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Americans are notoriously bad at taking time off work: If you have trouble using your vacation and sick days, you’re not alone — more than 4 in 10 workers in the U.S. don’t use all their paid time off. You might also have found that even when you do figure out a way to take some days off, you’re not actually feeling relaxed or rejuvenated. And when you come back to work, you’re feeling less than restored.
It turns out that taking breaks from work doesn’t automatically help you recharge and avoid burnout. Here’s why.
Why taking breaks is so important
Let’s start with just how crucial it is to take breaks from work — not just for your mental health but also for your body.
Days upon days of intense work without sufficient time to recharge can lead to chronic stress, in which your nervous system gets stuck in “fight or flight” mode. This can lead to myriad negative health effects, from digestive issues to high blood pressure.
If you’re a desk worker, sitting for prolonged periods can lead to increased risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. And get this: Your breathing can actually become shallower or even stop when you’re getting new emails or chat messages, a phenomenon that’s been dubbed “email apnea.”
In other words, not being proactive about taking breaks can have a serious impact on your overall health — and eventually lead to burnout or levels of exhaustion that can undermine your ability to function effectively at work or even to get out of bed.
Determine your current situation
Unfortunately, it’s hard to give yourself the kind of quality time off that will actually alleviate your stress, and harder still to do it consistently enough to achieve a sustainable work-life balance.
Two factors are important to consider in figuring out what you need to do to take effective breaks:
Your stress levels at work
The first is understanding the severity of your work stress. To help do this, Kira Schabram, assistant professor of management at the Foster School of Business, uses the image of a slope: a state of thriving lies at the top of the slope. It then gradually moves downhill, ending in a cliff, which is burnout.
“You can be pushed down the slope by just one more drop and eventually you hit the cliff, a death by a thousand cuts,” says Schabram, who researches human sustainability at work as part of a research team led by Christopher Barnes, a professor of management at Foster. “Or it can be acute, a major life event that you weren’t prepared for, where you’re doing okay, but now your parent gets sick.”
In general, the more stress you’re feeling, and the lower you are on the slope, the more time and space from work is necessary to truly unplug and feel an improvement.
Think about where you might currently be on this slope: stressed but managing OK? On the verge of rage quitting? Somewhere in between?
The amount of agency you have at work
Another important factor, according to Schabram, is how much agency you have over your time and when you get your work done.
There is no correct work style or formula for work-life balance — it all depends on the person. You might do better setting a hard boundary and compartmentalizing work when you’re off the clock. Or you might thrive by integrating your work into your life routines throughout the week.
“For me, I find that Sunday in the evening, I like getting ahead of things and spend an hour or so just getting set up for my week,” says Merrill Berger, a clinical psychologist at UW Medical Center.
The important thing is being able to choose how you’re getting work done. If you’re feeling forced to answer emails or respond to messages from your boss on Saturdays, that’s very different from choosing to get ahead on your work.
Similarly, if you feel empowered to ask for time off, that’s a lot better than feeling like you need to hide your breaks.
“People will go to the bathroom and just be on their phone for a second to take a break or they’ll put themselves in a meeting status while they’re actually taking the break and pretending to work,” says Schabram. “What we find is that people do not come back feeling better, they just come back feeling more frustrated, annoyed, angry at the system, distracted.”
So also think about how much agency you have in when and how you take breaks — or whether you feel like you can ask for time off at all.
What kind of break do I need?
Now you can determine how to get more out of your work breaks — or if you might need to find a new job altogether that will allow you to take the time off you need. Here are some suggestions depending on the amount of stress you’re experiencing.
Short breaks during the day
If you are thriving at work — you are able to manage your workload and have agency most of the time — then a little can go a long way.
“If you’re pretty high up on the slope, then even short breaks seem to really work, like going for a 10-minute walk, for example,” says Schabram.
Other examples of short breaks include practicing some breathing exercises, making a cup of tea, or doing jumping jacks or stretches to give your brain a rest.
Routines to unplug after clocking out
It’s also important to find ways to unplug from work in the evenings and on weekends to prevent moving toward burnout. It can help to have a ritual to transition out of work.
“For me, when I drive home from work, I go the pretty way versus the most direct way,” says Berger. “Driving along Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, I can just look at the water, maybe the mountain is out — for me, that is my transition.”
If you work from home, maybe it means going on a quick jog or doing a short yoga session at the end of the day. The important thing is to make it into a routine that you can sustain even when things get stressful and you move closer to the edge of the cliff.
“I use meditation all the time when I find I’m absolutely exhausted, but I’m also really agitated and I can’t calm down,” says Berger. “Taking a bath or a shower can also be very helpful.”
While activities that allow your body to rest and your nervous system to calm down are crucial, just switching gears, even while still being active, can be effective too.
“If you’re high enough on that slope, a break can just be a different activity,” says Schabram. “So spending your Saturday volunteering or doing things with your kids — it doesn’t need to be static as long as you’re doing this regularly, this disconnecting.”
Being consistent with these sorts of routines when things are relatively manageable at work can prevent you from moving closer to burnout.
Mental health days or longer leave
You wouldn’t be alone if you’re already further down the slope and experiencing more severe stress at work. You also might not be lucky enough to have a job or manager that gives you the kind of agency to take breaks whenever you need them. If that’s the case, you might ask if you can use sick leave for a mental health day.
It might be the case, though, that you need more rest than you think and even a day off won’t be enough to recover from the exhaustion you’ve been experiencing.
“There is a tendency for people not to allocate enough time for themselves to take off,” says Berger. “You’ll get somebody who’s really exhausted and quite burnt out, and they say, ‘I’ll take a day,’ which is not nearly enough.”
If this is the case, it’s crucial to find a way to take a longer amount of leave in order to have time to recover and get some distance from your job. That might mean using vacation, sick days or even unpaid leave if that’s possible for you.
“One of the things that often happens is when people are stressed out, they’re not sleeping well, and getting sleep is foundational for people’s overall physical health,” says Berger. “So many times when people go on vacation, they actually just get to sleep better than they are when they’re working.”
If you’re taking time off after a stressful stretch at work, it’s important to actually give yourself enough time to rest and recover — this could take days or even weeks — and not jump into a busy itinerary or to-do list right away.
“When you take vacation, you really do need to take vacation,” says Berger. “If you are in vacation mode and you answer an email or two, that’s fine. But the main thing is that you really feel as though you’ve switched gears and you’re in vacation mode versus work mode.”
Quitting your job or taking a sabbatical
OK, so you’ve fallen off the cliff and into burnout. Now it might be time to contemplate some more dramatic measures like taking long-term leave or even quitting your job.
Schabram has also studied sabbaticals — both the kinds that people choose to take, in order to travel or pursue a professional or creative project, and the kinds people are forced into.
“When they’re pushed into it by burnout, they will quit their job or be pushed out by a toxic environment and they're going to spend months at home, just in bed, binging Netflix and things like that,” says Schabram.
Again, it’s important during that period of recovery to be kind to yourself and let your body recover. Trust that when you’re ready, you’ll figure out the right next steps. Those steps might even include changing careers or another big life change.
But in an ideal world, you won’t need to get to that point.
“Preventive maintenance is much better than corrective maintenance, so it’s important to take breaks ahead of time,” says Schabram. “Those terms also apply to everything in the world: It’s better to maintain your house than wait until the roof has a leak.”
