Rejuvenation for Work Stress

I final­ly had a bit of a break ear­li­er this month, for a few days — and wow, did it make a difference!

For all of us, the first half of 2020 was chal­leng­ing, stress­ful, busy – and a blur. It’s gone so fast!

Like many of you, it’s been the hard­est I’ve worked in more than a decade. I had added work stress man­ag­ing inter­nal changes, shift­ing exclu­sive­ly to vir­tu­al meet­ings, solv­ing seri­ous chal­lenges for our clients, and more.

I could feel the fatigue kick­ing in and, while I took a cou­ple of mini breaks, it was won­der­ful to have a week away. Although I did work part of the week, hav­ing zero respon­si­bil­i­ties was just what I need­ed to rejuvenate.

“…your well­be­ing must come first for you to have the strength to keep going and keep giv­ing. You need to con­tin­u­al­ly replen­ish your oxy­gen, your ener­gy and your stamina.”

For me, that’s not easy. I thrive on being busy, on pres­sure and get a kick out of how I can help people.

For most of my life, I’ve wok­en up every day with a num­ber of things to get done, and then pre­pared for even more.

Usu­al­ly, when I have time off, I’m excit­ed to make plans to do all kinds of things, includ­ing doing some strate­gic think­ing about my work and life. This time was different.

I did none of them – a sure sign of how much I need­ed to rest and reju­ve­nate. I need­ed more than my dai­ly resilience rit­u­als (Chap­ter 3, Dou­ble Your Resilience, Your Oxy­gen Mask First). I need­ed ​‘drool time’ — you know, when you are so relaxed that your jaw releas­es and drops? That’s drool time.

And that’s only pos­si­ble with more than a week­end off.

And it took a while to com­plete­ly relax but I could feel more of the bright­ness of my spir­it come back, as each day passed. It was a joy to wake up to days with noth­ing I had to do, nowhere I need­ed to go.

And, by the way, one of the great­est plea­sures of down­time is time to nap. High­ly recommended!

That bit of down­time was great and as I have more time off, through­out the sum­mer, I’ll be con­scious of hav­ing time for fun with friends and fam­i­ly, bal­anced with enough reju­ve­nat­ing drool time for me.

The Chal­lenge

• What is your plan for deep, per­son­al reju­ve­na­tion over the next cou­ple of months?
• How can you set aside all respon­si­bil­i­ties to do absolute­ly noth­ing for a few days or, ide­al­ly, more?