Slow down

Slow down

“Slow down.” You probably know this phrasal verb. If you tell someone to “slow down,” you’re telling that person to go more slowly.

If you’re in a car with a teenage driver, you might tell him—and it’s usually the boys who want to speed—you might tell him: “slow down, you’re going too fast.”

If you’re talking to an English speaker, and the person is talking really fast, you might ask the person to please “slow down.” That means, don’t speak quite so fast.

But like most phrasal verbs, you can use “slow down” with an object. And when you do that, what it means is this: you take some action to cause something else to go slower. Take some action to cause something else to go slower.

You can slow a car down. You can slow a car down by tapping the brakes or by downshifting. You take some action to cause something else to go slower.

Most governments and central banks are happy when the economy is growing: it means the country enjoys higher living standards overall from one year to the next. But if the economy grows too quickly, inflation can get out of control and that’s bad. So if the economy is growing quickly, and if prices are rising, the central bank might try to slow the economy down. The central bank will take some action—usually increasing interest rates—they’ll take some action to make something else (the economy) go slower. They raise interest rates to slow the economy down.

By the same token, you might want to slow a project down. Why would you want to do that? Let’s say you’re doing a home renovation and you expect it to take six months. You’re planning to pay the contractors when they reach each milestone. And you’re ready to make the payments once a month for six months. But let’s say they’re going really fast, and they’re hitting the milestones faster than you expected, faster than you had budgeted for. You might want to slow the project down so that you don’t have to pay the bills quite as fast.

Or, you might be implementing new processes at work. They might be great—new technologies, new processes, whatever—but it takes time for people to get used to new systems. Maybe you don’t want to introduce too much change all at once. So you might want to slow the project down. You might want to deliberately make the project go less fast, so that people can have more time to adapt to the changes.

You can slow things down in your own body. Do you meditate? One thing you might do when you meditate is to slow your breathing down. You would take action to make your breathing slower. Deep, slow breath in, deep slow exhale. I’m not into meditating, but that’s one thing you might do.

Weight-loss drugs do a few things to your body. One of the things they do is this: they slow your digestion down. Don’t ask me how they do it! But digestion is a process. If it goes quickly, the food will leave your stomach and you might get hungry again soon. If it goes slowly, you’ll feel full longer. So the weight-loss drugs slow your digestion down. They purposefully reduce the speed of digestion.

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