‘The world needs a wash and a week’s rest’

Why do we need a slower life?

The book describes the accelerating and pathological pace of modern life and the chronic exhaustion, stress and dissatisfaction that follows. Whenever I ask friends or clients how they're feeling they invariably reply, "I'm so tired!". The poet W. H. Auden diagnosed our age as 'The Age of Anxiety' – we're collectively racing ahead towards some unknown goal, at a pace that's unrelenting and unsustainable. I also agree with Auden when he concludes 'The world needs a wash and a week's rest'.

Out of the alternative ways of being you describe – Hinduism, Daoism, Buddhism and Judaism – what are you most drawn to?

I've been studying Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist thought for over thirty years, and was raised in the Jewish tradition. There's a beautiful line in the Talmud that I live by, which asks and answers 'Who is wise? He who learns from all people.' In many ways this book is the distillation of my dialogues with these Wisdom Traditions. 

Psychology tends to focus on the cognitive and affective dimensions of life and experience, Wisdom Traditions describe more expansive and profoundly transformative metacognitive and 'transcognitive' states of consciousness – and these are what I am most drawn to studying, experiencing and understanding.

You argue against personal responsibility but what can we change personally to slow down?

I wouldn't say that I'm against personal responsibility per say, but I'm certainly wary of our culture's current fixation on 'resilience', which can risk ignoring significant socio-economic and even environmental factors. Rather than working towards making the world a less stressful place to live, we might focus excessively on trying to make people less 'stress-reactive'. It's interesting to note that we've even started exporting this approach beyond psychology into ecology - looking for ways to enhance 'environmental resilience', rather than more directly addressing or changing our destructive patterns of behaviour.    

How has being a psychologist shaped your life?

I started reading Freud when I was an adolescent, and his pessimism really resonated with me at that particular psychosocial stage. When I was studying Psychology at university, I was drawn more to the optimism of Maslow, the idea and ideals of Human Potential and Self-Actualisation. 

Now I'm firmly in Middle Age and I find I'm gravitating towards Transpersonal Psychology – exploring the value of non-ordinary states of consciousness and pursuing deeper questions concerning meaning and purpose in life. Psychology accompanies me through life, offering helpful lenses to look through and achieve focus.      

Why does psychology matter?

Psychology gives us an opportunity to study the mind, to consider and explore consciousness. I've always been fascinated by our cognitive capacity to think about thinking, to wonder why we wonder why.

How do you live slower?

My relationship with technology has changed significantly over recent years. I consciously quit obsessively checking emails, producing status updates and checking for likes, loves or replies on various social media platforms. I've tried to rediscover and recover a more human and humane pace of life. I go on more nature walks with my family and I love to visit slow towns and cities. Part of my interest in Environmental Psychology concerns 'the pace of place.' I devote a section of the book to the restorative effects of visiting Ludlow, which was the UK's first official 'slow town'.

What would you tell younger Elliot?

Don't take your lecturers' words 'as gospel' and be sure find your own authentic path through the discipline. When I was a psychology undergraduate in the early Nineties, I was told, quite emphatically and dismissively, by one of my personal tutors that 'mindfulness is not psychology, its spirituality!' 

Barely a decade later, it became far more mainstream – my catalogues from the BPS Clinical Division often contained several pages devoted to mindfulness-based approaches. It was only after my degree that I discovered the BPS Transpersonal Psychology Section and found a great many kindred spirits.

What would you like your students to know/appreciate?

I would like my students to realise that they have a voice, a choice and opportunity to shape the future discipline of psychology. Some may argue that psychology isn't a unified, mature discipline, that it's preparadigmatic – but I believe psychology is inherently multiparadigmatic and therein lies its core strength and appeal. If psychology is to remain relevant, it needs to pursue interdisciplinarity and cultivate cross-cultural capabilities. Psychology is a product of our culture and cultures don't remain static.

If you were starting out as a student again, would you do something different?

When I was a student, the internet was still dial-up and essays were handwritten, but technology was already transforming our lives. Around this time John Suler was starting to conceive Cyberpsychology. After reading Suler's work I dearly wished I'd kept more detailed autoethnographic notes of my time spent in chat rooms, the swiftly changing and expanding landscapes of the virtual world, and the birth of the metaverse.