[Dean Roddey]

But you didn't address the point of what regulates the speed of those processes? Something has to be getting affected to slow them down.

It's not like temperature related change in the statistical activity in particles. That's an easy one to understand, since you are lowering the average energy of all the particles involved, and easily measured in your own reference frame. This is completely different.

It's one of those things where it's so easy to just accept that particle activity is going on all the time that you don't question why they happen at the rate that they do, and so you don't even think about how they are being slowed down. But clearly something is regulating their speed and that something is being affected in order to slow them down. It's not a change in the energy level of the particles, since that will measure exactly the same to the person in that reference frame, AFAIK.

Otherwise, you are putting forward an effect as the answer, instead of the actual cause.