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Every week, I pour my heart into these words to make your caregiving journey a little lighter and less lonely. Many of you have shared how these stories have brought comfort, perspective, or even a smile on a hard day.

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There’s a military mantra that’s usually attributed to the elite Navy SEALs: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” I’ve found it to be every bit as true in dementia care as it has been in my martial arts training and teaching.

It seems contradictory if we look at the basics: how can going slowly equate to being fast? If two cars are on a racetrack and one is going 30 MPH and the other is going 60 MPH, the faster one will get there sooner.

But life isn’t a race track. Life is a backed-up freeway on-ramp at rush hour.

Or maybe life is more like a horror movie! You know how they all go: the terrified person is rushing to their car, tripping over every tree root, stone, and their own two feet along the way. When they finally make it to their car, they are racing so fast that they drop their car keys, accidentally kick them under the car, realize they brought the wrong keys, run back to the house, and try again. It’s a good thing horror movie villains don’t run, right?

(Also, did I just reference car keys? I think I just dated myself and my horror movies) 🤣

Our movie victims could learn a lot from the Navy SEALs and other soldiers who have figured out that slowing down the steps of a process will speed up the completion of it.

Want to hear an example of how I botched that lesson? Last week, I had an appointment with the Social Security Administration office to become my mom’s official representative so that I could get all of her tax forms. Her dementia has progressed to the point where I need to take care of all of that now.

I was running a couple minutes behind, thinking about how I could make up a few minutes on the way there and carefully mapping out the route in my head as I weaved through traffic like an Indy race car driver. Halfway there, I realized I forgot the primary document that I needed to present in order to complete the process.

Not only did I lose my driving time, but I also had to spend about 30 minutes on hold with the government before I could get someone who could reschedule my appointment. I also lost precious days to get her tax form to the accountant. That stacked a load of stress onto my day that I did not need. Why? Because I skipped the 5-second step where I made sure I had what I needed for the appointment. I was going so quickly that my mistake cost me a lot of time.

That kind of situation gets magnified when we’re working directly with someone who has dementia. The first concern is the speed of your speech. As the language center of the brain is affected by dementia, the ability to process speech slows way down. If you are speaking quickly, you may not be giving the person time and space to understand. Are you speaking slowly enough to allow for comprehension? Do you need to leave empty space in the conversation after a sentence so that the person has time to process? Sometimes people with dementia are confused because you haven’t allotted time for them to put your words together in their own way.

Now think about how that too-fast energy feels. Have you been around a person who talks a mile a minute? The kind of person who everyone jokes about: “how many cups of coffee did she have today?!” It’s jarring to be around them, isn’t it? Now stack that frantic energy on top of processing things through dementia. If the people traveling through life at breakneck speed are agitating to caregivers, how must it feel to someone with Alzheimer’s disease?

A last point: when we rush, we tend to only focus on the task to be accomplished. We lose track of all of the little steps along the way. The person we’re trying to help gets lost in the rush to check a task off the list. Care becomes about accomplishing an objective rather than helping someone we love. Giving in to the overwhelm and anxiety of rushing steals any joy and personal touches from the process.

Caregivers’ lives are packed with the things that trigger our need to rush: not enough time in the day, frustrations with communication, medical appointments, financial difficulty, care concerns, and lots of tough emotions. So we speed up, and everything seems to get worse: not just your day or your ability to complete a task, but your ability to work with, understand, and be understood by your loved one.

What if we changed our perspective, though? What if we could see frustration, overwhelm, and anxiety as the parts of our selves saying that we need to slow down, not speed up? When you’re having “one of those days,” can you view that as a message from your body to step back, take a deep breath, and slow everything down? Your breathing, heart rate, rate of speaking, and ability to listen and respond will all be changed for the better.

When you slow down, you will move through the care tasks smoothly and correctly. When you do that, you’ll cover more ground quickly, making fewer mistakes, and it may even be more enjoyable.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Now, go care for your loved one like a Navy SEAL!