5 Signs You Need a Break + 5 Things to Do About It

Work. Friends. Projects. Errands. Family. Health. Repeat. Life has put a lot on our plates, and it seems to be adding more. It is easy to get caught up in this plight of modern life, but you do not have to. Here are five things that I most typically notice and hear as signs of needing a break, and five ways to remedy them.

Signs It’s Time for a Break

1. You dread the alarm clock. Your alarm clock goes off, no matter the hour or day, and all you want is to stay crawled up in bed.

2. Your fuse is short. No matter what someone says, it is not the right thing. You are constantly triggered for arguably no real reason.

3. You avoid what you know you like. You start making excuses for not going to yoga - to that class you love - or a friend’s house you always enjoy, claiming stress and tiredness.

4. Your diet starts to waver. You start eating foods you know make you feel bad, and other foods you simply know are bad, saying, “just today.”

5. You simply do not care. You start to spend more time surfing the web at work, flipping through channels at home, ignoring messages and invites from friends, and pretending your family does not exist, all in the name of “rest” and silence.

Ways to Give Yourself a Break

1. Get offline. Turn the internet off two hours before bed, and turn your handheld devices off for at least eight hours a day. Let your mind rest, and spare it the endless stream of often unnecessary information. (This one is hard, I know.)

2. Take a local adventure. Take yourself  somewhere new or unfrequented in your city; think neighborhood walk, proper restaurant diner, bikini picnic in the park, or museum wandering. Simply experiencing something new - with different people, air, and vibe - will refresh your mind and body.

3. Plan an escape. Plan a day, week, or weekend holiday within the next six months; anything outside of and away from your day-to-day routine. Something to look forward to will add a skip to your daily step.

4. Laugh. There is really no better remedy. Cures you from the inside out.

5. Do something crazy. Go to a seemingly ridiculous class, plan a one-day escape to the beach, go out for a night on the town, or do something you think you never have time to do, or is simply nuts. The thrill will rejuvenate you.

This article originally appeared on mindbodygreen.com and was written by Lauren Imparato

The Busier You Are, The More You Need Quiet Time

In a recent interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that serious thinkers and writers should get off Twitter.

It wasn’t a critique of the 140-character medium or even the quality of the social media discourse in the age of fake news.

It was a call to get beyond the noise.

For Coates, generating good ideas and quality work products requires something all too rare in modern life: quiet.

He’s in good company. Author JK Rowling, biographer Walter Isaacson, and psychiatrist Carl Jung have all had disciplined practices for managing the information flow and cultivating periods of deep silence. Ray Dalio, Bill George, California Governor Jerry Brown, and Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan have also described structured periods of silence as important factors in their success.

Recent studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work, and lead. Duke Medical School’s Imke Kirste recently found that silence is associated with the development of new cells in the hippocampus, the key brain region associated with learning and memory. Physician Luciano Bernardi found that two-minutes of silence inserted between musical pieces proved more stabilizing to cardiovascular and respiratory systems than even the music categorized as “relaxing.” And a 2013 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, based on a survey of 43,000 workers, concluded that the disadvantages of noise and distraction associated with open office plans outweighed anticipated, but still unproven, benefits like increasing morale and productivity boosts from unplanned interactions.

But cultivating silence isn’t just about getting respite from the distractions of office chatter or tweets. Real sustained silence, the kind that facilitates clear and creative thinking, quiets inner chatter as well as outer.

This kind of silence is about resting the mental reflexes that habitually protect a reputation or promote a point of view. It’s about taking a temporary break from one of life’s most basic responsibilities: Having to think of what to say.

Cultivating silence, as Hal Gregersen writes in a recent HBR article, “increase[s] your chances of encountering novel ideas and information and discerning weak signals.” When we’re constantly fixated on the verbal agenda—what to say next, what to write next, what to tweet next—it’s tough to make room for truly different perspectives or radically new ideas. It’s hard to drop into deeper modes of listening and attention. And it’s in those deeper modes of attention that truly novel ideas are found.

Even incredibly busy people can cultivate periods of sustained quiet time. Here are four practical ideas:

1) Punctuate meetings with five minutes of quiet time. If you’re able to close the office door, retreat to a park bench, or find another quiet hideaway, it’s possible to hit reset by engaging in a silent practice of meditation or reflection.

2) Take a silent afternoon in nature. You need not be a rugged outdoors type to ditch the phone and go for a simple two-or-three-hour jaunt in nature. In our own experience and those of many of our clients, immersion in nature can be the clearest option for improving creative thinking capacities. Henry David Thoreau went to the woods for a reason.

3) Go on a media fast. Turn off your email for several hours or even a full day, or try “fasting” from news and entertainment. While there may still be plenty of noise around—family, conversation, city sounds—you can enjoy real benefits by resting the parts of your mind associated with unending work obligations and tracking social media or current events.

4) Take the plunge and try a meditation retreat: Even a short retreat is arguably the most straightforward way to turn toward deeper listening and awaken intuition. The journalist Andrew Sullivan recently described his experience at a silent retreat as “the ultimate detox.” As he put it: “My breathing slowed. My brain settled…It was if my brain were moving away from the abstract and the distant toward the tangible and the near.”

The world is getting louder. But silence is still accessible—it just takes commitment and creativity to cultivate it.

This article originally appeared on Harvard Business Review & was written by Justin Talbot-Zorn.

How Float Therapy Benefits Mental Health

Credited for helping with anxiety, depression, chronic pain and other health problems, float therapy has been evolving as a wellness treatment since the 1950s. Similar to meditation, floating in a salt tank or pod may hold an advantage over other methods of mindfulness because of how it affects the human brain.

What is Float Therapy?

It’s simple. Strip down. Hop into a float tank or “pod.” The high concentration of salt in the float tank has impressive buoyancy. You will peacefully float on soothing, body-temperature water.

There is no light in the float tank, so you get a sensory deprivation experience as well. It’s like you’re in the womb. How can this not be healing?

The evidence is mounting that float therapy does have healing properties.

In an ongoing study, doctors used fMRI technology to scan the brains of 40 healthy, non-depressed people. Half the group floated in salt water for 90 minutes, the other half spent the time in another type of restricted stimulation experience, such as meditation.

When all participants received a second fMRI brain scan afterward, they also completed tasks to assess attention span, reward processing, and emotional reactions. One key takeaway from the second scan was a higher level of “interoceptivity,” or awareness of internal sensations such as heartbeat and breath, among the float group.

Float therapy candidates should know:

Multiple sessions are usually required to gain a benefit. With commitment, mental health professionals and patients may find that regular floatation sessions can open up new roads to recovery for the following conditions:

Eating Disorders

Float therapy can help patients with eating disorders, including overeating, because deep mental relaxation may calm triggers, past traumas, and clarify habits affecting food habits. Research on float therapy will soon specifically study those suffering with anorexia, some of whom have documented that consistent visits to the flotation pod have aided recovery.

Insomnia

Float therapy can not only help anxious people sleep, but also understand how an absence of environmental stimuli such as light and sound can improve sleep at home. Many sleep-challenged floaters use recorded guided meditations, visualizations, counting and other sleep-inducing techniques while in the pod.

Anxiety

Panic attacks, self-mutilation, and other stress-related conditions may be aided by float sessions that soothe the patient and invite him or her to gently consider actions and events leading to episodes. The solitary experience of floating alone in darkness inevitably leads to curiosity and — in some cases — epiphanies about how to solve personal problems.

ADHD

The inability to concentrate or focus can also be addressed by float therapy. By committing to an hour or more in the pod, a patient with ADHD may benefit from the lack of distractions and enjoy a purer level of concentration and thought than normally possible. Ideally, an improved ability to concentrate will slowly begin to emerge in daily life.

Curious? Go to a float therapy center and sink into a pod of warm, briny water for an hour or more of REST (restricted environmental stimulation therapy) and decide for yourself.

This article originally appeared on blogs.psychcentral.com and was written by Mike Bundrant