There’s something quietly fascinating about the way previous generations lived. No push notifications. No meal kit deliveries. No ten-tab anxiety spiral at midnight. They moved through their days at a pace that felt proportionate to human capacity, and it turns out a lot of what they did without thinking twice, we’re now rediscovering through research.
Slow living is a mindset and a social movement that encourages people to make choices intentionally and to avoid living at a constant fast pace, promoting a focus on enjoyment rather than speed or efficiency. What’s striking is that this isn’t some new wellness invention. It’s largely what our grandparents practiced as a default. Here are six of their most underrated habits – and why they hold up today.
1. Cooking Meals at Home, from Scratch
For most of the twentieth century, eating out was an occasional treat, not the norm. In 1900, only about two percent of meals were eaten out, and most families had dinner together. Compare that to today, where convenience food and takeout have become deeply embedded in daily routines, and the shift in health outcomes becomes harder to ignore.
Poor dietary quality, including high intakes of ultraprocessed food and food eaten away from home, is associated with an array of adverse health outcomes including increased BMI, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Home food preparation offers an affordable strategy for reducing ultraprocessed food intake, and several studies have found that increased home cooking is associated with increased intake of fruits and vegetables and overall diet quality.
Research from a large population-based cohort study found that people consuming home-cooked meals more than five times per week, compared with those eating them fewer than three times, were roughly a quarter less likely to have excess body fat and significantly less likely to have overweight BMI. The numbers matter, but so does the habit. A strong majority of people find cooking to be more stress-relieving than stressful. That’s not a trivial benefit.
2. Sitting Down Together to Eat
Our grandparents didn’t just cook – they ate together. The dinner table wasn’t optional. It was the daily checkpoint, the place where news got shared, arguments got aired, and the day was wrapped up in company. Today, that ritual is often replaced by solo scrolling and eating over a keyboard.
Most people believe that eating with others is better for their mental health than eating alone, with conversation, camaraderie, and the chance to connect among the key reasons. This isn’t just sentiment. The social dimension of mealtimes has real psychological weight, and researchers are increasingly treating shared meals as a meaningful form of social connection rather than just a feeding habit.
For a large majority of people surveyed, health is a stated reason they plan to cook more – with men and parents of young children especially motivated to get back into the kitchen. Bringing people back to the table might be the simplest step toward that goal.
3. Walking Everywhere, Daily
Before the car became central to everyday life, walking wasn’t exercise – it was just transportation. People walked to the shop, to a neighbor’s house, to work. The idea of “fitting in steps” would have seemed genuinely puzzling. Today, that basic physical habit has become something we have to schedule.
Walking regularly has been associated with a reduced risk of chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and dementia, and studies also suggest that walking may help reduce stress and improve cognitive performance, both because of the exercise and the time spent outdoors and in nature.
Regular walkers have up to roughly a third lower risk of type 2 diabetes compared to inactive people. Most adults see major benefits from around five thousand to seven thousand steps daily, or at least one hundred and fifty minutes per week. These are modest numbers. Our grandparents likely hit them before lunch.
4. Spending Time Outdoors as a Default
Being outside wasn’t a wellness strategy a few generations ago – it was simply where life happened. Gardening, hanging laundry, sitting on the porch, tending animals. Time outdoors was woven into the texture of the day. Today, the average American spends roughly ninety percent of their life indoors, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A study published in Scientific Reports found that health benefits significantly increase with at least one hundred and twenty minutes per week spent in nature. That’s not a huge ask. Spending time outdoors activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s ability to relax, and research has shown that nature-rich environments help reduce mental distress in as little as ten minutes.
A thirty-minute visit to a park can improve heart health, circulation, and lower cholesterol, blood glucose, and blood pressure. There’s something almost frustratingly simple about that finding. The outdoors itself is the intervention.
5. Going to Bed When It Got Dark – and Without Screens
Our grandparents followed the rhythm of daylight more closely than we do. When the sun went down, the pace of the day wound down with it. Dim lamps, a book, maybe some quiet conversation – and then bed. The concept of a glowing screen in the bedroom at midnight simply didn’t exist.
Blue light emitted by phones, tablets, and laptops suppresses melatonin, the hormone responsible for helping you fall and stay asleep, and using screens within an hour of bedtime significantly delays REM sleep and shortens total sleep duration.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in March 2025, examining screen use among nearly forty thousand university students in Norway, found a link between more screen time and worse sleep – with each one-hour increase of screen time after going to bed tied to a significantly higher chance of experiencing insomnia symptoms. Most adults need seven to nine hours of sleep each night for optimal mental health and physical functioning. The screen-free bedtime routine our grandparents observed by default is now something sleep specialists actively prescribe.
6. Staying Closely Connected to the People Around Them
Older generations didn’t outsource their social lives to apps. They had neighbors they actually knew. They visited relatives in person. They kept up with people face to face, regularly. It wasn’t romantic – sometimes it was tedious – but it was consistent, and that consistency mattered enormously for health.
The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection released a global report revealing that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, with loneliness linked to an estimated eight hundred and seventy thousand deaths annually. Strong social connections can lead to better health and longer life, the report says.
Rising concerns about social isolation and loneliness globally have highlighted the need for a greater understanding of their mental and physical health implications, with robust evidence documenting social connection as an independent predictor of mental and physical health, including mortality. Social connection can reduce inflammation, lower the risk of serious health problems, foster mental health, and prevent early death – and it can strengthen the social fabric, making communities healthier, safer, and more prosperous. These aren’t soft, feel-good outcomes. They’re measurable.
7. Tending a Garden or Growing Something
For many of our grandparents, growing food was practical, not therapeutic. A kitchen garden was just common sense – a way to put vegetables on the table without spending money. The mental health benefits were incidental. Or maybe they weren’t incidental at all; maybe they just didn’t need to be named.
Gardening combines physical movement, time outdoors, sensory engagement, and the quiet satisfaction of watching something grow under your care. It’s a concentrated form of slow living. Even just thirty minutes of gardening a few times per week can have a positive effect on sleep quality, with more time in the garden generally producing greater benefits.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology explored the link between mindfulness and health-promoting behaviors, revealing that individuals with higher mindfulness were more likely to engage in better nutrition and exercise – and that these healthier habits served as a pathway toward more sustainable lifestyle choices overall. Gardening quietly cultivates that same quality of attention.
8. Resting Without Guilt
There’s a version of the past where people simply stopped working when the work was done. Sundays genuinely meant rest. An afternoon nap wasn’t laziness – it was expected. Our culture has largely replaced that with the idea that rest is something to be earned, and even then, consumed productively.
When you rush through the day, your body gets stuck in overdrive. You run on stress, not real energy. Over time, this leads to burnout. The American Psychological Association reports that a significant majority of people experience high levels of burnout at their jobs, faced with pressures like productivity paranoia and the expectation to be constantly accessible.
Being present helps you connect better with others. When you’re not thinking about the next thing, you listen more closely and respond with more care – and these small shifts can lead to deeper connections and a stronger support system, which boosts emotional health. Rest, it turns out, is infrastructure.
9. Limiting Entertainment to Specific Times
The radio came on in the evening. Neighbors stopped by for a few hours. Entertainment was bounded by time and by the physical effort it took to access it. Our grandparents weren’t virtuous by resisting distraction – they simply didn’t live in an environment designed to capture their attention at every possible moment.
Advocates of slow living argue that the constant pursuit of efficiency and productivity can negatively impact health and happiness, and often recommend reducing screen time and engaging in digital detoxes to break free from the addictive nature of technology.
Taking breaks from screens can enhance productivity. Continuous periods of intense focus lead to mental fatigue, while regular short breaks rejuvenate the brain, enabling better concentration and efficiency when returning to screen tasks. The grandparent version of this was just the ordinary structure of pre-digital life. It happened automatically.
10. Treating Meals as Ritual, Not Refueling
Slowing down around food was one of the defining features of earlier domestic life. Mealtimes had a rhythm. They took as long as they took. The preparation, the setting of the table, the sitting together – it was a small ceremony repeated three times a day, and it created something stable in the structure of the day.
Stress can slow digestion and lead to problems like bloating, heartburn, and constipation – and eating hurriedly while distracted is its own form of digestive stress. Slowing down at the table isn’t just about mindfulness as an abstract ideal. It has a concrete biological logic.
Overall, slowing down allows you to consider the habits you want to support in your life – and the impact you’re having on your community. When a meal is a ritual rather than a task to check off, it tends to carry a bit of that broader quality. It’s a small place where the pace of the day gets to be something you choose, not something that just happens to you.
A Quiet Takeaway
None of this requires a dramatic lifestyle overhaul. The habits covered here are ordinary things that ordinary people did for most of recorded history – cooking, walking, sleeping, connecting, resting, going outside. The fact that modern research is now confirming their value isn’t a surprise. It’s more of a quiet confirmation.
Slow living emphasizes an intentional and mindful way of life, prioritizing enjoyment and connection over fast-paced demands – and it emerged specifically as a response to the rapid technological advancements that have transformed communication, work, and daily routines, often at the expense of personal well-being.
Our grandparents didn’t have a name for what they were doing. They were just living. The real question isn’t whether these habits work – the evidence says they do – but whether we’re willing to treat them as non-negotiable rather than aspirational. That part is on us.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.