It’s Time to Take a Serious Break, and You Can Do This
By: Robert Roy Britt
Tags: Wellbeing, Vacation, Motivation, Mental Health, Burnout

It’s Time to Take a Serious Break, and You Can Do This

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s the need for real downtime

Photo: AsiaVision/Getty Images

Sitting in my usual chair in front of my computer at a ridiculously early hour on a Friday morning, uninspired by every single story idea I was mulling after 11 months and 11 days of writing or thinking about writing every single day, I looked around my home office and said to myself: “Rob, you kinda just don’t wanna write any of these.”

My next thought: “These are some good ideas. Why don’t you want to write them? Where is your motivation?”

Then finally: “Dude, you really need to take some time off.”

“But I suck at taking time off,” I said aloud. (Yes, I talk to myself out loud when dealing with the most intractable challenges — it’s the best way to get my attention.) And I had the usual fear pop into my head: “If you don’t write something today, you’ll slip out of the flow, become irrelevant, never making a living wage again.”

That’s when my next story idea germinated: This year, let’s actually work really hard to take a real break. Because we’re terrible at it.

Everyone needs a break right now. Among the 75% of U.S. adults who say they’re burned out at work, 40% blame the pandemic and the sudden disruption of working from home.

Meanwhile, we Americans are, compared to other developed countries, terrible at taking time off. When we do vacate, however, we tend to return to work more motivated. In a survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association in 2018, 57% of Americans said they return to work more motivated after a vacation, 66% said they come back with more energy, and 68% report a more positive mood upon getting back at it.

There’s a flip side, of course: Most Americans say their organization isn’t supportive about time off, so the whole idea of a vacation proves stressful. This is where your willpower must take over. You need time off. You must take it. You will enjoy it. And then you should do it again. Survey says.

Getting away from it all is particularly challenging when your home is your workplace. Whether that’s your situation or not, it’s more vital than ever right now to truly shut things down for a stretch.

Here are three easy (really!) ways that you can make this happen and ensuring your time off is truly time away from it all, drawing from back in the day when it was much easier to slip away and nobody could contact you even if they tried:

First off, tell, don’t ask, your boss about your time off. Be firm about the fact that you will be unreachable. Set email auto-responders for work and even your personal account. Change your voicemail to let everyone know you’re outta here. Delete social media apps from your phone. You can reload them when you get back and everything will be there — every last depressing, sorrowful, aggravating bit.

Then go do something you love and something that’s good for the soul. Cook, read a book, hike, bike, create some really long Spotify playlists, sleep in, snuggle for hours in front of your kids’ favorite movies, or even hit the road (safely, of course) with no particular destination in mind (other than where people aren’t).

So. I’m publicly vowing here and now to take two weeks off (!) from work and social media and everything, all before 2021 starts to kick our collective butts. Honestly, it will be really, really hard. But I must do it, I can do it, I will do it.

Join me?