One of my favorite quotes from Shaun T of the Insanity workout is, "A break can fix you." Right near the end of the video, sweating your eyeballs out, thinking you cannot go any further, he says, "take a break." He then goes on to say that a break can fix you and that by taking a short break you can come back with more intensity, energy, and focus.
I think the thing that surprises me about this is that people don't offer you to take a break very often. In fitness and in other areas of life I feel like I am constantly being told to not stop, keep pushing, and to not give up. Yet in my experience, by pushing through when I have already pushed as much as I have to give usually leads to burn out.
I have learned to let myself take breaks. I have taken breaks from blogging, breaks from the gym to change up my routine, breaks from relationships that were not building me up, and breaks from commitments like small groups or serving opportunities. My husband and I are pretty committed people. If we commit to something we want to follow through giving 100% of ourselves. But we have to take a break once in awhile to continue to have energy, passion, and a willingness to be a part of something.
The only bad part about taking a break is that people don't always understand. They too feel the same pressure to always be doing. Before Brent and I got married we took a break from serving in our church. We spent our first year of marriage solely focused on our marriage. He had work and I was substitute teaching. We spent time with our family and friends. But we did not have many commitments outside of that. By getting a glimpse of what a break can do and ultimately a taste of a slower paced life, we realized we never wanted to go back to our old ways of living a busy life.
As the years have passed, we have been able to add more to our schedule but are careful to what we commit to. We do not say yes to everything so that we can say yes to each other and to the day to day life that comes up unplanned.
I encourage you, if you feel stuck in a rut or feel like you cannot even catch up to your own life, consider taking a break. And sometimes a break does not always mean to stop something but to change it up and look at how you can do it differently.
Because sometimes a break can fix you.
