Why Speed Listeners Should Slow Down

What Is Speed Listening

Speed listening is the act of listening to audio media (and sometimes visual audio) at greater than real-time speed. The purpose of this essay is to target those that listen to at least double speed.

Don’t Max Everything

For a long time, I tried to maximise my speed by listening to everything. It was audiobooks, podcasts, conversations, talking points, audio dramas or narrated fiction. I consumed everything at the maximum speed. Maximum speed means the upper limit of whatever app I was using was capable of. In the case of my podcast app, this could be an average of 4x speed.

It was a fear of losing my skill at speed listening ultimately and wanting to not waste time. But I changed after I tried to enjoy some things for longer, so I had different speeds for different things.

I realised that as long as I kept up the speed listening skill in general, it benefitted me overall to mix up the speeds of different things. I could listen to some stuff at maximum speed without losing comprehension and drop down for other things, and my comprehension and enjoyment stayed the same.

Slowing Down Your Life

For me slowing down still often meant double speed or 1.5 times speed at the absolute minimum. I then decided to make audiobook fiction real-time speed. At first, it felt strange, but then it made me realise something that I’d lost in the speed of listening. That was full relaxation benefits of audio media. It slowed down my mind, which is just what I needed either during the day as a mental boost or for winding down for the evening and sleep.

I still speed listen, but it’s worth considering when you’re doing it and the effect of basically ramping up your mental acuity all the time. There are benefits to deliberately slowing down in everything, which goes mainly in speed listening.

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