Reboot

Let’s take a week off. We’ll call it a mental health week. Because a day is just not enough.

It’ll be a week when you promise yourself you won’t stress about things you can’t control and you won’t pressure yourself to do things you don’t enjoy simply because you have to. You’re only to do things you choose, that brighten your mood and lift your spirits.

Sleep in, get up and be lazy, binge-watch Netflix and Disney+, go for long walks listening to podcasts or music, get on the train without a destination in mind. Do whatever. Anything other than what has been draining you of energy for so long.

Burnout symptoms are not that hard to identify: inexplicable anger outbursts, constant irritation, inability to focus, sleep deprivation, constant agitation, and many more. But most of all it’s exhaustion; not just tiredness, but physical and mental drainage. Have you ever been so consumed that you feel tired before you even get out of bed in the morning?

Every machine once in a while needs to be switched off and on again to function properly, to declutter and reboot. Our bodies (and minds) work like that too. We need to reboot to revitalise ourselves to be able to serve our purpose better. If we cannot operate well – if we’re not even feeling well – we are of no benefit to neither ourselves nor to others.

We need those periods of taking a break from the world. Of deciding what we devote our attention to and to whom. Because life is short, and it’s a shame to waste days not feeling happy.

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Pause and breathe

There is always something to do in a day. If you want to, you can find tonnes of things to keep you occupied – doing your actual work being a fundamental one.

But the thing is, nowadays, we lack the will to do pretty much anything.

We may blame it on languishing, the phenomenon of our times. But it may also be due to a series of reasons.

Life’s hectic rhythms sometimes result in us being too exhausted to be productive. And we realise that if we pressure ourselves, whatever we deliver will not be up to our own high standards. Perhaps that is why we prefer to do anything else, other than our obligations. And that anything else is often nothing. (Unless binging on TV series and Netflix counts as something).

We need days off. If anything to clear our minds and actually relax. Those moments we spent as kids just lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, daydreaming; well, they were actually priceless. Now, we seem to be lacking time for a proper meal, let alone for an instance of losing ourselves in space.

But it is necessary to breathe. To hit pause and do nothing, simply so we can get back on track of actually doing all the things that we’re used to filling our days with.