With downshifting, you will be able to focus on achieving your life goals, gain personal fulfillment and build long-term positive relations with other people.
Sounds great?
You will not have to kill yourself any longer in pursuit of economic success. Instead, your life will be more satisfying, healthier and less work-focused.
‘The trouble with the rat race is, even if you win, you are still a rat.’
Lily Tomlin
Why do we need downshifting?
If your answer to all of these questions below is Yes’, you should try downshifting. This will help you to find balance between work and doing in your free time whatever makes you happy.
- Have you ever thought about living a simple life?
- Are you tired of the rat race, while working in one of the world’s largest cities like Shanghai, New York, Paris, London or Tokyo, because the modern world is all about being obsessed with the rat race?
- Do you want to escape from work-and-spend-money cycle?
- Do you want to reduce stress?
- Have you ever thought about not having to work overtime and coming back home late from work?
- Do you feel that your life is too cluttered because you own too many things living in a small apartment due to high real estate prices?
With downshifting, you will be able to focus on achieving your life goals, gain personal fulfillment and build long-term positive relations with other people.
You will not have to kill yourself any longer in pursuit of economic success. Instead, your life will be more satisfying, healthier and less work-focused.
How to start downshifting?
Downshifting helps you to live a simply life in the long-term perspective, but the change happens gradually.
Basic principles of downshifting include:
- Maintaining a healthy relationship between all aspects of life.
- Slowing down the life’s pace.
- Spending time meaningfully.
- Not spending money wastefully.
- Enjoying time in the company of the loved ones.
- Concentrating more on connection to life, food and places.
Downshifting at work
The work-life balance philosophy is way more important than the philosophy of work-to-live. Try job downshifting.
If you are not fully satisfied with the place where you work, despite a decent salary, try to find a job with fewer hours worked or less responsibility, shorter commuting time, flexible working hours or non-traditional work arrangements. Downshifting may require a voluntary reduction in your income, but instead, you will gain extra free time for the important things in life.
To apply the gradual approach, instead of quitting your full-time job on the spot and doing completely nothing at home, you can try to find a part-time job instead. You may also take a half-day off every week or refuse to work overtime.
Downshifting your career
Another way to downshift your life is job downshifting.
You lower your aspirations to become the wealthiest person in the world, get a promotion at work or achieve higher social status in the eyes of your colleagues. You choose to do gardening of attending another boring business dinner with your co-workers.
Because, the higher you belong in the corporate hierarchy, the more responsibilities, extracurricular activities, frequent business travels, more stress and long working hours your new position will require. You downshift your professional career because you prefer to have more free time to read a book, spend with your family or simply do nothing for a while.
With more leisure time and lower income, you will also reduce your spending levels by not living a hectic lifestyle.
Downshifting your spending
Being a conscious customer and staying away from consumptionism is the key to shopping downshifting.
Instead of overbuying goods and services to achieve personal satisfaction, you should stick to purchasing the necessities. Do not let others persuade you that social status and happiness can only be achieved by material possessions. Buying high-quality products, rather than focusing on quantity and brands, will allow you to minimize stress and dissatisfaction resulting from a wrong purchase.
When you live simply, you will be able to reduce expenses, therefore you will manage to live on less income and consequently work fewer hours.
Downshifting the place of residence
Living in an urban area can give anyone a headache due to the busy pace of life, constant crowds of people and never-ending stress.
For home downshifting, you can relocate to a smaller town where rent and real estate prices are cheaper, so you do not have to work really hard in a big city to afford expensive rent. Another way is to move out to a rural community and work online because the access to the Internet nowadays is widespread.
In conclusions, downshifting is indeed a great concept. It will help you to slow down your life’s pace and get a better grip on the work-life balance in favor of life.
Downshifting will have a powerful impact on your physical health, mental well-being as well as relationships with colleagues, relatives and friends.
Give a slower way of living a try, relocate and embrace living with less, so you can create a more relaxed and fulfilling life.
