S3 E16: Why You Should Take More Breaks

November 13, 2020 Rebecca Hass

It’s easy to get trapped in the idea that productivity means we have to work constantly, and then feeling guilty about breaks and time off, but breaks are essential for replenishing energy and creativity! I’m always pro-break, but during extreme events (like a pandemic) you might need even more breaks than you’re used to. I know, easier said than done, but in this episode you’ll learn what it can look like to integrate more breaks into your work, even in the busiest of schedules, and all of the benefits that come with that.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everyone, welcome to Episode 16 of Being A Whole Person, and today we're gonna talk about breaks, why you should take more of them, how they help you, why they're not a waste of time. Breaks are good.

But first, I have two announcements for you. The first one I kind of told you about last week: one-time coaching sessions are back, and these single sessions are titled Rise Above the Overwhelm, because they are all about helping you get to the root of why you're overwhelmed, figure out how to get unstuck and fix it, and send you on your way with lots of tools and resources. So for you self-directed people, this might be a great way to get a little shot of support, but without having to commit to a longer period of time, if you're not able to do that.

I really do believe in the power of longer term support for making lasting changes, but I know that sometimes that's not always accessible, and I'm really excited to have this as an offering. You'll also, after our original 75 minute call, you also get a week of access to email support. I can even check in with you specifically in a week to see if you've started, whatever it is that we decided was going to be your plan for next steps. So I'm really excited about that.

Announcement number two is, I'm going to be doing a holiday self care workshop on November 24. That's a Tuesday at 10am Pacific. I know that the holidays are a stressful time. I know they look really different this year, and we probably have a lot of feelings about it, and more stress around it, along with the fact that it's just kind of hard to balance all that holiday activity with the waning daylight and winter. So I have lots of tools for you there. I'll put a link in the show notes for how to sign up for that workshop.

Let's get into it. So I know I have the word “should” in the title, and mostly I'm against using the word “should” because I don't want to “should” on you. And, you know, I believe in your ability to figure out what you should and shouldn't do. But I know, also, that I'm talking to a lot of people who have trouble with taking breaks and who work too much kind of as a default. And if that's you, you should probably take more breaks. Of course, this is general advice. I'm going to tell you some specific ways for how this can happen. I just want to address the word “should” there - probably true, but you are the ultimate decider.

Even if this seems like kind of an obvious topic, like yeah, you should take more breaks, it's good to take breaks, it's good to rest - based on my history with feeling guilty taking breaks, maybe this is obvious to you intellectually, but maybe it's really not that easy to do in real life. I know we're all in various work situations right now and various degrees of going back to normal, whatever that might mean, working in person rather than at home, or maybe you are still working at home, maybe you're going back to working at home. There's a lot of different things going on, that require more processing, mentally, and are probably gonna cause more stress.

We're still processing being in a pandemic, we're still coming off election stress, whatever else is happening in your life that you're balancing, this all takes a lot of energy. So I'm always pro-break, but right now you might need even more breaks than you think you need, or than you're used to.

This is one of the first changes that I work on with clients usually, to figure out how they can incorporate more downtime, and how that'll actually work, how that will actually look in their pretty jam packed lives. It's also great because it plants the seed that rest is okay. It might be okay to take breaks, if you're not used to this feeling okay, it's just a start.

A great place to start with breaks is with your body. You have a body, it has needs. It's easy to ignore your body. It's easy to ignore its needs, like the really basic stuff, like food and water and taking a bathroom break, standing up to stretch. All this kind of stuff, when we're in constant work mode, can just not even occur to us. Or it can feel like, “Alright, I just gotta finish this thing, and then I'll get up and drink some water, or have a snack, or whatever it is.”

I used to teach piano in blocks of like, four hours without a break. And because of the way that was structured and because it was one on one face time with people, it would be really difficult for me to drink enough water and have the time to take as many bathroom breaks as I would if I were drinking enough water. And that is one of the most basic bodily functions.

Plowing through and not doing these basic things doesn't make your work better. Because, we are meant to have energy cycles, we do have energy cycles, they wax and wane. Caffeine can sometimes make us forget that. No shame to coffee drinkers, or caffeinated tea drinkers out there, but just being aware that that augmentation of energy that comes from caffeine can kind of mask those cycles of energy that are very normal and very human.

So one of the number one reasons that I hear that people don't take as many breaks as they think they should, or would like to, or would feel good about - they just don't feel like they have time, they feel like it's a waste of time to take a break, because they just want to get done with the work. The work kind of never ends, especially if you're doing creative work, and you have a million different hats that you wear to try and make your career happen.

We have to look out for ourselves first. We have to make sure we have breaks. If you take a break, you're going to be more effective afterwards. And if you take that time to replenish your energy, you're playing the long game, it's going to be sustainable in the long run. It's easy to be kind of afraid of breaks, maybe afraid is a strong word, but a little bit afraid of losing your inertia.

I talked about this a lot in Episode 13: Why We Resist Rest, because it's a lot about control, and continuing onward, because that's what we're told is the best thing to do. And like I just mentioned, you might feel like, “Why would I waste time doing something else? I need to get this work done.” But it is not wasting time. It's so easy to underestimate the power of this short break like even five or 10 minutes to re-energize you, and if you come back and you're more effective, you are actually saving time.

For instance, a 10 minute walk has been shown to increase communication between different parts of the brain, and improve your memory processing and connecting the hippocampus with the parts of your brain that have to do with learning. So there is a lot of neurological evidence to support this, and this 10 minute walk doesn't have to be part of a regular exercise practice, it's still impactful if you haven't exercised in months, which is really cool. There's a study that I will link you to if you want to delve deeper into that.

Breaks also give you the mental space to make better decisions, to avoid getting fatigued, to allow you a little bit of rest in any number of ways. People think about just physical rest. Usually when they think of rest, they think of sleeping or lying down. But there are actually seven different types of rest, physical, mental, social, sensory, creative, spiritual and emotional, so a break could serve the function of any of those things.

Taking a break is also a self compassionate act. You can choose to intentionally be kind to yourself by taking a break, because you deserve a break, because you deserve to care for yourself in that way. In a world where the highest value seems to come from productivity, it can seem like taking a break is admitting that your worth is less, because you're not proving your worth by working constantly. But taking a break as a self compassionate act really goes against that in a really helpful way.

So, let's talk about what these breaks could actually look like in a practical sense. You can choose to have them have an intentional purpose to fulfill a need, like I was talking about those different types of rest. But if you're not in a place to give it that much thought, that's okay, too. That's the next level.

If you feel like you don't have time for a break, you can start first by thinking about the micro break. What's a tiny action that would feel good? Maybe it's eating a square of chocolate, that's definitely one of mine. listening to a song that you love, taking a minute to stretch, petting your cat or dog or whatever pet you have. Maybe it's going to be fulfilling a physical need, like a short pause to breathe deeply if you're feeling stressed, like to put my hand on my heart and just take a couple deep breaths. That is absolutely free and it takes less than a minute, and it makes me feel better afterwards. Maybe it's fulfilling a physical need like thirst. Maybe you just need a little bit more water, maybe you need a mental break to just stare out the window for a minute.

Sometimes I like to just look out the window or even just look around the room and notice 10 things in my surroundings, I kind of mentally list those 10 things, because it kind of helps me get my mind off of whatever I was thinking about before. If that was a stressor, especially, and it helps focus you - it's a mindfulness practice.

So the micro break actually is a great place to start, and is actually more impactful than you think it will be. Then there's the short break, like longer than a few minutes, maybe it's taking that walk for, you know, it could be 10 minutes, it could be 20, it could be 30, it could be an hour, lying down to meditate, or just taking a break to do something enjoyable that shifts gears, like some kind of fun creativity could serve that purpose.

Sometimes, even though piano and practicing piano is part of my work, practicing piano is kind of like a break from whatever admin work I was doing or whatever computer work or it's a nice way to shift my brain and process after a client session. So the break can be kind of a shifting of gears, it doesn't have to be a total removal from everything.

Then there's the longer term breaks. I know if you're feeling really burned out and your life is jam packed, it might feel like these are impossible. If that's where you are, definitely start with the shorter ones. First, you can build up to this, but I know that it can feel really scary to take a full day off, like you are going to fall behind immediately. Or taking a weekend off or taking a vacation longer than that, like sometimes that feels like it is completely impossible. And I want to acknowledge that.

But starting with those smaller breaks is where you start to get the mental space to make bigger shifts in your life that allow those longer breaks to refresh you, and just make sure the structure of your life can support that. If you're burned out, you might need to take a longer break to remember why you do what you do, just to replenish yourself physically.

I'm not really going to dwell on longer breaks in this episode, since that's something that takes more thought and guidance and planning. But I just really want to affirm that taking a whole weekend is okay, taking a long weekend is okay. Everything's not gonna blow up while you take a break, I'm sure that it will be okay. If there's something you need to watch over, you can set boundaries around that too. So like I said, if that seems really desirable, but kind of impossible, start with the micro break, or the short break.

The number of breaks that you need each day is going to change from day to day. It might be a lot sometimes if you're feeling really tired, might be a little on a day where you're feeling more energetic. But I think the most important thing about breaks is to give yourself permission to let them truly feel like breaks, instead of just “10 minutes before I have to do something else,” and you're already mentally in that other thing, and you're still feeling stressed.

If you are feeling stressed during your break, also, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong, it's still helpful. And if you don't feel totally relaxed during a break, that doesn't mean you failed. I just want to say that too. But notice and appreciate yourself when you allow a break. Because it's super easy to just try to cram in one more thing, just one more thing in this five minutes before you have a meeting. Inevitably you'll start that thing, and it'll take longer than you think. And then all of a sudden, you're a couple minutes late to your meeting, and you're feeling just really scattered because you didn't have the mental time to transition between things. So I invite you, next time you have 10 minutes before something, not to cram in another thing, and think about how you can prepare yourself to be present in your next activity, which will just make it better.

You can also be more intentional about when you take breaks by putting them in your calendar, and by setting alarms on your phone. I used to have an alarm for 2pm every day, because my teaching day would start at 3:00 or 3:30, and 2pm is when I get a real energy slump. So, I had a reminder set that said, “you deserve to take a break now.” I would take a break because I knew that I had to prepare for what was coming later, and I knew that good work wouldn't even get done during that two o'clock hour because I was usually just in a slump.

You can experiment with this. You can be more intentional. If being more intentional or experimenting feels like too much, just try taking a micro break next time that you need one. They can be spontaneous or they can be scheduled.

But most of all, just remember, you can cultivate the trust in yourself to take rest breaks that actually replenish you, and you can trust yourself to follow through on your goals. It's not an either/or - the breaks support the work that you're doing. They support you meeting your goals, and doing the work that you really want to be doing.

Taking breaks is part of your job, because it makes you able to show up better for your work. Anytime you can get yourself in a more positive mental space means you're going to be doing better work. So, I'm giving you permission, but really, you're giving you permission, I'm just here to affirm.

Take as many breaks as you need. Abnormal times call for increased amounts of self care. And even in normal times, breaks are good. You deserve to take breaks as you need to.

If you need more support in this area, my ebook Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity talks a lot about taking breaks and has a method for making sure you integrate them into your life on a regular basis, so that that can support your work. I'll put a link in the show notes to that.

I'm also always here to support you, you can sign up for a free discovery call if coaching sounds like the next step for you, those one time sessions might be a great next step too. And I'm always open for questions.

So with that, I'm gonna go take a break, because that's what I always do after I do a podcast recording, but also because breaks are great. I hope you have some good breaks this week, and a good weekend in general. See you next time.

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