We’ve all heard that it’s important to take breaks, have time off, and recharge the batteries. However, while we all have weekends and holidays throughout the year that doesn’t mean we’re actually giving our minds the chance to disconnect, relax and regenerate.
Taking a proper break is more than simply not working, it also requires a pause from stress and using the problem-solving parts of the brain. Parts that are far more taxing on our mental energy. Achieving this in the 21st century is not as easy as it used to be. While the internet and smartphones provide almost endless opportunities for learning and productivity, they also provide an equivalent source of added work, stress, and distractions. For most, taking a proper break will require that they stop checking their phone for notifications or to check the value of their cryptocurrencies, stocks, or other assets. It would also require a conscious effort to avoid getting lost in thought about earlier conversations with friends or colleagues, as well as avoiding thinking through future plans, ideas, political opinions, or world events.
When was the last time you did all the above for a full day?
It's not often that I've managed to take a proper break these last 10 years. But when I do, it usually looks like this.
Looking at myself I’ve been failing this miserably for the past 5-10 years. In fact, I have had to look back to my teens to find the last time I’ve experienced a full week of a "proper" break this way. A week in which the only “problems” I had to solve was deciding what I wanted for dinner on the menu at a restaurant in Greece, or whether I wanted to go play tennis or do hiking in the afternoon.
This failure has haunted me real bad, and accumulated into a fatigue that unfortunately took years to properly diagnose and then finally repair.
Thanks to our smartphones and 4G internet connection, we have the opportunity to do something productive every waking minute. Instead of relaxing in a chair to your favorite song, you could be trading stocks or cryptos, building a following on social media, engaging on your business's social media account to gain traction, answering a work email, or earn by writing a blog on Hive.
Given this fact, it is easy to see why we are becoming increasingly poor at ever taking breaks. And why fatigue, burnouts, and high levels of stress have together become a first-world pandemic. It may not be that we work more than we used to. It may be that we simply rest less.
Impulses to check notifications, valuations, reactions etc, etc, are all triggers of stress. And even if it’s not felt as stressful, it is engaging the problem-solving portions of our brain and thus not allowing it to take a break.
The solution itself is simple: Find time to not try to solve any problems or invent clever thoughts and ideas, but instead merely be present. Of course, as always, everyone knows what they need to do. But most don’t know how to do it.
So for the first time in years, I've had a prolonged period of time to disconnect, completely. And then rebuilt my day around respecting having dedicated time off from thinking. But I have to admit, taking a break is one of the hardest things I've done in my life, and I've built a freaking rocket. Not that having a break is hard in and of itself, but rather getting myself to do it and resist the urge to grab my phone or computer to do something "clever" or stay lost in thought about things I wanted to build or solve.
In the end, I even had to plan in detail how I would manage to do nothing but have fun. In retrospect, it sounds crazy, but the urge to "always do something productive" has been so strong that I knew it would require a hard reset. Thankfully, it only takes about a week to forget old habits and get somewhat into a new flow. Knowing this, I knew that if I could plan a week or two without work and distractions, then the rest would get a lot easier.
So starting with this year's summer holiday, I went to the drawing board to plan the first proper holiday in well over a decade. To do so, I started out by identifying the common sources of stress and distractions that I was currently having. Being mindful of these and having a "list" of things not to think about helped make me conscious of when my thoughts were going to those topics so that I could immediately stop and focus on something else. It's a technique I've found extremely powerful when needing to concentrate or avoid temptations.
After that, I made a simple draft of what I wanted the break to include. Roughly speaking, I wanted it to consist of one part socializing and having fun, one part relaxing and having conversations with close family, and one part exploring and being in nature. A rough split that to me seems like a holiday trifecta that I intend to keep as a "simple rule" also for future use.
Me arriving at a unique beach found almost 1000 meters above sea level in the Norwegian mountains close to our cabin area. This was during the first half of my holiday when just going for walks with family.
It's hard to overstate the positive effects this has had on me. In many ways, I feel as if I have gotten my life back after years of constant fatigue, tiredness, and poor levels of focus. With the heavy carpet of mental fatigue gone, laughter and positive emotions also come a lot more easily.
It's far too easy to normalize being busy, and then not realize that you are running yourself into the ground before it's too late and you're already burned out. I could go on about the discovered benefits of taking proper breaks and finding proper rest. But I wanted this post to be more about what I've done rather than the why. It's almost infuriating to know that we're not learning more, earlier, about the pitfalls that modern technology becomes to the mind, and how much we're really sacrificing when being "online" all the time.
Hopefully, having been able to take almost half a year's break from technology means I’ll be in a better mood and shape to contribute to some of the many things I’ve long wanted to help add to Hive’s growth going forward. It’s been exciting to see so much positive development lately, and many things have been done right with the last HF as well as across dApps and proposals like the Hive Authenticator.
Still, I think most of the important “right things” are yet to be done. Which although being mild criticism of some of the priorities made so far, only means that we have even more opportunities to grow.
I look forward to sharing some ideas and proposals in that regard soon. But first, there's just no way I can return to posting without sharing a bit of a travel blog from some of the most epic places I've been to these past 6 months.
So stay tuned :)
