The Value Of Taking A Break

Sometimes, a colleague says it better than I can. I am re-posting a lovely article by Heather McIver, of Stillpoint Acupuncture in Greensboro, NC.

The Value of Taking a Break…

More and more I see people who are overwhelmed, overworked, stressed out and exhausted. I know this feeling very well. In 2013, circumstances required me to work very, very hard. Even though these circumstances were temporary, and even though I was really having fun during the excitement of it all, by 2014 I was completely exhausted. The enthusiasm I carried for my work was gone. My curiosity was dulled. My thinking became unclear. That is when I knew I needed a break. Fortunately, I was in a position that allowed me to take six months off. During that time I slept (a lot!), read, meditated, played with my kids and studied. As a result, I came back to work invigorated and with a new sense of purpose. Because I had been able to take a step back, I now see things more clearly than before. I think more creatively, and work with more confidence.

Often, I see people in this same situation. Because our culture tends to view needing a break as weakness, they are looking for a treatment or a pill or a diet that will allow them to keep moving forward. It’s as if they are frantically trying to keep up with a speeding train, and there is no station in sight. Typically, these folks know exactly what they need. They might need some time away, help with a project, some quality time with a friend or a spouse–maybe even to find work more suited to their strengths and interests.

This is lesson number one: “You know what you need.”

If you stop long enough to look deeply, if you can cut through the social conditioning and work ethic and delve into your own mind-body wisdom, the solution is there.

Unfortunately, even once we recognize these solutions, we don’t often perceive them as available to us. I was in the same boat–since I was the only practitioner in one of my offices, I thought it would be impossible to take time off without closing that office completely. This thought–which I held to be ultimate truth–prevented me from looking for solutions. Then one day, it occurred to me that my health was at stake.

I remembered a story a friend had told me about the busiest period of her life. She had three young children, she worked as a nurse, she volunteered, she was busy all the time. She said, “I was just nonstop. Until one day I went nonstop through a stop sign and plowed into another car.” That accident landed her in the hospital for 5 months.

So as soon as I decided that time off wasn’t a choice, I opened my mind to possible solutions. I made a few phone calls, sent a few emails, and within 24 hrs had work coverage for the next 6 months.

Which leads me to lesson number two: taking a break makes you more productive.

One of the main excuses I hear from folks who are working too hard is “I just need to get through_____, and then I can slow down a little.” We know that the more likely scenario is that another more important or more compelling situation will present itself as soon as the current one is over. Or we know that even though we say we will take a break once this busy time is over, we probably won’t. And the myth is that if we stop to smell the roses, we will lose our momentum and therefore our productivity. This is simply untrue. I say, stop the train before the train stops you.

One of my teachers used to say, “Giving 100% is killing you.” Another famous acupuncturist who is known for getting pain relief immediately once needles are placed says, “when you get 80% improvement–STOP! Otherwise you’ll screw it all up.” His point is that after that 80% threshold, the amount of work we put in produces fewer and poorer quality results. Many productivity experts recommend working about 50 minutes of every hour, and then getting up to take a walk or otherwise get some distance from whatever you were working on. This applies to both mental and physical work. If you work at a computer, stop and walk around for a bit or maybe close your eyes and listen to music. If you are doing physical work, stop and rest or read some poetry. In other words, Let your brain re-fuel.

It is common practice in academia to take a sabbatical, and this concept is becoming more accepted across disciplines. Designer Stefan Sagmeister takes one year off every seven years in order to step back from his design work and reinvigorate his creativity. In his wonderful TED talk, he says something like “we in the West plan for about 40 years of work and 15 years of retirement, so I just decided to cut off 5 of those retirement years and intersperse them throughout my work years. This way the energy generated flows back into the business and to society at large. And at the same time, I have more fun.”

There was a great article in the Harvard Business Review back in 2007 which talked about increasing productivity, creativity and innovation by encouraging employees to take care of themselves. It’s called “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.” The article talks about top-down workplace change, but also points out that “individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they are facing.” In other words, whether you are the CEO or the line worker, there will be small and large things you can do to take a break and restore your energy.

For inspiration, look to nature. Waves surge and then withdraw. Storms rage and then the sun shines. Birds work hard to climb away from earth, and then glide on the wind. Bees have an incredible and difficult work schedule, but then spend the winter huddling together inside, resting and staying warm. Plants create beautiful flowers and berries and leaves at an incredible pace, but during winter they rest deeply. These are natural cycles of productivity and recuperation. When we ignore these cycles, not only does our health and vitality suffer–but our WORK and CREATIVITY suffer.

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

Lao Tzu

Don’t exhaust your caterpillar before the butterfly has a chance to emerge! Listen to the signals indicating a break is needed:

becoming more easily distracted
tasks take longer to do than they used to
things that used to be fun aren’t anymore
feeling fatigued
re-reading the same sentence
becoming easily irritable
feeling something is missing in life
feeling overwhelmed
losing interest in things
reaching for the coffee or energy drinks as a way to “get through”
increased alcohol consumption
memory problems

In order to begin to recover your energy, you could make drastic moves like quitting your job, but that may just add more stress in the long run. So you could start by trying out small changes. The possibilities are endless, and here are just a few suggestions:

Hourly (pick one or two)

Set a timer for 50 min and spend the last 10 min of every hour taking a walk or even a nap.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply for 30 seconds.
Go outside. It’s amazing how this can change your perspective.
Chat with a friend or coworker and not about work.
Write down the one most important thing to accomplish in the next hour.
Read poetry.
Listen to music.
Stand up and stretch.
Read an inspirational quote.
Admire a piece of art.
Stare into space or out the window.
Doodle

Daily (do as many as you can)

Spend a little time writing / meditating / or staring into space
Exercise a little — enough to feel your heart pumping, but not so much that it’s like a second job.
Eat meals without working at the same time.
Answer emails only twice a day.
Notice your propensity to complain about things and begin to change that. Complain only to people who have the power to change things or to people who can truly help you see a way to change things.
Turn your phone off for at least one hour, or while you are working on a task that requires focus.
Do your best to sleep well.
Be diligent about negative self-talk. Change the story.

Weekly

Plan at least some time reserved for “whatever the heck I feel like doing.” Put in on your calendar. Make it mandatory.
Spend time outdoors.
Do something silly–dance in your pajamas.
Do something that makes you feel connected to God, the universe, the world around you.
Be completely present with your kids or a good friend.

Yearly

Plan at least one vacation…even if you just plan to stay at home but not work. If you can, plan some time off every quarter. Even if each break is shorter, they may prove more rejuvenating, and you’ll have more to look forward to.
Spend a week tracking how you spend your time. How does this reflect what is important to you?
Spend some time in self-examination. Take the strength-finders test or some other personality test. Quit trying to fix your perceived flaws and instead develop your innate talents.
Spend a week or even a day “disconnected.” What is it like to not have your thoughts interrupted six times an hour?
Better yet, turn off the power in your house for a day. Live by sunlight and candle-light. Enjoy the silence.
Go for a hike, go camping, go sailing or fishing.
Sleep for a whole day.
Go on a retreat — this could be a formal structured retreat or just some time away by yourself.
Review your accomplishments. For one moment, forget all that there is left to do. Forget all that didn’t go the way you had planned. Forget the failures. Make a list of everything you accomplished from work projects completed to an exercise program in place to overcoming some negative behavior or thought pattern. Then just be with the success of that.
Take a scenic train ride…just for fun. Make sure it’s a leisurely one!

–Heather McIver, L.Ac.

Saving the World

I'm taking a bit of a break for a week or so, and wanted to post something that someone sent me that I found to be profound. It is the Welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory. However, as you read, maybe you can insert your own calling to the work you do on this planet, and think of it as "world work" that brings more to the world than just your paycheck.

Saving the World

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had
very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and
they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I
might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still
remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to
music school—she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level,
I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music
was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to
classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its
function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a
society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the
newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in,
has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s
the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music and
how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient
Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music
and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the
study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects,
and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible,
internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible
moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the
position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this
works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet
for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi
Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across
Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper
and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a
cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet
with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941
for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is
one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps,
why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or
playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food
and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would
anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we
have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic
Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where
people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the
obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The
camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without
recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is
part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable
expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am
alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I
reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world.
I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practically routine; I
did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the
cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands
on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought,
does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the
piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems
silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a
musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I
was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of
getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in
fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano
again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We
didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop,
we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity
that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People
sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people
sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I
remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center,
with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of
grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a
concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US
Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by
music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not
part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us
believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers
of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is
a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense
of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have
no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we
can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece
Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you
may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone
movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of
music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open
like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had.
Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really
going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely
no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have
been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And
something very predictable happens at weddings —people get all pent up
with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where
the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or
something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t
good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at
a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The
Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of
ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel
even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones
or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it
about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all
the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I
guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it
wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the
relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand
concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were
important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris;
it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have
played for people I thought were important; music critics of major
newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my
entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years
ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We
began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written
during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a
young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our
audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing
them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the
concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the
program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair,
square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his
life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would
be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece,
but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went
on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to
talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the
circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its
dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience
became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly
figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was
in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I
watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the
Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across
the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and
I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was
lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that
first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly
that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this
was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this
piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little
more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find
those feelings and those memories in me?” Remember the Greeks: music is
the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This
concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to
play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron
Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help
him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music
matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman
class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will
charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical
school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies,
you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some
night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and
you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8
PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind
that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary.
Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do
your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician
isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an
entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue
worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a
spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who
works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if
we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and
well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I
expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on
this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual
understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come
from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even
expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem
to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future
of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these
invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come
from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration
camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able
to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”