How To Take Breaks

Hello World,

If you’re a perfectionist with workaholic tendencies like me, breaks are hard for you to take.

I’ve struggled with this for as long as I could remember.

I remember during my undergrad when my prof assigned us a paper due in a month,

And I would literally think about it (and then try and forget it) every day.

The memory of it would randomly pop up and FOIL my plans to take a break.

I would be sipping a latte with friends and then,

“Psst, Alana, hey, Alana, remember that paper…THAT’S DUE IN TWO WEEKS WHATAREYOUDOINGSHOULDNTYOUBBEWRITINGIT??”

And then I would feel guilty for not doing it.

And would stop enjoying what I was doing,

But I also wouldn’t write the paper either.

So I literally did NOTHING.

No rest, no work, just guilt-tripping myself.

It’s funny, I did this for school, I did this for work projects, I literally even did this for things that I wanted to do, like reading a book for fun.

And I used to give myself a hard time for it, which, as you can imagine, didn’t help.

But now I know why it wasn’t working.

When my brain told me that I shouldn’t be having fun because a project wasn’t done, I didn’t really have a convincing argument to respond with.

My brain would ask me, “Well, when are you going to get it done, huh?”

And all I could answer was… “Uh… sometime…later…”

Imagine if you hired someone to renovate your kitchen and that was their answer, you’d be like, “Yeah no, that’s not going to work for me.”

I know lots of people also struggle with this so this is the strategy that I use:

I schedule my work AND my breaks. And then all I need to do is follow my calendar.

So when my brain tells me that I shouldn’t be resting because I need to work I can respond,

“Yes, the work does need to get done. And it will. Thursday at 3pm. Now if you don’t mind, this latte isn’t gonna sip itself!”

If you’ve tried calendaring before and it hasn’t worked, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. It’s likely because your mindset is preventing you from committing to it. If this is an area you want to work on, I would love to show you how to transform your relationship with time, rest and productivity.