How Taking Breaks Has Made Life More Manageable

Recently, I wonder whether I have all of a sudden lost my mojo. I’ve been less productive, more tired, and just not as sharp overall as I have been in the past months or years. I am still sharp and productive in the mornings, but the afternoons feel like a cloud enters my head and I can’t get anything done. This new feeling has not come with any health ailments or illnesses, but has just come with slight changes in routine and responsibilities with the new year.

The task that took five to ten minutes in the morning suddenly becomes significantly more difficult in the afternoon, particularly after lunch. It’s not my actual output that becomes particularly concerning: it’s how it feels. It feels like I’m just not an effective person anymore in the time period between 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. every day.

I am a special education teacher during the day and a law student at night. From an external circumstance standpoint, this makes sense. I am about to leave my profession of teaching in a few months, and I’m researching other opportunities. I am also busier than ever, and have days where I have no break between work and law school, and taking more credits than before. Sometimes, because I do have additional academic and professional responsibilities than I had in the past and more to manage, I do lose steam out of a need to recover throughout the day and stop working for a bit.

I have days where I go to class from 4:20 to 9:30 p.m. I have work from 7:50 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This means that almost every second of the day from around 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is spent either working, in class, or commuting. I often work through my lunch — I will eat, but have so much to do that always seems so urgent all the time. Sometimes, as someone who helps run the special education department at my school, an essential service a child needs could be in jeopardy if I don’t do my job well and do it quickly enough. But the fact remains that on days where my schedule is like this, which is Mondays to Wednesdays, I do get less sleep than usual and do just fit in meals when I can.

I am also a long-distance runner and marathon runner. I ran a 2:35:40 marathon in November, which was a big four-minute personal best and breakthrough for me. But I want more out of myself, and I learned the tricks to the trade of running faster: run more miles, most of them easy, over a long period of time. I have abided by this long-term, consistent mileage. When I ran that personal best, I had averaged 60 miles a week for several months. Now, the past six weeks, I have averaged 70 miles a week. The training isn’t that hard to handle, but it is just managing it with the rest of my life and making sure to not feel terrible the rest of the day or week. I definitely am more tired throughout the day and need more rest and nutrition to keep up. There are most certainly days I don’t have much time to run at all and running has to take a bit of a backseat to other more pressing priorities, but I still try to fit in the miles when I can.

This means that none of this afternoon daily rut I succumb to should be surprising. I can still run meetings or tune up the adrenaline when I have a pressing deadline or need to get things done urgently. It’s when things are not so urgent that I can feel like I’m just languishing around, staring at the same computer screen without getting anything done for minutes on end. Despite how it looks to other people, feeling like I am losing steam and losing my sharpness has been very concerning to me.

It’s not rational, but sometimes, when I’m in those ruts where I’m working slower and inefficiently, I wonder whether I’ll regain my mojo at all and whether I have just lost it. I naturally do regain that mojo on weekends, evenings, and when I wake up the next morning, but I still run into an essential question: what can I do in the moment to get back to feeling like myself.

I discovered the solution to this problem, almost by accident. It was around noon and another day I was losing steam. I wasn’t being productive at all. Part of that is just the nature of working in a school — there are a lot of interruptions, a lot of students who need something, or parents who come to visit that I am supposed to meet with any time when available. This can lead to just forgetting what I was doing and need to get done, so I have a motto that if I don’t get something urgent done at that particular moment, I could forget and there’s a possibility I might forget it altogether, only for that task to come up in an even more urgent moment.

But I just stopped. I didn’t leave my school’s premises, but I just looked away from my screen and focused on work I could do without needing to stress myself mentally and cognitively. I walked around the building to deliver files to teachers and students, or just remind them about a deliverable. I started putting papers in files and organizing around our file room.

I remember what I did when I was teaching: give the students a break. I would give one or two breaks throughout an hour long class, which could be three to five minutes long. Some of my students just had breaks as an accommodation, but otherwise, especially when we were just staring at a computer screen during virtual learning, the breaks were very necessary and helped the kids not lose steam, too.

I have realized that the best thing I can do in these circumstances, not push harder, but take a break, particularly during these afternoon ruts. In these periods, I can feel overstimulated and overwhelmed. It hasn’t completely changed everything, but it has made things marginally better.

I may be cheating, but my breaks at work don’t necessarily involve not doing work, but sometimes not doing very cognitively challenging work. It might not involve ton of writing or a ton of looking at screens. The big thing is just not looking at a screen or doing an intense amount of reading in that time period which will lead to a lot of eye strain and feeling any more overwhelmed than I’m feeling in the moment. It can be for as short as five or ten minutes, and it’s not like it’s a new day, but it does recharge me a bit. At home, this break can mean attending to housework without looking at screens, like folding clothes, doing dishes, or cleaning up around the house. It can mean attending to other essential chores like taking out the trash or recycling or organizing the mail.

I know it is problematic to take breaks because I realize they make me more effective and productive. I know it’s problematic to gamify my breaks so it looks less like an actual break as it would to most people.

But I have a fraught relationship with the idea of taking a break and relaxing in general. I believe every minute of every day needs to be efficient. I believe every minute needs to be accounted for. I just have trouble chilling out and not taking everything so seriously all the time.

The irony is that not taking breaks has made me less effective overall. I always thought of myself, particularly in the last two years, as someone who managed my time very well. That can be true, but with breaks, I am someone who can manage my time even better and more sustainably.

To be someone who has become so goal and achievement-minded, where every second of every day has to be put towards advancing myself, can be tiring. It can be spiritually unfulfilling and leave me with a sense of emptiness. The break is not always an opportunity for a blank slate where I’m thinking of nothing — often, it is a period of reflection on morally nuanced situations, thinking of the meaning behind different interpersonal relationships, or just taking a step back and absolving myself of the tunnel vision I was experiencing. It can be a time when I try to ground and balance myself on what is actually important and what is not, given I often try to barrel through my day like a freight train without stopping.

Taking a break will not fix the world or completely rechart the course of my life on a bad day. I am not going to sit here, lie, and say it has. At the very least, however, it can be a short reset, a way life has become just a little bit more manageable.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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