It’s no surprise that . . . the “meditation and mindfulness industry raked in nearly $1 billion” last year. Virtually everyone wants to slow down.

But individual workers aren’t necessarily getting more productive; by and large, they’re just being asked to do more and more–and there comes a point of diminishing returns, no matter what digital tools are available to help. The U.S. Department of Labor recently reported that productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, actually declined at a 3% annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2015, the biggest drop since the first quarter of 2014. And then there are the costs to physical and mental health, with some studies putting those who work more than 55 hours a week at higher risk for a stroke, coronary heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

So it’s no surprise that, according to a Forbes report, the “meditation and mindfulness industry raked in nearly $1 billion” last year. Virtually everyone wants to slow down. Here’s why slowing your pace can actually help you work smarter–and even become more productive.

Feeling like you’re constantly short on time is a state of mind. Sure, you may actually have more on your plate than you can possibly handle, but the way you work might be maximizing rather than reducing the stress of that. Carl Honoré, the author of In Praise of Slow, writes evocatively about “slow” thought as a totally different cognitive state:

Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly, and creative. It is what we do when the pressure is off, and there is time to let ideas simmer on the back burner. It yields rich, nuanced insights and sometimes surprising breakthroughs.

For anyone who’s ever felt frenzied at work, that makes plenty of intuitive sense. Honoré’s point (or one of them) is to draw attention to the experience of slowed-down thinking as a mental benefit all by itself. Jumping rapidly from one unfinished task to another isn’t just exhausting–and can take a serious psychological toll over time–it’s also inefficient. Chances are you can get more accomplished if you focus intently and deliberately on getting one thing done at a time. That way, you may even realize you had more time on your hands than you thought.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman draws attention to two systems of thought–one fast and automatic (our survival instinct or “sympathetic” nervous system), the other slower and more logical (our “parasympathetic” nervous system, which has helped us evolve to achieve rational thought).

Kahneman argues that the impact of overconfidence in business strategies, the difficulty of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation–each of these can be explained by the interactions between those two systems. Their dynamic profoundly shapes our judgments and decisions.