Most of us are carrying the baggage, the stress, and pressure of the last meeting into our new meeting. And then we're carrying the confusion, anxiety, and lack of preparation of that meeting into the next meeting. And then we're confusing and deluding ourselves into the next meeting, and the next, and the next, and the next. By the end of the day, you don't even know which meeting you got right.
Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that are listening while you walk your dog, while you're at the gym, while you're cooking. Wherever you are, I'm so happy to be with you. As always, I appreciate you.
I'm grateful to you. I am so happy that you tune in every week. Now, today's topic is really, really interesting to me because I think I've been going through it myself. And so when I'm struggling with something or when I'm finding something difficult, I naturally want to figure out how to help you all through it as well.
And be honest with me, how many of you have been dealing with fatigue or tiredness and you don't even know why? Right, have any of you been feeling a bit tired during the week, maybe a bit fatigued? Now, I was looking at some studies as always, and I found a research study that says 60% of adults say they are more tired than ever before, right? And these are research being done during the pandemic.
And this one really hit me. About half of participants of the study get out of bed 10 minutes before the remote workday starts, right? So if you're starting at nine, people are getting out of bed at 8:50. Now, if that's you, I'm not judging.
I'm just checking in to let you know that there's around 50% of people that are doing that as well. How many of you have felt like your sleep's been disrupted, your space has been disrupted? How many of you are feeling more fatigued than ever? I think it's pretty, pretty common right now.
And I wanted to address it because I just really feel like sleep and rest and rejuvenation are just such important things, no matter what you want to achieve in life. Whether your goal in life is ultimate material success, right? If you want to be number one, you have to know how to rest, how to recoup. Now, if your ideal form of happiness is joy, connection, bonding, you need energy for that.
You need presence for that. And if you're someone who just says, yeah, I just want to live an easy life, well, even for that, we need to be healthy and well. So the idea of good rest and good sleep and good breaks is such an important thing to consider. And I think a lot of us look at play as play and work as work.
When we're at work, we're at work. And when we're playing, we're at playing. Or if we're sleeping, we're sleeping. But based on the changes in our routine and the changes in what we've been experiencing over the last year, we need to change the way we work.
And that's why I think that there is more need for regular breaks throughout the day, right? If we look at a, let's take a soccer game, obviously I call it football. There's a break at halftime, but there's also many breaks that players are taking throughout the game. It may be when the ball goes out, out of play.
It may be when it's not on your side of the field. Like there are many breaks, even in the biggest athletic sports. Maybe not basketball as much. They seem to do a lot of running.
But most sports have a lot of breaks in throughout. And we have to start thinking about our days and our life in that way as well. Now, I used to be someone who didn't believe in breaks. I used to be someone who used to frown on people who took breaks.
I used to be someone who saw someone taking a break and thought, yeah, that's why you're not successful, right? I used to be highly judgmental in that way because so much of my life was spent trying to be successful. I really wanted to be successful. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that.
I'm not saying that I made a mistake. I'm not saying that you're making a mistake if you're doing that. I'm just saying that the value of a break counts even when you want to be successful. And whether that's a short break per day or whether that's a vacation, whatever it may be, it's so, so important.
So I want to talk about lots of different types of breaks that you can take today to rewire your mind around breaks. Because a lot of us just have this guilt around breaks, right? How many of you feel guilty when you take a break? How many of you feel like, you know, you're letting someone down?
And I wanna ask you, where do you think that's coming from? Where is that challenge that you have, that guilt that you feel around a break coming from? Is it that you had a parent that told you, you can never stop? Did you have a parent that forced you back out when you said, I need to take a day off today?
Did you have a boss that told you there were no days off? Where was that mentality created? Was it a hashtag, no days off that you started following? Where did that mentality come from?
Now, I had that mentality too, and I still have it to a great degree. And I think that it's brought me a lot of joy, success, achievements over the years, but I've also seen where it's weakened me. And this is what I love doing with habits, is I wanna look at a habit and I want to think about how does that strengthen me and how does that weaken me? For example, let's take the habit of healthy eating.
It's obvious where it strengthens you, right? It nourishes your body. It makes you fitter. It makes you healthier.
Hopefully you'll live longer. But where does it weaken you? It can weaken you if it makes you judgmental. You may judge other people who eat unhealthy.
You may think negatively of them. So now you have a healthy body, but an unhealthy mind. No one wants that, right? So many of us can have healthy bodies, but we have unhealthy minds because we have toxic thoughts about other people who don't work out.
We have negative thoughts about other people who eat unhealthy. That doesn't lead to a healthy place for ourselves. So let me take another habit, for example. Let's take the practice of meditation.
When you're practicing meditation, what are the healthy benefits? Of course, focus, determination, boosting your immune system. What are the negative habits of meditation? Well, there aren't many weaknesses, but one of the weaknesses would be when you're late or you miss a day, you then fall into that trap of perfectionism.
Maybe perfectionism is the habit I'm talking about. How many of you know you struggle with being a perfectionist and that when it's not perfect, you stop doing it? You quit, you let go, and you just let it be. So many of us experience all of these challenges, right?
So many of us experience all of these things. So taking breaks is something that's undervalued, massively undervalued. I think a lot of people think breaks are something you should feel guilty for. A lot of people think breaks means you can't focus.
A lot of people feel breaks throughout the day means you're unproductive or ineffective. And I found now that the rate at which I'm performing at, if I don't take breaks, actually, that's the biggest weakness, right? In the beginning, I do believe that taking regular breaks may actually slow you down, but as you grow and as you develop, taking more breaks is actually the most effective, productive thing you can do. So I wanna share with you how I think about breaks at multiple levels in different stages in my day, in my weeks, in my months, and even in my year, because that way you can start building up a schedule that really builds you up for success and happiness in the year.
Now, the reason I like breaks is breaks are the first time we let ourselves take a breath. Take a break, take a breath, right? If you notice that when you're just pushing, you're just holding your breath, you're grinding through, you've got that grit, you're forcing through. When you take a break, you allow yourself to take a breath.
And when you get to hold your breath in that way, in that natural, effortless way, that's when you're truly aligned and truly in sync. So I want you to, every hour, take a break for five minutes. Just five minutes. Every hour.
And I want you to have this in your schedule. So if a meeting finishes at 10:30, the next one starts at 10:35. If a meeting finishes at 12:30, the next one starts at 12:35. Or even better, make your meetings 55 minutes long and start five minutes later if you wanna get 10 minutes in to make sure you get five, but make your meetings all 55 minutes long.
Meeting starts at one, it ends at 1:55. You get that five-minute gap in. Is it gonna make any difference? And here's the key thing.
Is five minutes every hour going to make a difference in the meeting you're in versus taking that five minutes going to make a huge difference to the next meeting and how you enter it? Most of us are carrying the baggage, the stress, and pressure of the last meeting into our new meeting. And then we're carrying the confusion, anxiety, and lack of preparation of that meeting into the next meeting. And then we're confusing and deluding ourselves into the next meeting and the next and the next and the next.
By the end of the day, you don't To take many breaks is having a healthy snack. For me, it's mainly been nuts. It's mainly been walnuts and Brazil nuts and just getting a bit of energy pumping again. And if you're someone that needs to take regular snacks, I highly recommend anything from nuts to fruits that can be really brilliant for just keeping that energy going.
I think a lot of us are missing meals, missing breakfast, missing lunch, and it's so important to make sure that if you're missing energy, that you do take a moment to re-energize. Now, this may sound unpopular, but I think as we're working from home, we're probably making this mistake even more. How many of you at work used to eat at your desk? Eating at your desk is such a bad idea because you don't do anything.
You don't work well or you don't eat well. Most or more often than not, you're just rushing your food down your mouth and you're not digesting it properly now. So now you're at your desk, you're feeling bloated, you're feeling some indigestion, maybe you're feeling some acid. And it's because we actually have to learn to chew our food 16 to 32 times.
Every bite, we should be biting food 16 to 32 times. I remember learning this in the monastery and just being like, what? I didn't think I even bite four times. The next time you're eating, I want you to count how many times you think you bite.
But middle of the day, you need to take at least 30 minutes for lunch. You need to take that 30 minute lunch. I really want you to take that 30 minute lunch. And again, you may be saying, Jay, I don't think that's going to happen.
There's no chance I can take a 30 minute lunch. I mean, my boss would just kill me. And again, I'm not gonna get anything done. And you're like, Jay, you're just telling me to take more breaks throughout the day.
And the reason that, first of all, I just want to get really clear. You may be listening to this going, Jay, this is so unrealistic. The reason I'm telling you to take so many breaks is because I know you're not gonna take this many. But if I tell you how important breaks are, maybe you'll take at least half of what I'm saying.
But taking that 30 minute lunch, and that's for you to do your personal thing. Try and avoid making it about social media or scrolling or, you know, sending an email. But that's your lunchtime. You want to go and do some online shopping.
You want to call someone in your life. Or you just want to sit there and eat, eat and be present with your food. Try it. Try to do that without getting bored.
I promise you'll be weird the first time and even leave your phone at the desk. And it'll be weird. You'll keep reaching for something and noticing that it's not even on the desk. I've done that a million times.
But you'll start seeing how that feeling starts to disappear. You'll start seeing how that, you know, challenge in the first place, that awkwardness actually turns into this beautiful stillness that you experience in your mind. For the past two days, and I'm doing this for the next two weeks, I am working on my book and I won't be having my phone next to me from 9am through to 3 to 4pm. So 6 to 7 hours of the day.
I'm not using my phone. I cannot tell you, it's only day two. I cannot tell you how fulfilling and freeing it is to not have my phone to scroll on during the hours of 9am to 4pm. You'd think I'd get bored, but actually I'm so in tune with my work.
I'm so aligned with what I'm doing. It's so refreshing. I would be thinking, oh, I'm missing so much. I've got so much to do.
Sure, I've got emails coming through that I check after 3 or 4pm. But the truth is that I'm getting so much more done of what I want to do. Most of us start our day on the reactive because we are starting our day by responding to everyone else's needs. We start our day, we go, okay, well, what does everyone else need from me on email?
Rather than saying, well, what do I want to achieve today? What do I want to get done? Now, the fourth break I'm recommending is I want you to take, and this can be your weekend, but I want you to make sure that you're taking a full rest weekend every 30 days. So every 30 days, I want you to take a full rest weekend.
So now that we're getting busier, we are tempted to fill our calendars up with a social life. Every night we're out, every weekend is jam-packed. I can see it on social media. People are back out with each other again.
And again, that leads to exhaustion during the week. I want to make sure that every 30 days, there's one weekend that you take that is purely for rejuvenation. It may be one that you go and sit on the beach, sit in a park. It may be one that you just sit in your garden.
It may be one that you allow yourself to just really lie in. It may be one where you go on a little hike. Whatever it is that you want to do, I want you to take a break every 30 days. Now me and Radhi, before the pandemic, started taking three days every 30 days where we drove three hours away from where we live and we spent time together.
We locked our phones in the safe of the hotel or the Airbnb that we stay in. And then we go out and just spend time together. And it was amazing for our relationship. It's amazing for our marriage.
And we're about to start doing it again when it's safe to travel. But those were some of the best memories we made in our relationship as well. Being able to spend that quality time together. So I really want you to consider planning some quality time with friends, with loved ones, with a partner every 30 days that allows you to truly disconnect from everything that's going on and reconnect with the people that mean the most to you.
So many of us keep saying, oh my gosh, I don't get enough time with my family. I'm working late every night. I work too hard during the week. This is the best way to not feel that way anymore.
You won't realize how much connecting in a deep way will surpass every other type of connection. Even if you sat down with your family member every night, it wouldn't solve the same feeling as this deep, immersive way of connecting with someone. And so I don't want you to underestimate this. This isn't just a take a weekend break advice.
This is really about deep connection. It's really about the other person and you feeling like you've truly connected. And that's only going to happen when you spend this deep quality time with each other. So I want to make sure that you start planning this out.
And when I say planning this, this needs to get into your calendar. It needs to be in your calendar. And what this is going to do is it's going to stop you from feeling burnout. See, what people don't realize is when you get to burnout, it's really hard to get back.
It takes so much more time. It takes so much more effort. It takes so much more out of you. But this will actually help you avoid ever getting to burnout.
Right. And the last two breaks, this one is you need to take that three day break every quarter, every quarter. That's four times a year. Take a long weekend for yourself.
Take it on top of the long weekends that already exist. I was shocked when I moved to the United States and realized there were only 20 days off a year that people got for annual leave in England. It was 30 days a year. And I always used to take 40 days when I worked in the corporate world, even if it was unpaid leave, because I just really believe in getting your sanity back.
And studies show that most of us don't even take the annual leave. So let alone taking 20 days, most of us aren't even taking 15 days or 10 days off per year. I want you to make sure you take three days off every quarter. And that could be a weekend and just adding one day off.
So one day every quarter, I want you to take off to make it a three day weekend on top of the three day weekends that you get wherever you live. It will be truly, truly life changing. And I know right now you're all going, Jay, you are telling us to basically do nothing. And I'm like, no.
If you add it up, every break that I'm asking you to take, this is what it would be. So even if you added up all the days I'm asking you to take, so you've got one day per quarter with the weekends. So that's four days. And then finally, you've got your one vacation per year where you're taking off seven days.
Now, I've spoken to a lot of people and a lot of people tell me, Hey Jay, it takes me like three to five days just to switch off. It's why we can't go away for three to five days once per year as our only time off. Right. Because if that's the time it takes.
That's why when you're taking those three days off every quarter, right, with the two days on a weekend, one day off, every time you're taking that one full weekend every 30 days as a rest weekend, you're slowing down the chances. You're actually avoiding the chances, eliminating them of you ending up burnout. And that's the wish I don't have for you. I just don't want you to burn out.
And the only way to not burn out is take more breaks. And so these are the breaks that I recommend you take regularly, consistently, daily,