Giving Yourself a Break Is Key to Mental Health

In a time when schedules are jam-packed with work and all the other things required to exist in a fast-paced world, our society has grown to become one that values and rewards instant gratification and expediency above all else. We post pictures on social media and get instant approval through likes and comments, creating a popularity contest in cyber space. By clicking a few buttons on a mobile app, we can instantly order food and rides to our doorstep, and send text messages to our friends with the expectation they’ll respond quickly. Clothes shopping no longer requires a visit to a mall; we can order them online and they’ll often show up the next day.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always rushing – after my hour-long commute home, I’m changing clothes and going to the gym, then running errands so I can get back home in time to cook dinner (or pick something up from the store). Before I know it, it’s nearly time to go to bed and start the whole process over again.

While instant-gratification and conveniences can be great time-savers in a busy world, they don’t promote reflection. I was shocked to discover a feature on Instagram that tells you how much time per day you spend on the app – for me, it was a surprising two hours this past Sunday. My brain has become so accustomed to the hustle of everyday life that it can feel foreign to just sit in silence and stillness.

Because of this constant hustle, it’s easy for me forget to check in with myself to see how I’m doing emotionally sometimes. In recent years, I’ve put more focus on prioritizing self-care, mindfulness and relaxation. When I don’t, my body will force me to because I’ll end up getting sick and I have no choice but to stay home and rest.

In the past year, I left the company where I worked for nearly seven years and started a job at a new company. The new job sent me into a deep reflection and forced me to question my purpose in life, and whether this was the career I wanted. Additionally, now that I’ve spent 12 years on the east coast, I’ve felt more disconnected than ever from my family and miss the west coast culture on a daily basis – and those feelings intensified during a recent visit to Oregon.

But even before that visit, I had been repeatedly questioning whether I was happy and if my job was making me happy. I would jokingly tell my friends that at 36 years old, I was having an early mid-life crisis. The hustle and bustle of 12 years in D.C. have finally caught up with me, and I’m standing at a fork in the road asking myself, “What’s next?”

Recently, a friend told me about a program called Unsettled, which offers month-long and two week-long co-working retreats around the world for people who are contemplating a life change, and seeking reflection and human connection. After looking at the website, I immediately hopped on the opportunity and signed up for a two-week retreat in Cape Town, South Africa.

I’m going to use the time to reflect, relax and find out what my next steps in life will be. I’m praying for some sort of huge awakening, where I suddenly know all the answers to my life and what I want to do next. However, at the bare minimum, I know it will be an opportunity to rest, reflect and relax. It’s my Tahira version of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Of course, a trip like this is a more radical approach to self-reflection, and I realize that a lot of people may not be able to manage going halfway across the world for two weeks to take a break from life. However, if you’re nearing burnout, consider taking a short getaway – something that removes you from your routine and forces you to disconnect. This could be a camping trip, a weekend trip out of town or even a nightly walk around your neighborhood. Just find a way to let your brain rest and reflect.

An article on Salon.com said it best: “When we are resting the brain is anything but idle and that, far from being purposeless or unproductive, downtime is in fact essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics … Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future. We craft fictional dialogue to practice standing up to someone who intimidates us or to reap the satisfaction of an imaginary harangue against someone who wronged us. We shuffle through all those neglected mental post-it notes listing half-finished projects and we mull over the aspects of our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions.”

The article went on to say, “During downtime, the brain also concerns itself with more mundane but equally important duties. For decades scientists have suspected that when an animal or person is not actively learning something new, the brain consolidates recently accumulated data, memorizing the most salient information, and essentially rehearses recently learned skills, etching them into its tissue. Most of us have observed how, after a good night’s sleep, the vocab words we struggled to remember the previous day suddenly leap into our minds or that technically challenging piano song is much easier to play. Dozens of studies have confirmed that memory depends on sleep.”

Without downtime or adequate sleep, we can barely remember words, let alone figure out our lives or our next career move. So take a break – you can thank me later.

Be on the lookout for my columns in November and December, when I’ll be writing about my adventures in South Africa and whether my time away was useful.

Tahira Hayes is a correspondent-at-large for CU Times. She can be reached at thayes@cutimes.com.