Why we should all live like a sloth

To mark the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Power of Sloth, zoologist and author of Life in the Sloth Lane, Lucy Cooke, unleashes her inner sloth to discover why being lazy could actually be the ultimate evolutionary strategy.

The lackadaisical lifestyle of the sloth would appear to be the very antithesis of everything we value. Modern life is fast and focussed on finding ever more inventive ways of cramming more into every second of our existence. The technology in our pocket ensures our lives are saturated with information and our schedules stuffed with experience. Sloth is a sin and busy-ness a badge of honour – but is our need for speed really the best strategy?

Zoologist and broadcaster Lucy Cooke, holding a baby sloth

I started my investigation with a trip to London zoo to meet their slowest mammal resident – a two-toed sloth named Marilyn, who greeted me with an insouciant turn of the head before going back to sleep (with her head wedged inside a ceiling lamp for added eccentricity).

I love sloths and have spent many happy hours admiring their languorous lives. But as founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society I am frequently asked how sloths can exist when they are such losers. As I discuss in my book, The Unexpected Truth About Animals, these gentle vegetarian pacifists were damned from the moment they were saddled with a name that speaks of sin – a PR disaster that has helped fuel centuries of misunderstanding about the sloth’s stealthy and surprisingly successful existence.

Conservationist Nisha Owen, from the ZSL EDGE of existence programme confirmed that the indolent sloth is actually one of the most prosperous tropical mammals. Sloths make up as much as one third of the mammalian biomass in some surveyed rainforests (biology-speak for I’m doing rather well, thank you very much.) Sloths have survived in one shape or another for some 64 million years – outliving far flashier animals like sabre-toothed tigers. Only two of the six species alive today are considered endangered, which is quite good going for a lazy loser.

Professor Rory Wilson explained that the secret to the sloths' success is their slothful nature. They are energy-saving icons with a suite of ingenious adaptations – such as an upside-down life that requires half the muscle mass (and energy) of an upright existence. Their slowness also helps them slip under the radar of fast-moving predators like the harpy eagle as it scans the treetops for movement.

Sloths are not the only animals that have survived by taking it easy. I visited the Galapagos tortoises at London Zoo and discovered that a slow life is a long life. These gentle giants, with a penchant for being tickled under the armpit, are the world’s longest living vertebrates with an age span of some 150-200 years.

Slothfulness is a successful strategy adopted by a suite of other less obvious animals which even includes ants. I talked to Dr Anna Dornhaus, whose team at Tucson University have recently discovered that 40% of worker ants are actually idlers, which they believe is necessary to keep the colony at peak productivity.

If those paragons of industry – the social insects – are not afraid to put their feet up, then maybe we humans should take heed.

The psychology Professor Richard Wiseman told me there are numerous studies which show that by doing less we actually achieve more. Daydreaming may assist our creativity and mental health. And brain "time-outs" can help children learn better.

Yet our pace of life is actually speeding up. Wiseman measured the speed that people walk in 30 different cities – a good indicator of how quickly our lives are moving – and found it is 10% faster than it was ten years ago.

A hurried, harried society has less space for creativity, luck and acts of spontaneous compassion, but more chance of suffering from chronic stress and heart attacks. No wonder more and more people are joining "the power of slow" rebellion.

I may love sloths but I am addicted to speed so I spoke to Carl Honoré, author of "In Praise of Slow", to get some practical tips on how a stress-junkie like me can join the slow movement. His advice was to slash my schedule, turn off my technology on a regular basis and instigate a slow ritual – like yoga or knitting – into my day.

It would seem that the future for humanity should be a bit less cheetah and a bit more sloth. These Zen masters of mellow are the ultimate go-to gurus for a slow, steady and sustainable life.