit on the other.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Levine and Norenzayan’s research is correlational at the level of entire countries, and faster-paced places also tend to be wealthier and more urbanized, factors that could contribute to heart disease risk alongside pace itself. Jose, Lim, and Bryant’s study relied on a fairly young sample, averaging 21.5 years old, and while the savoring mechanism is well-supported by their data, the exact size of the effect could look different in an older or more varied population.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful case for slowing down, not as an aesthetic preference, but as something with measurable stakes. A hurried pace of life tracks with real physical health risk across cultures. And in the smaller, daily moments, the good feeling a moment can offer is only half realized if it’s rushed past rather than savored.