The Benefits Of Slowing Down In Life Ft. Ayamma Mohsin

This conversation is with Ayamma Mohsin, a psychotherapist who brings a gentle, compassionate energy to everything she does. We talk about slowing down, not as an aesthetic trend, but as a way to actually hear yourself again. I leave this chat feeling lighter, and I think you will too.

The moment everything clicked

Ayamma didn’t always know she wanted to be a therapist. She was on track to become a chartered accountant, a path that felt familiar because many in her family had taken it. But something shifted when she got to university and started exploring psychology, philosophy, writing. Then she began personal therapy herself while taking a counselling psychology course at the same time. She describes it as fireworks.

“I’d be sitting in class and be like, oh my God, there’s a word for the thing my therapist did,” she says. That convergence, theory meeting real inner work, made her realize this was it. She had a checklist: something about people, something with meaning, something that wouldn’t feel like the same day on repeat. Therapy ticked every box.

The Edinburgh lesson: slow down and get uncomfortable

Ayamma chose to do her Masters in Edinburgh, a decision sealed by an interview that focused entirely on her personal journey rather than just academics. Moving there wasn’t easy. She calls it the hardest and most wonderful thing she’s ever done. The program demanded deep personal transformation. You can’t sit with other people’s pain if you haven’t faced your own.

That experience taught her the value of slowing down. “I’m a very highly energetic person, very extroverted, lots of people, lots of friends, etc.,” she says. “I realized that to personally transform, to create space with yourself, to sit with yourself, you really need to slow down and you really need to get uncomfortable. You need to be friends with the discomfort.”

That uncomfortable slowing down is what she now actively advocates for, both in her own life and with her clients.

Where our need for speed really comes from

We unpack the hustle culture so many of us live inside. Ayamma points out that it’s not just personal ambition. It’s generational. Our families survived partition, displacement, financial instability. That survival mode got passed down. Even once we became more stable, the internal panic didn’t leave.

“We’re descendants of a partition. That’s something we don’t acknowledge,” she says. “That generation went into survival mode, and I think we’ve all inherited that survival mode. The sense of needing to keep earning more from that place of panic never stops.”

I see this in our language, in the constant warnings from elders about everything that could go wrong. It comes from fear, not from desire. And now our generation layers passion onto that panic. We want to do work we love, but we also feel we have to do it fast, turn it into something bigger, monetize it immediately. We skip the messy beginning, the not knowing, and that costs us our present.

“We are giving up our present for the sake of a future,” Ayamma says. “Your twenties are worth as much as your thirties. Why are you sacrificing this decade to build a later decade?”

The painful loop so many women get stuck in

For Desi women, this pressure is even heavier. We are trying to break the patriarchy our mothers faced, build careers, be boss babes, and also have families, also enjoy cooking, also get it all right. Ayamma calls it “identity failure” when we can’t balance it. We watch new mothers feel like just giving birth and raising a child isn’t enough, that they’re lagging behind.

“It’s so sad how you don’t enjoy that,” I say to her. “You don’t embrace your motherhood because you start thinking, this is not good enough, I need to be doing more.”

Ayamma agrees. We’re trying to do everything with the same intensity all the time. We can’t give ourselves permission to just be in one season of life. “We can’t prioritize because we can’t give ourselves: if we’re raising a child right now, it’s okay if we’re not working for a while. It’s okay if we give ourselves the time to come back to this,” she says.

And even when we want to pause, the external noise, the comments, the log kya kahenge, what will people say, creeps in. We’re running on external values and have no space left to even check in with ourselves.

Ten minutes of nothing is a radical act

So what does slowing down actually look like? Not the Instagram version with scented candles and a beautiful balcony. Ayamma is clear that this doesn’t require privilege. Anyone can carve out ten minutes. Put your phone in another room. Sit somewhere. Don’t do anything, don’t think, don’t even journal if you don’t have the capacity. Just notice what’s happening around you. Let your nervous system settle.

I share how during the pandemic, when the world stopped, my husband and I sat on our balcony and watched birds. We never had time for that before. That small stillness, no conversation even, was a form of healing. Ayamma had a similar experience recently at her ancestral village. No phone signals for days. “Three days in, my nervous system was calm enough to appreciate the sun and the birds and the sounds,” she says. The moment she returned to the city and her signals came back, she felt the split: present to absent in seconds.

The problem is we’ve created such a distance from our own voice that when you first try to sit with yourself, all you may feel is anxiety or a desperate urge to escape. It takes months of practice. But slowly you might notice your shoulders are tense, your jaw is clenched. That’s the beginning of connection.

And if you slip up, if you scroll first thing in the morning again, don’t become cruel to yourself. “The whole point is not to curate a certain version of life,” Ayamma says. “It’s to keep having that conversation with yourself. If it’s falling through the cracks, maybe a part of your mind can know it’s falling through the cracks right now and I need to eventually make space for it.”

Your emotions are not a problem to fix

One of the most striking things Ayamma observes in her work with women is how quickly we pathologise our feelings. We feel sad for six months and immediately think “mere sath kuch problem hai,” something is wrong with me. But she gently reminds us to look at what’s happening around us. The world is on fire. We lived through a pandemic that rewired us. Many people never recovered emotionally.

“There’s no hierarchy of emotions,” she says. “Happy is easier to sit with than sad, but that doesn’t mean sad is bad. A lot of the time, have you seen what’s going on in the world? It’s literally on fire. We were in a pandemic not long ago and we’ve forgotten that we were in a pandemic.”

We also carry the weight of our mothers, feminism, the new world we want to create, our own safety. So much is not in our control. Giving ourselves the grace to feel messy, to have dualities, is a quiet rebellion.

Boredom and the childlike part of you

Ayamma and I share a deep belief that boredom inspires creativity. When your brain isn’t constantly fed, ideas surface on their own. I tell her I will actively make sure my child experiences boredom, even if he whines. She says that’s how kids access that inventive, playful part of themselves, the part adults have suppressed with responsibilities and noise.

Art journaling, play, paint on your fingers, these are lighter tools to reach self-awareness. Therapy can be heavy, but creativity balances that. Ayamma is now shifting part of her work toward creativity and play, and starting a newsletter on Substack because she wants to reclaim writing and deeper connection away from the frantic pace of Instagram.

“Creativity over productivity any day,” she says. I feel that in my bones. This conversation is an invitation to legitimize your own creative desire, that dream you buried long ago. Even once a week, making space for it creates lightness.

A small, honest step

If you take nothing else from this episode, take this: stop being an to yourself, as Ayamma’s colleague says. Talk to yourself the way you would a friend. Notice the cruelty in your inner monologue and gently shift it. That alone is huge. And if you can, give yourself ten minutes of nothing today. Not to be productive, not to heal, but just to be. That’s the good stuff.