Recharging your batteries
Are you burning the proverbial candle at both ends? If not, you likely will sooner or later. If you are, it may be time to recharge your batteries with some much-needed rest and relaxation.
Burning the candle
We’ve all been there. It’s 4:15 PM on a Friday, you get off at 4:30 PM, and the last 15 minutes of your last workday of the week feel like an eternity. You take your career seriously. You’re often the first one in and the last one to leave. You’ve worked overtime this week, and your mind, body, and spirit feel it. You spend your spare time with family and friends. You also enjoy dabbling in several hobbies.
As your weekend commences, you can’t help but look forward to all of the time you’ll enjoy relishing in those things. You get home, put away your work items, lay on the bed for a minute, thinking you’ll catch up on some text messages you missed throughout your busy workday, and bam, reality hits, and you pass out.
You wake up late Saturday morning only to realize half of your day is already gone because you were exhausted and overslept. What’s more, you recognize you’ll have trouble completing everything you’d planned for your fantastic weekend. This scenario perfectly describes burning the candle at both ends, which means to work incessantly with little to no rest in between. Why do so many people fall victim to this?
Well, for starters, some do it to get ahead. New employees at large organizations believe doing so will display an unwavering passion for completing whatever task their supervisor needs. However, what many junior-level employees don’t realize is, eventually, whether they like it or not, a lack of rest or time spent fulfilling one’s desires will lead to their own unhappiness.
Routine
You see, humans are routine creatures. We seek out routine-oriented lifestyles because they’re most comfortable to live. While uncomfortableness does lead to success, you don’t want it to be present in your everyday routine. The key is finding a balance. By working tirelessly to rise up the ranks without taking care of yourself, you’ll inevitably fall by missing a ladder rung because you were too tired to see or feel it.
We’d all love to take monthly vacations, but that isn’t always reality. Yet, there are many strategies you can implement into your daily routine to recharge your batteries. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? If you’re human, you likely look at your phone. It’s probably the last thing you do before you go to sleep, too.
Studies show this screen time right before we go to sleep or after we wake up is most detrimental to our health. It’s recommended to put your phone away at least 30 minutes before you attempt to fall asleep—part of the reason being blue light. Your cell phone emits blue light, and there’s even a blue light filter on many phones nowadays. But whether you have this feature turned on or not, light is light, and any level of exposure that close to your eyes impacts your ability to fall asleep. Instead of endlessly scrolling, you could try planning out the next day in your mind, or better yet, meditate and let your thoughts of today come and go.
Another method to implement into your daily routine to recharge your everyday batteries is to do something you enjoy before or after work. If you like writing, get up an hour early and pull out the pen and paper. If exercise is your passion, pack your gym bag and hit the gym after every workday. You have to look at recharging your batteries like this; it’s not about whether or not you can find time; you must find it. If you don’t, you’ll fail to reach your full potential both as an employee and a person.
Vacation
If you’ve been placing techniques into your daily routine to recharge your batteries, I am proud of you. It’s a sure-fire way to get started on taking care of yourself. However, sometimes, we all just need some good old-fashioned time off. That’s right, folks, a vacation. Yes, the media likes to portray a vacation as sitting on the white sand beaches of the Bahamas while sipping your favorite beverage, but it doesn’t always look like that.
You can recharge your batteries on a staycation. What you need is a mix of downtime and leisure time. Downtime is where you simply do nothing. We often get so caught up in our careers and goals that we forget about the “be” in human beings. Sometimes you have to just be, which could very much look like staring out into the sea while letting the elements pass.
Now comes leisure time, which involves doing something fun. For you, maybe that means sightseeing, traveling, hiking, kayaking, etc. Either way, you’re participating in something you love doing. By doing so, you’re taking your mind off the time-sensitive, stress-inducing tasks you have to complete at work. When you work long hours and are looking to advance in your career, sometimes you need to do the opposite of just that.
While on vacation, you likely don’t have too many cares in the world, which is a much-needed feeling after months of hard work. You have to make time to recharge your batteries because eventually, your juice will run out. When you do, you put yourself in an ideal scenario to be the most well-rested version of yourself, which will help you produce both at work and in life.
