We’ve been discussing routines, and creating healthy habits, one of the many things people often forget to do is schedule a break. We all need a time to recharge, re-cooperate, and restore. Is this any different from self-care? Yes. Self-care is about making assessment, and correction if needed. Taking a break to restore, is about allowing yourself to disconnect from your day-to-day and give your body, mind, and spirit time to rest. Taking a break should be a part of your self-care routine, however self-care can involve interaction with loved ones, and others.
Taking a break isn’t about isolation for the sake of isolation, but taking a break to listen to yourself. In our daily lives, we are constantly connected to something or someone other than ourselves. You wake up in the morning each day and drive in to work, listen to the radio, greet the security guard in your building, get to your desk and open your email. Before you even sit down to start your day, you have engaged with multiple people, in many ways. If you listen to the radio, are they playing music the entire time or are they taking caller and discussing hot topics. How was your commute? Do you get frustrated in traffic? How many emails are waiting upon your arrival at work?
We take in so much on a daily basis from so many forms of medium. Social Media, conversation, texting, emails, television, radio. Do you ever feel like you are overloaded with useless information? How many times have you fallen asleep with the television on and found yourself having the craziest dream? Did you wake up and discover that you were dreaming the very thing that was on the television? This is a prime example of how we subconsciously absorb everything around us. Have you ever greeted someone as you passed them in a hall, and something in the way they responded made you turn back around? It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that even when we don’t feel like we are, We are constantly engaged in or by something.
Being engaged, and aware of all that is going on around you can be a good thing, however, when do you turn it off? When do you process it all? We are humans and we all have a built-in processor. Our brain is constantly trying to process, classify and determine how to use the information we feed it. Some information is easier to process than other info. But even in our sleep, our brain is processing everything we’ve given it throughout the day.
Just like a computer however, too much information at one time, constant use with the no breaks, We get drained. We get overwhelmed. We get tired.
Have you taken a break recently? Look at your calendar. Do you have any “white” or empty space on it? What do you normally do during that time? When is the last time you did nothing? By nothing I mean, absolutely nothing, no television, no social media, no contact with other people; just pure nothing. Just sat in a quiet room, and did nothing.
I am totally guilty of planning to do nothing, but ending up making my to-do list for the week, laundry, cleaning, and other things that don’t add up to the nothing I intended. So I am making myself schedule that time for nothing. Even if its 15 minutes a day in silence, not driving, not talking, not listening, not watching. Just 15 minutes a day to do nothing to take a break and not have anything enter into my mind from any outside source.
Why? You might be asking. Because my mind needs the space and time to reset. Its hard to sort out laundry when the piles keep coming in. But if I set a specific time to do the laundry, and make it a point to not accept anymore laundry until that laundry is done, then I can sort what is there and move it out of the hamper. If my day starts 4 am and I got to bed by 9 pm, that is 17 hours that I am awake, taking in and processing information. When I lay down to go to sleep, my mind is still processing, and I lay there making lists, remembering the things I forgot to do that day and adding them to tomorrow. What if instead of going to bed at 9pm, I decide to shut everything down at 8:30. That means, I am bathed and ready for bed at 8:30. In order to do that, I have to shut down outside information “drop off” by 8 to have enough time to be sleep ready. I’ve shortened the information deposit time by nearly an hour, I am giving myself 30 minutes to prepare for the closing of my eyes, and allowed time to process before going to sleep.
How much inner peace could you gain from 1 day of nothing on a regular basis?
Schedule some time to take a mental break from the world. Allow your mind, body and spirit to rest in quiet places. Meditation and Prayer are great tools to help get to the place where you can calmly sit in indefinite silence and find peace rather than engage in ways to disturb it.
Take a break and regroup the first and every opportunity you have.
