The Importance of Breaks
We live in a world full of stimuli and distractions, we are constantly accessible and usually have more to do than we have time for.
Especially in the startup world it is rare that we take a break when we have finished our work. Because there are always more tasks waiting for us.
And then there is our private life. Friendships want to be cultivated and we have hobbies that we want to pursue and we should also be active in sports and eat well.
All this leads to the fact that we have less and less time to just be. We rush from one task to the next one. And while we are still busy with one task we are already thinking about the next one, while we are still thinking about the previous one in the next one. Our busy schedule often leaves us no time to reflect and that can be a problem.
We need breaks to learn
Especially in the start-up world it is important to learn, but how can you learn from your everyday life if you don’t take the time to reflect and process what you have experienced?
Therefore it is important to take a break from time to time to take a different perspective on your everyday life and to become aware of what you have experienced and what you can learn from it.
Every athlete knows that muscles do not grow during training, they grow in the breaks between training. The training itself only gives the body the impulse that the muscle has to grow in order to achieve the required performance.
And it is the same with our brain. How are we supposed to process the impressions when new ones are constantly being added? We need breaks to learn from our experiences.
Let it go
You all know this situation: You are working on a problem and try hard to find a solution but you can’t think of it. Frustrated giving up and postpone the solution until later. And then one day in the shower, when you haven’t thought about the problem at all, the solution comes to you.
This does not mean that all the effort was in vain, on the contrary, all the time you spent on the problem was valuable preparation, but sometimes a solution takes time. All the information and thoughts that we have made up must be processed and put together like a puzzle until a clear picture can be formed. But if you focus too much on one piece of the puzzle you can’t see the whole picture. And sometimes we have to let go of the problem to see the solution. Be like Elsa, let it go.
Mindfulness breaks against stress
There is another kind of break that can help us to deal with our stressful life in the future: Mindfulness and meditation.
Studies have shown that meditation and mindfulness can help against depression and anxiety and can help us to better deal with emotions. And it seems to help a lot of people — the meditation app Headspace has over one million users.
Small pauses in which we are back in the here and now, and listening to what our body and mind tells us can help us understand what we want and who we are, and even if that sounds like another task we have to squeeze into our busy schedule, it helps us to focus and find out what of what we want to do all day and maybe we will find some things we don’t want to do at all in our schedule that will give us more pauses when we let go.
