What if Less Frequent is Enough?

WALKING ALONG THE SHORE IN DONEGAL, IRELAND

The other day I was talking to a friend about what it means to live more simply.

It's a prominent topic these days in the haze of overwhelm—how to find more time within the relentless beat of the modern world of constant doing.

We increasingly find ourselves experimenting with detoxing, downsizing, sabbaticals, retreats, and a way of minimalist-being to simplify our lives.

The "Slow" Movement has also taken hold, with things like Slow Travel, advocating for spending weeks or months in one place instead of rushing from one city to the next to "see it all." There is a trend towards Slow Fashion, buying fewer, better-quality clothes. There is the art of decluttering, or "KonMari," curating your life so you only have what brings you joy.

The core principle is doing things with more intention and less haste.

Turns out, the idea of “less is more” is not just about doing fewer things, it’s also about doing things less often.

It’s about lowering the repeats of how often we loop the same thoughts through our minds, how often we ping-pong emails, or how often we see a friend.

Have you ever noticed how this relentless cycle of busyness often leads you to re-act rather than act consciously?

Are you aware how often you check the screen of your phone to make sure you didn’t miss a message, ask your spouse to cut the grass, or call on relentless repeat when trying to reach a person via phone?

Do you give everyone the chance to get back to you within reasonable timing - a crucial point, since “reasonable” is so subjective. Are you impatient, as I often have to admit to, wanting things to resolve themselves right now?

How is this working for you?

How does your insistence to push forward impact your overall energy?

Are you perhaps wearing yourself out by never backing down, accelerating your anxiousness about wanting to force life along? Are you developing inner dialogues as to why others are so inconsiderate of your time, not aligning with the rhythm you are trying to set?

What about you being on the receiving end of someone pushing for an answer before you are ready to respond?

Do you feel suffocated by the pressure to act? Does it raise anger and resentment in you the more you feel rushed along?

What if We Are Acting on a Learned Reflex?

In our high-paced world, we can easily find ourselves constantly responding to emails and checking screens for alerts (if you've checked your screen time, you might, like me, be convinced it can't possibly be right).

It seems like the more often we repeat our interactions, the more we struggle to be present, leading to only superficial engagement.

It’s like when you have meetings for the sake of it, while an email might be enough, or when you meet with a friend who is on a repetitive weekly rant about the same topics, not caring about a conversation, but rather a passive audience.

In many workplaces I was in, the habit of wolfing down food while running between tasks was a twisted status symbol, as if being too busy to attend to your break meant you were more important.

What if we have conditioned ourselves to act upon automated reflexes?

What if we've become dependent on filling every unscheduled moment?

What if we are losing control over how often we search for new input?

What if our reflexes are merely that though—a learned rapid response?

What if we can un-learn this means of responding as much as we made it habitual?

What if this means we hold the key to come back to a more digestible, intentional rhythm?

What We Lose When Constantly Upping the Pace

High-paced repetition seems to make us exponentially more anxious for the next ping. It’s very similar to any addiction operating under the law of diminishing returns. We require ever-increasing doses for less satisfaction.

Essentially, more repeats make us want more repeats.

In this non-stop action mode, the stillness necessary for our systems to recover gets suffocated. It's as if we take away the space needed to digest what we have experienced.

What if there is a silver lining making the case for lowering the relentless beat?

Have you ever noticed how a solution can come almost by itself when you let the anxiety of needing one subside, allowing your nervous system to regain calmness?

Have you observed how breathing space can bring more impactful results than constantly being on it, as if leaving incubation time?

This idea is at the heart of the Zen concept of "Ma," a Japanese term for the empty space or pause. It’s the intentional space that gives form and meaning to the whole. It's like the silence between musical notes—that silence is what makes the music powerful.

A Zen master would argue that the pause between your actions, thoughts, and conversations is where true understanding and clarity arise. Without it, everything blurs into a meaningless noise.

What if the space you're suffocating from your schedule is urgently needed for creative sparks to materialize?

What if that moment to process lets you respond with clarity to a challenging situation after the innate agitation has worn off?

The famed pianist Arthur Rubinstein captured this beautifully: “The unfortunate thing is human nature’s tendency to become so familiar with the miracle that we develop a vicious way of taking everything for granted.”

What if seeing a friend less often heightens the impact of exchange, the way, as the proverb goes, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder"?

What if quiet times in between the action are the key to picking up the messages of our intuition?

What if the law of diminishing returns also works in reverse?

Henry David Thoreau famously stated that "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

What if we regain life by deliberately choosing to take down the repetition of what we do?

The Win-Win of Conscious Rhythms

What if we could be more efficient and impactful by consciously choosing how often we have the same conversation, repeat a meeting, a chore, or write a follow-up email?

Have you ever thought that you might actually be doing people a favor by taking things down a notch?

What if responding less often, while doing so more intentionally, is a win-win situation for both sides?

Maybe meeting every other week makes an exchange more thoughtful, creating space for solutions to reveal themselves more impactfully.

Maybe calling a friend less often brings new depth and input to the table instead of just rambling for the habitual sake of it.

Our brains operate on a "use it or lose it" principle, but they also need downtime. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a set of brain regions that becomes active when we're not focused on a specific task—when we're daydreaming or simply letting our minds wander.

This state is crucial for creative problem-solving and self-awareness.

Constantly "doing" and reacting prevents the DMN from engaging, which is what we need to make deeper connections and process information.

Decreasing constant busyness opens up recovery time needed to build resilience. It gives our nervous system a chance to calm down before it gets riled up again. It can crucially take anxiety from an underlying chronic state in our life to a reaction that we recover from after it is triggered by an experience.

Nature itself shows that sustained, relentless activity often leads to collapse:

Ecosystems rely on cycles of growth, rest, and renewal. Think of a farmer who lets a field lie fallow for a season.

What If There’s an Effect of Expanding Returns?

When hiking in remote areas with no network coverage, friends and I have often commented on how nervous we feel on the first day without constant pings from our devices.

Yet, we always surprise ourselves with how quickly the limited frequency of notifications lowers an underlying anxiety.

As the external input gets less, there suddenly is an unexpected amount of time available that had been buried under the constant buzz.

The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke expressed this fear perfectly when he wrote, "I see with horror how one dulls oneself to the most magnificent things through constant interaction and being surrounded by them."

This shift from constant busyness to forced pauses (network coverage often only in more elaborate huts, if at all) is beautifully captured by explorer and author Erling Kagge. In his book Silence, in the Age of Noise, he reflects that, “We do have enough time. Life is long, if we listen to ourselves often enough, and look up.”

It's an urgent reminder that slowing down the beats is what allows us to look up.

What if less repetition allows for a higher quality outcome overall?

What if looking up every now and then, instead of checking your email inbox on a frantically repetitive rhythm, will make you more efficient overall?

What if your attention to answer a request is sharper to the degree that it has a chance to recover?

What if we decidedly enhance our physical well-being by pushing back against the constant acceleration?

What if by lowering the frequency of our activities and interactions, we get to unlock deeper and more meaningful exchanges?

Have you asked yourself:

• What happens when you lower the frequency of doing something?

• How often are you thinking the same thoughts?

• Do you need to check your messages as often as you do?

• What's one area of your life where you feel like you could consciously choose "less" to create "more"?