Relaxation to equilibrium can be hindered by transient dissipative structures.

Relaxation processes in a closed chemical reaction-diffusion system which can potentially form Turing-like patterns during the transient are investigated to address the question given by the title. We find that when certain conditions are fulfilled the relaxation process is indeed drastically hindered, once the pattern is formed. This slowing down is shown to be due to stepwise relaxation, where each plateau in the relaxation process corresponds to residence at a certain spatial pattern. Mechanism and universality of the phenomena are discussed.