Taking Breakes

Do you also find yourself finishing one activity and immediately starting the next one? I just finished a zoom call with a coach who helps me with marketing. Our meeting left me with positive energy. I immediately want to start one of the tasks on the new to do list: writing content for LinkedIn. I start to write these lines and decide to take a 2 minute break to just sit down and breath. Why don‘t you do the same and continue reading afterwards?

Welcome back. How do you feel now? Was it hard to do nothing for two minutes? Don‘t worry if it was difficult for you. It is for most of us. My head has a theory about why that is the case:

Most of us were conditioned to take breaks when some authority told us it was time to take a break. We were punished for taking breaks when we felt like we needed one. Where did that happen? Right, in schools. For me it was twelve years of following a rhythm imposed from the outside. How long was it for you? In any case it was probably long enough for you to get worse at listening to your own body for its intelligent signs about when it is time to slow down and take a break. For me it is now. Do you join me for another two minutes?

Now for many of us, unless you are working in an industrial factory or a school(!), there are no fixed break times anymore. Nobody tells us when to take a break and we don‘t feel out own bodies telling us either, because we were so many times forced to ignore them.

How do you feel now? I feel sadness. Sad for all those kids in schools, for my own inner child, and for the teachers who are stuck in a system that was designed in the 19th century to make good workers for the industrialization. I feel anger too.

What can you do? As soon as I write this question I notice how deep this conditioning is. Doing something. Doing, doing, doing. So I‘ll just end this text here, sit down on my couch and do nothing for the next 10 minutes.