Take the Break Before You Need It
I am going on holiday.
In preparation for this holiday, I have been working extremely hard. This feels like a design flaw. There are clients to see. Emails to answer. Things to organise. Loose ends that suddenly seem terribly important because apparently the entire infrastructure of my life may collapse if I am unavailable for ten days. I have also been experiencing that familiar pre-holiday thought: Perhaps it would actually be easier just to keep working. Which is obviously ridiculous but I don't think I'm alone in this.
Many of us are surprisingly bad at stopping. We wait until we have finished everything, helped everyone, returned every message, cleaned the house, completed the project and reached some mythical point at which nobody needs anything from us. Then we will rest.
Except there is no such point.
There will always be another email.
Someone will always need something.
The washing basket will regenerate overnight.
There will always be work we could be doing. Which means that if rest is something we are only allowed once everything else is done, we will never really get to rest. We have to stop anyway. And this is something I am trying to get better at.
We tend to rest too late
One of the stranger things about the way we think about self-care is that we often treat it as an intervention for when things have already gone wrong.
We take time off because we are exhausted.
We cancel plans because we are overwhelmed.
We start sleeping properly because we can no longer function without it.
We finally say no because we have reached the point where saying yes makes us want to cry. We rest when our body or brain effectively forces us to, but surely the better strategy is to take the break before we desperately need one. The same principle applies almost everywhere else. We don't wait until the car engine seizes before putting oil in it. We don't charge our phones only once the battery has been dead for three days. We generally understand that systems require maintenance if we want them to keep functioning. ** See the post script note for ADHD thinkers below!
Yet somehow, when it comes to ourselves, preventative maintenance feels indulgent.
We keep going.
We push through.
We tell ourselves, Just get through this week.
And then next week arrives.
Pushing through isn't always productive
There is also an assumption buried inside our resistance to rest: that stopping means getting less done. Mathematically, this seems obvious. If I work for eight hours instead of six, surely I have produced two additional hours of work. Except human beings don't operate like photocopiers. Eight hours at a desk is not necessarily eight hours of useful cognitive output.
Fatigue changes how we work. We become slower. Attention wanders. Decisions become harder. We reread the same paragraph. We make mistakes and then spend time fixing them. Things that would normally take twenty minutes somehow take an hour.
Sometimes the most inefficient thing we can do is continue.
Research into short breaks supports at least part of this. A 2022 meta-analysis of experimental studies found that micro-breaks (defined as breaks of ten minutes or less) reliably reduced fatigue and increased feelings of vigour. Their effect on performance overall was more complicated: very short breaks didn't improve every kind of cognitive performance, but longer breaks were associated with greater performance improvements, particularly for creative and routine tasks.
That distinction matters.
The science doesn't tell us that getting up for three minutes will suddenly transform us into productivity machines. It tells us something more sensible. Recovery matters. And the more depleted the system is, the less likely a tiny pause will be enough. Sometimes you need five minutes. Sometimes you need lunch away from your computer. Sometimes you need an evening where you don't answer emails.
And sometimes you need to go on bloody holiday - which is me, right now. I haven’t been on a proper holiday in absolutely years. I honestly think pre-COVID? But even my brain is saying that can’t possibly be true!
A major review of research into recovery from work concluded that recovery during breaks, evenings, weekends and holidays helps sustain wellbeing, motivation and job performance.
More recent research on holidays is particularly interesting. A 2025 meta-analysis examining 32 studies found that holidays had a large positive effect on employee wellbeing, and that the benefits didn't disappear as quickly as earlier research had suggested. Psychological detachment from work and physical activity during holidays appeared particularly beneficial.
Psychological detachment is the interesting bit. Because technically being away from work and actually being away from work are not necessarily the same thing.
Your body can be on holiday while your brain is still at work
I can leave the office.
I can also take the office with me.
It weighs approximately 180 grams and is called my phone.
There is something wonderfully absurd about paying thousands of dollars to travel somewhere beautiful and then standing beside a swimming pool checking Outlook. And yet I understand the impulse.
Just quickly checking. Just making sure there isn't anything urgent. Just responding to this one thing because it will only take a minute.
The problem isn't necessarily the minute. It is that psychologically, we have gone back to work. A boundary has been punctured. The part of our brain that was beginning to relinquish responsibility has just been reminded: You're still on duty.
This is why self-care sometimes requires more than doing nice things.
It requires boundaries.
Not answering.
Not checking.
Allowing somebody else to handle something.
Tolerating the possibility that something may not be done exactly as we would have done it.
Maybe even deleting the email app for a while.
I know. Terrifying. Which is exactly why I am thinking of doing it.
Then comes the guilt
For many people, the practical act of taking a break isn't actually the hardest part. The hardest part is allowing themselves to enjoy it. We lie beside a pool thinking about everything we should be doing. We spend Saturday afternoon resting and hear an internal voice reminding us that the garage needs cleaning. We say no to someone and then spend three hours constructing an argument for why our no was reasonable. We take a day off and feel guilty because other people are working.
This is particularly common when our identity is built around being useful. Good mothers do things for their children. Good partners are available. Good employees go the extra mile. Good friends show up. Good psychologists care about their clients. All true.
But somewhere along the way, caring about people can quietly become never inconveniencing anyone by having needs of our own.
Those are not the same thing.
And being permanently available is not evidence that we care more. Sometimes it just means we have terrible boundaries.
The oxygen mask analogy is annoying because it's right
We have all heard the instruction on aeroplanes. In an emergency, put your own oxygen mask on before assisting children or other people. Nobody hears this and thinks “What a selfish mother!”
We understand immediately why the instruction exists. A parent who loses consciousness while attempting to secure their child's mask is useful to nobody. You need oxygen precisely because someone else depends on you. Self-care works in much the same way. Taking care of ourselves isn't the opposite of caring for other people. It is one of the things that allows us to continue doing it.
I want to be a good psychologist.
I also want to be a good mother, partner, friend and person.
None of those ambitions are assisted by me becoming chronically exhausted. When I am depleted, I have less patience. My attention is worse. Small inconveniences feel bigger. I am less creative. I have less emotional bandwidth. I become more likely to experience ordinary requests as demands because there isn't much left in the tank.
Rest doesn't take me away from the people I care about.
It helps me come back to them.
There is another problem with waiting until burnout
Burnout doesn't generally arrive one Tuesday afternoon carrying a clipboard and formally announce itself.
It accumulates.
A few late nights.
Working through lunch.
Checking emails on Sunday.
Not taking leave because this month is busy.
Then next month is busy.
Then Christmas is coming.
Then you've just come back from Christmas.
Then suddenly six months have passed and you cannot remember the last time you weren't tired. This is why boundaries matter before they feel necessary. A boundary isn't something we install once other people have taken too much from us. It is something that helps prevent us reaching that point.
Finish work.
Take the lunch break.
Use the annual leave.
Don't answer the email at 10 pm.
Leave some things until tomorrow.
Let somebody be mildly inconvenienced.
This last one can be surprisingly difficult. Especially for people who are accustomed to anticipating other people's needs. But your wellbeing cannot depend upon nobody ever being disappointed by your limits. Sometimes somebody will want something from you and you will say no. Sometimes somebody will prefer that you were available and you won't be. They may even be annoyed. That doesn't necessarily mean the boundary was wrong.
Rest is not something we earn
I think this is the belief underneath a lot of our guilt. That somehow rest must be earned through sufficient productivity.
Once I have done enough, I may stop.
Once I have been useful enough, I may relax.
Once everyone else is okay, I can look after myself.
But the problem is there is no agreed definition of enough. So the goalpost keeps moving.
You finish the work and notice the dishes.
You do the dishes and remember the washing.
You put the washing on and think you should call your mother.
You call your mother and remember an email.
Congratulations. You have invented an infinite task. Rest cannot depend upon completion because life is never complete.
Sometimes we simply decide: That's enough for today.
Not because everything is finished. Because we are.
There is also a biological reality here
We can argue philosophically about whether people deserve rest, but our brains and bodies are remarkably uninterested in the debate. They require it anyway. Sleep restriction has measurable effects on cognition. Meta-analytic research has found that insufficient sleep impairs sustained attention, executive functioning and memory, while even a single night of restricted sleep can increase attentional lapses and slow reaction times.
In other words, eventually the person heroically pushing through may actually be producing worse work.
We don't become more committed by ignoring our limits.
We become tired.
This sounds embarrassingly obvious when written down and yet many of us continue behaving as though exhaustion is a moral achievement.
Maybe we need a different definition of self-care
Self-care has become associated with massages, candles, yoga retreats and expensive moisturiser. All perfectly nice. But much of the self-care that actually protects us is considerably less Instagrammable.
Going to bed.
Taking lunch.
Saying no.
Not explaining the no for seventeen paragraphs.
Turning the phone off.
Asking someone else to do something.
Leaving work unfinished.
Taking annual leave even though work is busy.
Not filling every spare hour with another obligation.
Accepting that our capacity is finite.
These things can feel uncomfortable precisely because they involve limits. And limits mean accepting that we cannot be everything, for everyone, all of the time.
So I am taking the holiday…
And I am going to try to actually take it. Not technically take leave while remaining available. Not monitor my inbox from another country. Not just quickly check whether anything catastrophic has happened.
I am considering deleting my email app from my phone. This feels simultaneously sensible and like I am abandoning civilisation.
But perhaps that discomfort is part of the point.
Because boundaries aren't really boundaries when they only exist while nobody wants to cross them. And self-care isn't particularly meaningful if we only practise it once we have nothing left. The time to rest is before we collapse. The time to take leave is before we hate our jobs. The time to protect our capacity is while we still have some. Maybe the goal isn't to see how long we can keep going without stopping. Maybe it is to build a life in which stopping is part of how we keep going.
So take the lunch break.
Take the weekend.
Take the holiday.
Put your oxygen mask on.
The work will almost certainly still be there when you get back. You might just be considerably better at doing it. If you are wanting help applying these principles in your own life down load this free PDF to help find ways you can start to take your foot off the pedal (even just a little).
Mind My Mind x
Nothing I write here is a substitute for individual advice from a suitably qualified professional who understands you, your circumstances and the particular context of whatever you’re dealing with.
P.S. A note for ADHD brains
There is an extra complication here for those of us with ADHD: sometimes we are genuinely terrible at noticing that we need a break.
ADHD isn't simply difficulty paying attention. It involves differences in the regulation of attention. We can struggle to shift our attention away from something once we are absorbed in it, particularly when it is interesting, urgent, novel or rewarding. Hyperfocus can mean we sail straight past hunger, thirst, needing the toilet, physical discomfort and the increasingly obvious fact that we have been sitting in exactly the same position for four hours.
There can also be difficulties with interoception (noticing and interpreting signals coming from inside our bodies). Before I continue however, it should be noted that difficulties with interoception are not present with ALL individuals with ADHD brains and the research isn’t really strong enough yet to conclude that this is anything at all to do with ADHD in particular. However… anecdotally this has been an observed phenomena that is being explored further.
We may not register the gradual accumulation of tiredness or stress particularly well. Or we register it, but don't act on it because I just need to finish this one thing. Then another thing. And another.
This means our internal warning system isn't always particularly helpful at telling us when we are approaching our limit. Instead of noticing ourselves moving from 40 per cent depleted, to 60, to 80 and thinking, I'm getting tired; I should probably slow down, we can experience it more like:
Fine.
Fine.
Fine.
Fine.
Absolutely not fine.
Suddenly we are crying because someone asked what we want for dinner. We cannot move off the couch. Everything feels irritating and impossible. Or our body finally intervenes and we get sick, a migraine arrives, pain flares up, or we simply crash.
Only then do we realise how exhausted we have been.
This is one reason why, for ADHD brains in particular, we may need to stop relying on feeling tired enough to justify taking a break.
Sometimes the break needs to be externalised and scheduled.
Lunch happens because it is lunchtime, not because we have finally noticed we are starving. We stop working because it is 6 pm, not because every task is finished. We take annual leave because we haven't had a proper break in six months, not because we have reached the point where we physically cannot continue.
We may need to learn our earlier warning signs too. Perhaps emails start taking longer to write. We become unusually irritable. We stop cooking. The house gets messier. We skip a shower. We wear the same clothes as yesterday. We withdraw from people. Everything starts feeling like an interruption. We spend more time scrolling because we don't have enough cognitive energy to do anything else.
Those signs count.
We don't have to wait for tears, illness, complete exhaustion or the inability to get off the couch before we're allowed to conclude: I think I need a break.
In fact, the whole point is to get better at taking one before we get there.
References
Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460.
Sonnentag, S., Cheng, B. H., & Parker, S. L. (2022). Recovery from work: Advancing the field toward the future. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 33–60.
Grant, C. A., Dujon, A. M., & Schofield, M. B. (2025). Vacation interventions and employee well-being: A meta-analysis.
Lowe, C. J., Safati, A., & Hall, P. A. (2017). The neurocognitive consequences of sleep restriction: A meta-analytic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 80, 586–604.
Bellato, A., Arora, I., Kochhar, P., Hollis, C., & Groom, M. J. (2021). Is autonomic nervous system function atypical in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? A systematic review of the evidence. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 125, 369–385.
Hupfeld, K. E., Abagis, T. R., & Shah, P. (2019). Living “in the zone”: Hyperfocus in adult ADHD. ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 11, 191–208.
A note about how I write:
I’m a clinical psychologist, not a writer or editor, so I use AI as an editing assistant to help me tidy up my writing, organise my thoughts and occasionally rescue a sentence I’ve rewritten twelve times and somehow made worse.
The ideas, opinions and clinical reflections here are mine. Nothing I write here is a substitute for individual advice from a suitably qualified professional who understands you, your circumstances and the particular context of whatever you’re dealing with. Where I make claims based on research, I try to include the sources so you can read them for yourself. If I’ve picked something up somewhere over the past 20-odd years and can no longer remember exactly where it came from, I’ll try to say so. And sometimes what I write comes from my own professional or personal experience, which has value but also has limits. I’ll try to be clear about that too.
Basically: I’m aiming for thoughtful and evidence-informed, not omniscient. AI helps with the editing. I remain responsible for what ends up on the page.
