I Took a Self-Prescribed Vacation: Here’s What Happened

If you’ve followed along with my last post, I’ve disclosed that I’ve been feeling quite burned out for a while now.

 I decided to take a step back and utilize the time I was moving into my new place, to relax, reflect, and nourish myself with rest.

What I realized was this: life itself takes up a lot of energy.

I thought I would be bored, but the opposite was true. Getting the home ready, cleaning, cooking for myself, exercising, reading, planning, and hosting— these things took up the majority of my time. By the end of the day, I found myself wiped out, ready to plop on the couch with a good show.

I was wrong in the way I thought about work; learning that just because I wasn’t doing work in a traditional sense (earning money or studying), doesn’t mean I wasn’t contributing to or labouring in other aspects of my life, and the lives of others.

More significantly, this time off has given me the opportunity to practice self compassion. And as a result, clarity came.

When you’re burned out, everything feels overbearing. You just want to throw down all plates and give up. Everything feels like a chore, even going out to dinner with your friends. And because of the insufferable lack of motivation, you end up in this spiral of negative self-talk that attributes your deep need for rest, with laziness and incapability.

At the time of this writing, it’s one day before I go back to normal business. I haven’t felt this calm in a long time, and life, just feels like it’s going to be okay. Logically, I know the path forward and I also know that even if things don’t always go the way they’re planned, it’s within my power to shift and adapt a new direction. Nothing is the end.

Here are some helpful things I learned during my time off:

Taking Time Off is a Healthy Self Investment

More and more, the concept of PTO has arisen amongst knowledge companies. From a strategic standpoint, management would want to prevent their best talent from overworking and burning out. The quality of their output is of prime importance, and as long as they continuously achieve KPIs, project outcomes..etc, regular breaks can actually be conducive to achieving these standards. In other words, they’re looking at a long-term trajectory for their talent, because it’s costly to rehire and train. This is opposite of the traditional service industry (ie. restaurants/bars/retail) because the turnover is always high, and it doesn’t cost much to rehire someone the next day. This is why in industries as such, time-off is not a high priority.

Think about it this way. Have you ever had something to do but you were so tired  you couldn’t help but nod off every couple of minutes? So you decide to do it the first thing when you wake the next morning. When you follow through on that plan, the clarity and energy you have after a night of rest is incomparable to what you were feeling before, and you’re able to blast through that task in an hour. We’ve all experienced this likely.

An exaggerated version of this is taking a longer break after you’ve endured months of working really hard at something. Physically, it’s easier for us to tell whether we’ve reached our maximum exertion point. Our bodies gives us clear indicators like muscle fatigue and low energy, for example, if you’ve consistently worked hard at the gym. It’s a bit trickier to define when it comes to our mental and emotional capacity. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between feeling challenged or feeling burned out.

One way to tell is that, challenge causes a bit of inner tension, but once you move through it you feel spurts of a rewarding sensation. You feel more motivated to keep going. Conversely, when you’re burned out, nothing feels exciting. No matter what you cross off your list, everything just feels like a drag and you find yourself constantly battling extreme cynicism towards people and events.

There’s Important Parts of Life We Neglect in the Pursuit of “Success”

We often perceive success as a game of sacrifice. You “have to” give up ‘less important things’ in order to become successful.

What I learned from taking time off, is that there are important actions and decisions we can make during our time of rest, that can contribute to not only our long-term wellness but our success as individuals. You may even come to a new definition of success because you allowed yourself time for greater introspection.

The majority of my day was broken down into this:

Reading and Introspection

Relationship-building and maintenance

Cultivating a beautiful home

Physical Conditioning

Nourishment through Cooking

Vision-building/ long term planning

I did hikes I would not have done during a work week. I had friends over for dinner almost every day of the week. I cooked for myself. I did my laundry. I woke up at the break of dawn and sat myself in the hot tub before my coffee.

These things might seem simple, but they can be so easily neglected when we get busy in our lives with work. If you just value making money, that’s fine— but one of my values is creating a beautiful life with healthy, deep relationships. 

How can you make sure your home is fed, your relationships are bred and your health is preserved in peak condition, if all you prioritize is working 80% of the time?

I’ve gained a lot of perspective during this week off and learned that taking care of ourselves take time. And we shouldn’t feel shame for doing it, just because it’s not traditional work. Self work is just as important, and the work we do to take care of the people we care about.

Recovery is Not Instantaneous, It’s a Daily Practice

Great, so you’ve taken a whole week or month off for yourself. You are feeling rested, pumped and ready to go back to your ‘normal’ and crush your targets.

We always think there’s a magical cure for everything—if you’re burned out, just rest and you’ll be good for another year or so. 

The problem with this frame of thinking is that it sets you up for another situation where you’re overworked and not taking time to yourself on a daily or weekly basis. It turns into a nasty cycle.

What I did when I was doing my weekly planning, was I wrote out my priorities and color coded my schedule based on it. Rest was one of them. I’m aware to incorporate things like exercise, relationship building and rest into my schedule, as well as making it clear what each work task contributes to. 

When we live according to our highest priorities, which derives from our values, we can feel more aligned with our purpose. Even when you don’t know exactly what that purpose is yet, if you value being a generous person, perhaps you want to allocate some time outside of work to volunteer, or volunteer to host dinners within your own friend group. The more consistently you live according to your own set of values, the more happiness you may experience in the long run—even when it’s unrelated to your day to day work. Again work, can mean a multitude of things. Fixing a bulb in the house is work, making sure the dishes are clean is work, going to a yoga class is work as well.

When we start to frame our days with work not being a main priority above all else, but instead, as synergistic with the other activities in our lives— we may start to feel like our lives have a little more meaning, purpose and we feel more rested and nourished in the process.

I realize that not everyone has the choice to take time off whenever they need, but I encourage you to find ways to incorporate rest and time for introspection into your daily routine. That way, you’re less prone to burning out and more likely to live a more fulfilled and peaceful life.