It can be easy to exhaust yourself while taking time off. It doesn’t matter whether you’re off for the holidays, summer break, vacation, or otherwise. Your main commitment, be it school or work, usually dominates most of your waking hours, preventing you from being able to attend to other matters. So, when you get to take a break from that commitment, it can be tempting to do all the other things you’ve been needing or wanting to. And you should!
But it’s also important to take a break. Specifically, to take a break from everything, not just the main thing.
Take a break: It’s okay to do nothing sometimes
The recommended amount of sleep is between 7-9 hours per night. But the average person doesn’t sleep quite that much. So, if people really wanted to catch up on sleep, they could spend all their time off doing just that—sleeping for hours on end to make up for all the hours of sleep they’ve been missing out on. Problem is, they wouldn’t have time to do much of anything else.
Replace sleep with watching movies, reading books, organizing the garage, yardwork, and anything else that’s been “missed out” on, and you have most people during their time off. Capitalizing on one of the few times we get to take a break from work, it’s easy for us to fill our time with all the activities we’ve been meaning to do. Yet in so doing, we’re still working in a way. Because in so doing, we’re forgetting to take a break from everything.
And it’s okay to take a break from everything. It’s okay to do nothing sometimes. It’s okay to have a day with no agenda. In fact, it’s often needed.
So, do what you need to do when you need to do it. Do what you want to do when you can. Don’t waste your time off. But at the same time, don’t forget to truly take time off from everything every now and then Don’t forget to take a break. A real one.
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