Preventing Burnout Means Planning Your Time Off

Apr 1

Does your life feel like an endless grey trudge through work chores and home chores?

If you want your time off to truly restore you, you need to invest some time, ahead of time, to make a plan for your leisure time. There is no free lunch.

What makes time restorative is that it is vivid — it feels different, it stands out in your memory — you can look back on a hike, or a picnic, or time spent drawing a picture, and it brings you strength and happiness as you remember it. Taking time off that is truly restorative also helps prevent burnout; but restorative time off is not something that just happens.

For one thing, we are swimming against a cultural tide with some powerful currents, including:

A workaholic culture that emphasizes constant, go-go productivity. Combined with changes created by the pandemic, this means that work life is increasingly stealing time from personal life, which in turn requires that we respond with a little more structure.
"Machine drift," which is technology writer Kevin Roose's term for algorithms in our devices that make decisions for us, including decisions about how we spend our leisure time. I use a Kindle reader and subscribe to Spotify. Their algorithms funnel me into recommendations based on what I’ve already read or listened to. Sometimes these algorithms are helpful; but they also block out the joys of discovery, of stumbling upon something entirely new. Buying another e-book on my Kindle is not nearly as different or memorable as exploring a new book store.
The harmful notion that everything we like to do must be turned into a side hustle: in other words, there is strong cultural pressure to turn even our interests and hobbies into yet another form of work. Part of this shows up as a loss of appreciation for the value of anything that is "non-productive." (What did you like to do when you were a kid? Are you doing that now? Is it still fun?)

Here are a few practical ideas to help you develop truly restorative time off:

For restorative time off, break out of your usual routine

When I was an intern in training for an emotionally demanding line of work, I asked a retired homicide investigator how he had dealt with the emotional intensity of his job. He told me that when I had time off, it was important to use that time to do something different.

"This does NOT mean doing chores around the house," he said. "You need to get out, and you need to do something different." What was his "something different?" He enjoyed coaching youth teams, and he attended games at the local college where he knew some of the student players.

After that conversation, I got a membership pass at a large and beautiful garden, and went there most weeks. I loved exploring those gardens — they changed every week. After that, because I love to cook, I would hit a local farmer’s market and the high-end grocery store: not for boring necessities like laundry detergent, but for interesting new foods I wanted to try. That was all very restorative. And now I have vivid, happy memories I can look back on, because it was different.

Next up are two strategies from two public figures whose U.S. election votes no doubt differ, but who show that restorative leisure time is a pursuit that transcends partisanship.

Switch your gears: if you sit most of the time at work, get moving

In Emily and Amelia Nagoski's book Burnout, Emily asked MSNBC host Rachel Maddow how she deals with it (Nagoski and Nagoski 2019, p 186).

Maddow said, “I leave work and come home and spend time outdoors, and I have the world’s most perfect family and great dogs and I go fishing and I chop wood and I use different parts of my brain. And that’s the only cure that I really know of; when you are burned out, it’s because you burned a specific gear in your brain, but the Lord gave us a lot of different gears. When you use the other ones, you regenerate.”

On her time off, Maddow goes from an indoor job to the great outdoors. Switching your gears means that whatever activity you’re switching to, is different. And for restorative time off, different is good.

Have a menu of leisure activities you can turn to

One of the secrets to having truly restorative leisure time is to know, before you have your time off, how you are going to spend it. Maddow already knows that she wants to spend time with her family, and time outdoors doing something physically active. She switches gears by selecting from a group of activities that she already knows will refresh her. In other words, she created a menu for herself.

Plan your time off, ahead of time

I have told myself more than once that I was going to watch a good show on Netflix, only to scroll through show descriptions for an hour because I didn't already know what I wanted to see. Has this ever happened to you? It took me a while to realize that I had to decide what I wanted to watch before the hours arrived.

While he was governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee was interviewed by Laura Vanderkam on how he fended off burnout. He stressed the importance of planning ahead of time, what you want to do with your time off (Vankerkam 2012, location 76):

“Don’t enter into it with such a lack of structure that you don’t do anything because you spend all day thinking about what you want to do,” Huckabee advises. “If you know you want to read a book, then get the book out and have it set aside and make plans to read it. Say it’s going to be at one. When that starts, get on it. Don’t wait until that afternoon, then think—could I read? Or listen to some music? Or take a walk? Then you’ll sit about wasting an hour of what little time you have figuring out what to do with the rest of it.” To make the most of your weekends, “you tell yourself, look, what would make me really, really enjoy this day and kind of get me out of the normal routine and give me pleasure?” Then say, “this is what I’m going to do,” and come that time, be disciplined about that commitment, telling yourself, “this is my appointment, just as if it’s a doctor’s appointment or an appointment to go to work.” This is the paradox of weekends: “You have to set an appointment to go off the grid as surely as to go on it.”

I have to admit that this is a true minus-plus on my battery tracker: I never feel like planning my time off (so unspontaneous! ) but Spontaneous Anna too often ends up scrolling through screens, which kind of defeats the romance and excitement one would hope for from the notion of spontaneity.

Even though I rarely feel like planning my time off, I’m always glad I did.

But then there’s the part about actually getting up off the couch and following the plan, which leads us to…

Make the effort to do things that you will remember later

It is sooo tempting, with time off, to dismiss your plan and just sink into inertia (a.k.a. the couch) but that usually means doing nothing: doing nothing memorable or different, that is. (And remember, when it comes to time off, different is good.)

To be truly restorative, at least some of your time off needs to stand out in your memory.

Laura Vanderkam acknowledges how difficult it can be to work against inertia, especially if you have young children (as of this writing, she has five children). She writes about the experiencing self — the one experiencing the hassles of pulling an outing together — versus the remembering self, the one who will take joy from the memories later (Vanderkam 2012, Kindle loc 471).

While we often crash into weekends feeling overwhelmed, the impulse to do nothing leads, as one reader told me, to feeling like we’re missing out on our own lives....Traveling with little ones is always challenging. There are highs and lows—always in the same day, often in the same hour. In the rear view mirror, though, the experiencing self who spent forty minutes trying to get the baby to lie down in her portable crib is replaced by the remembering self. The remembering self has turned what could be fallow, forgettable days into memories sown into the brain. These memories are there to nourish that brain through its weekday labors. They are there to fortify the soul in years to come when the busyness of now is replaced by a quieter life—as quiet as an off-season amusement park when the kiddie rides have been packed up after Labor Day empties the shore.

And… there is still no free lunch. When it comes to taking time off that actually restores you by being memorable and different, you have a lot of forces pushing against you.

So you need to push back. Creating a plan will help you push back, and most importantly will give you some wonderful memories to strengthen and encourage you down the road.

References

Emily Nagoski, and Amelia Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Illustrated edition, Ballantine Books, 2019.

Vanderkam, Laura. What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off. Portfolio, 2012. Kindle edition.

Anna Havron