We provide evidence of an extremely slow thermalization occurring in the discrete nonlinear Schrödinger model. At variance with many similar processes encountered in statistical mechanics-typically ascribed to the presence of (free) energy barriers-here the slowness has a purely dynamical origin: it is due to the presence of an adiabatic invariant, which freezes the dynamics of a tall breather. Consequently, relaxation proceeds via rare events, where energy is suddenly released towards the background. We conjecture that this exponentially slow relaxation is a key ingredient contributing to the nonergodic behavior recently observed in the negative-temperature region of the discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equation.