"I hate my 9 to 5 job, I have no motivation, I feel burned out, I feel stuck, I'm making no progress in my career, I make dump mistakes at work and in personal life, I often get snappy and cranky"... How often do you get thoughts like that?
Are you satisfied with your career?
Are you happy to get to work every morning?
When was the last time you took time for yourself?
Do you feel healthy?
These are all important questions that we often forget to ask ourselves in our busy lives. I've been working hard building my career for many years, sometimes running more than one job gig at a time and got my Bachelor's while working full-time. Does this sound familiar to you?
I've pushed through several points in my life when I was burned out because that's how my mom raised me (and I'm grateful to her for that) BUT four months ago I took a sabbatical to slow down and take a break. Looking back, I pat myself on the back for making this great decision, and want to share with you some wisdom on how to decide when you need a break.
Here is the list of signs that you need a break:
7. Lack of sleep.
1. Low productivity, but more accurately - you cannot complete your job in the amount of hours that you should be able to.
The “should” can be determined based on your observation of the productivity of other people across your industry, employer expectations and your own estimates. If this is the case, try to analyse the reasons why completing your workload is taking you longer than it should. Do you need to improve your skills at your job? Is your employer failing at setting the employees up for success? Or perhaps you find yourself procrastinating and feel like you could perform better if you just weren’t tired? If the latter seems to be your case and you already tried taking relaxing vacations, as well as following a healthy routine, yet nothing helped, sabbatical may be the answer. It is possible that your job is very stressful and tiring for you and after working many years with just brief one-week vacations here and there, you just need a long recovery.
2. You are not learning anything at your job. The answer here may be that you simply need to change the employer, but maybe you already tried that or you just no longer have any interest in your industry or profession. So let’s figure out why you are no longer inspired to learn. Do you need to recover your mental health so you can again be open to learning? Maybe it’s time to change your industry or career direction and take on completely different responsibilities. If you are trying to figure this out and just don’t seem to know exactly what it is, it might be good for you to take a step back and look at your situation objectively during a break.
Also, being on a sabbatical doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be doing absolutely nothing. You can still explore different opportunities outside of your current area of expertise. Try attending some networking events, meet new people and see if anything you learn from your surroundings interest you. Ask your friends if maybe they know someone who runs a business in the area that seems interesting to you. Try to get into some temporary gig. See what you like. While your starting point may not be a 100% match it could lead you to something that’s truly yours.
3. No career progression. You want to progress in your career yet your performance review does not appear promising for a promotion.
As someone who has been promoted many times and has been in a leadership position for a few years in different industries, I believe the path to a promotion is as follows. First, you need to perform extremely well, then take on some projects above your current title (with your manager’s permission) and deliver noticeable value to your employer and clients. If you are in the right place, you would just naturally want to do more without asking for extra money upfront. The desire to go above and beyond should come from you such that your manager would have no choice but to give you a promotion. It doesn’t matter if there is no position available for you to get promoted. The next level position always exists for the right person, and if you’re stepping up the game for the company resulting in higher profits or improving employer reputation, you should confidently ask your employer for a career step-up and expect to get a more lucrative title.
In other words, if you are not getting a promotion because you don’t have a natural desire to go an extra mile you might need to change your industry or career trajectory. Find what truly inspires you during an exploratory journey of your sabbatical.
4. Lack of motivation or creativity. It is normal to not feel motivated about doing a few tasks that are not primary of your job and just need to be done. We all have them, and sometimes you just need to plow through them at a specific day or time of the week. But if you have these feelings about most of your job duties, or lost your creativity that you desperately need in your job, then it could be time to re-evaluate things. Simply put, if you're dreading Monday morning on Sunday night, something needs to change. First, try finding new hobbies, re-evaluate your priorities, take proper weekend breaks and increase social time. Those could be some of the solutions to increasing motivation and creativity, but if that didn't help, consider a sabbatical.
5. Frustration build-up. The state of being unhappy and snappy, both at work and in personal life, comes from not being in your zen, which in turn may come from a number of things. It could be dissatisfaction with your life, wrong priorities, absence of work-life balance, loss of purpose, or just a general exhaustion. Work takes up a large portion of the time in a week, and affects you significantly. If you need to find your zen try starting with meditations, walks, yoga, exercising, and taking a vacation. If neither worked, then consider a long-term break.
6. You are not doing what you love, or when you are not sure if you are doing what you love.
Life is too short to spend years of your life in a 9-5 that doesn’t bring you joy, satisfaction and sense of fulfilment. You need to feel like you are applying all of your potential and talent into what you do. If you are not able to fully express what you have to offer, go find that one thing that is in your zone of talent and mastery. The sooner you start and the more you are trying, the higher your chances of finding your talent and succeeding more than you ever expected.
7. Lack of sleep, or to be exact you are consistently sleeping less than 8 hours per day and your job does not allow you to have more resting hours.
While you may think that sleeping less than 8 hours per day is normal (I used to be one of those people), turns out it is extremely unhealthy. According to sleep researchers, we absolutely need 8 hours of sleep to remain healthy and sane. Our brains are not capable to determine that we are sleep deprived when we are sleep deprived, so we just keep going at a lower than optimal productivity month after month. That being said, if you analyze your daily calendar and determine that after all your working hours, reasonable amount of social time, self-care time, meals and exercising, you simply don’t see those 8 hours for a sleep in your schedule, you need to evacuate.
You could switch jobs but if you need to catch up on sleep after months or years of being sleep deprived, you might be better off taking time off from work altogether rather than jumping into something new when your productivity and analytical abilities are not at your peak. This naturally leads me to the next sign that calls for an extended time-off.
8. Endless fatigue. When your body is showing the signs of fatigue and they don't go away.
If this is the case, first, start with improving your health and adopting healthy habits. I’m talking about improving sleep, diet, activity, water intake, meditation and removing bad habits. If you tried all the above and that didn’t help, you may want to go to the doctor, or try taking a break. Listen to your body, it’s there to serve you for your lifetime and you need to be attentive to it. If your body truly asks for a break, let it have it. Or else, your body will find a way to force you to have that break by getting sick for example. And this leads me to my next point.
9. You are constantly getting sick. There may be many reasons for this, but likely it is a way of your body to force you to rest, or it could be your reaction to stress or fatigue, or it could be the signs from your mind and soul that you are doing something that doesn’t align with what you want to do in life. I’m not a doctor and I suggest that you take your health seriously and reach out to a medical professional if you have health issues. But no matter the diagnosis, the root cause of that sickness may be one of the above reasons. You can keep healing the wounds but until you fix the root cause you won’t significantly improve the situation. In other words, if you need a break or need to discover what you want from your life - don’t wait too long.
10. You have an idea or a project that you want to work on, but don't have enough time for it in a day. Well, first start with parsing through your schedule and looking for things that are not priorities for you and work on that project instead during those couple hours per week. Be consistent, and work on that project starting with just 30 minutes every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, and stick to it. Prioritize this above everything else. If you stick to it, you can gradually increase the amount of time you devote to this project. This weekly time commitment would show that you are serious about working on this project, and that you wouldn't de-prioritize it when you head for a sabbatical. If you pass the "I'm serious about this idea/project" test, you find that it is a high priority and you really need a great amount of time to work on it then you might want to put your job on pause to pursue it.
To sum it up, all of the above signs could mean one of the three things: you either need to take a vacation, or you need to change a job, or you need a sabbatical. Only you know the answer, but hopefully this guide helps you make your own decision.
After all, what it comes down to is you gotta respect your body and mind, so if either of them tell you that you're tired or lost, take a break and take care of yourself. Nothing is more important than your health, physical and mental. Stay safe! 😉
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