How To Take A Break
My friends often teased me, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, do something fun! Well, I thought to myself, ‘They don’t know how vital my 20s are. They just want to spend their lives in mediocrity and be average. Haha! I know what I am doing.’
And so, I kept on toiling in my studies, in work, in life. I was highly anxious, which made working more overloaded than a cheese fries order. Fast forward 3 years, I look at myself, and I look at the people around me. They had fun, went out, danced their hearts out, and played along to the music. And, they showed promising results in college too! Weird right?
On the other hand, I didn’t remember the last time I had ‘fun’.
More than that, every day that had passed, whether it be a workday, holiday or any day, I was worried throughout all these days. ‘Existential crisis’ was the name I gave to it. I thought of all the memes we see on GenZs and Millenials bonding on this same angst that they experience. And I thought, how I had normalized being an ‘anxious-driven to overwork and stay up the whole night gal’ who didn’t know what she wanted but couldn’t stop working…couldn’t stop worrying.
Tell me, how often have you had days where you didn’t engage in work, where you didn’t feel the FOMO of not being involved in the LinkedIn achievements category.
When did you sit down to just sit down and take a breath? When did you actually rest?
We see the world in binaries; it’s always this or that. Life can either be excellent or bad; you can be a success story or a failure, you either work to death, or you live long enough to have an average joe life. You can’t get it all. One failed test, and your career will be stained. Try to do one thing, and your performance drops in another, become really good at coding, but you lose your class rank. Is it ever good enough?
The problem of our generation is that we know how to label the world’s issues, but we don’t know what to do after that! I am a simple person; I see other people having a one-hour lunch break and feeling like they are lagging too much, and I believe that. I never realized that there is a difference between not working and taking a break. And we, as intellectual and highly social beings, are incredibly awful at it.
I have been trying to think what ‘take a break’ actually looks like. Is it playing a game, reading a book, going for a hike, hanging out with friends, or slipping into a shower for hours! What do I do to chill?! And I did it all, tried everything and ticked it off the list. And I felt better after that head massage; I felt light after that breezy walk; I just couldn’t feel the rest. And I desperately needed it. My stress was at an all-time high, my hair dropping like leaves in autumn, and my urge to have sugary foods was unstoppable. I renamed myself as a lazy brat who lays around all day. But despite doing nothing, I couldn’t feel the bliss.
I did something super unusual then. I took my rest seriously. When I started to find the why, I realized that it doesn’t matter what you do to rest; it matters how you are doing it. What does your rest look like? Does it involve taking a bath, sitting on the sofa curled up in a blanket, and watching TV? Are you actually just watching TV, though or are you also thinking about how your body looks in the mirror, how your Instagram is filled with people’s vacays and Sunday hustles?
We think taking a break is behavioral. It’s an action. It doesn’t stop at that, though. Just like you have to focus on studying and repeat behaviors that reinforce a positive atmosphere around studying, you have to PRIORITISE REST and rewire your thoughts. Rest has been equated to laziness in our society. It’s shamed to the point that people seldom feel proud about taking a break. Rest is not a sin. It’s a necessity. Our bodies deserve rest, and it can be in any form as long as you are actually focusing on taking time off and not on problems and pressing issues. In 2022, where a pandemic runs in endless revolutions, where people are exhausted beyond their limits and where grief has become a daily carrier, rest is necessary.
Schedule some time to rest today.
Written by: Sadiya Mulla
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