Take a Break Once It Is No Longer Fun

Happy Wisdom Wednesday!

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I have a very complex relationship with “work”. Ask any one of my friends and they will say that I’m very busy. I have a hard time relaxing. I have this strong urge to “do something” in my free time. When I don’t have something to do, I feel like I am being lazy. On top of it, I don’t get much pleasure from the typical things that people do to relax: watching Netflix, Youtube video streams, scrolling on social media sites etc. When I consume media in a serial way, I feel gross on the inside, like my life energy is leeching away from me and leaving a nasty residue behind. I don’t understand it.

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So often I am resigned to working on something and for right now, I’m working on creating a life coaching business. I enjoy creating things and, to be honest, ruminating on how actualizing it is going to improve my life in one way or another. I realize that this fixation on “create to improve base level of happiness” can be a stumbling block for me.

For instance, the moment where something I do doesn’t reap the results I was expecting, I get disheartened and consider abandoning the project. I’ve been working on overcoming this ” throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality since I am very keen to quit very good ideas that require significant start-up and maturing time. I’m a bit of an instant gratification addict and feel frustrated when my goals don’t happen overnight.

So this is the context of this piece of wisdom. I learned to take a break once I no longer feel connected to the work I am doing. Take a break once the work is no longer fun.

I realized in listening to how my body feels, typically, I’ll feel a sensation of resistance in my chest, I learn to trust my inner wisdom. It can be very difficult in a world where “hustling” is fed to us at every turn. Hustling implies that taking a break or resting is a sign of weakness or waning commitment to the goal.

I decided that if my “better future” requires me to harm my body or mind in order to get it, that the end goal isn’t worth it. This is counter-intuitive to our “work hard, play hard” culture that pressures us to trade our waking lives to generating capital. That’s a good thing.

Just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s not insane.