Not All Days Off are Equal

Getting time-off alone doesn’t guarantee that we’ll have healthier or more engaged lives. It’s the quality of time-off that matters.

With many offices shut down and colleagues on PTO, the last week of the year is the perfect opportunity to prioritize High Quality Time-Off. High Quality Time-Off (HQTO) is a five part framework for making the most of your time off. Developed by our team at UC Berkeley, HQTO is getting emotional, cognitive, and physical distance from work during your off hours. This allows you to maximize your recovery from work and reduce stress levels back to baseline.

Doing something creatively or physically active gives your mind something else to focus on aside from work. Active experiences can trigger a cognitive change where you can force your mind to stop focusing on work stressors. This can give you a greater sense of control in your life, which is especially helpful when we understand that feeling a lack control is a key driver of burnout.

In his book on flow states, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines active experiences as those that require concentration of attention, have a goal, and require skill. Active experiences help us achieve cognitive detachment via perspective taking and distraction, two tactics that have been proven to impact emotional regulation. There is nothing that makes you realize how minor your work problems are like hanging off the edge of a cliff while rock climbing, for example.

This is not to say that there isn’t a place for low energy, restful activities like watching movies or staring at your phone. These can be helpful in moderation. The point is that those activities may not be enough to fully disconnect from your work stress. Creatively and physically active experiences can help you do that - in whatever frequency and intensity works for you.

Reconnecting with who you are outside of work can help you get some emotional distance from work stress. Activities that are intrinsically satisfying are ones that we do because they sound genuinely fun and fulfilling to us as individuals, based on our interests, values, and preferences. During intrinsically satisfying activities, we have an opportunity to activate their pleasure centers and experience emotional distance from work. Our motivation for performing certain actions deeply impacts the quality of and satisfaction of our experiences. Respite activities that are intrinsically motivating allow us to reconnect with our sense of autonomy and control and push back against the feeling of helplessness that characterizes late-stage burnout. Intrinsically motivating activities can also support prosocial behavior and contribute to an increased sense of community and connectedness.

Turning off phones, laptops and devices used for work is critical for creating physical distance from work. Our culture values 24/7 responsiveness, even though this behavior can be detrimental to our personal and professional lives. Research shows that too much time online leads to exhaustion, sleep disruption, weight gain, vision loss, body aches, reduced life expectancy, and increased risk of depression and suicide. HQTO sets a boundary with Slack, email, and other tools of an always-on work culture. Purposeful disconnection from the very devices that have become integral for our work (computers, smart phones) helps reduce some of the anxiety, sleep problems, and stress from burnout. Once again, the frequency of digital disconnection will vary from person to person. You may be the type that needs a 2 hour offline buffer before bed, or the type that doesn’t mind being always on as long as you get to disconnect on a camping trip once a year. It’s all up to you - self awareness and intention-setting are what matter.

Activities that challenge us are more likely to strengthen our sense of personal competence. Incorporating milestones into your time-off practices will help us demonstrate to ourselves that we can do hard things. This mindset will transfer to our work challenges, too. This is, essentially, building resilience.

Proactively practicing courage through activities that ask us to be brave boosts our sense of pride and satisfaction in ourselves. Doing this consistently can contribute to our feelings of self-respect. Plus, being proud of ourselves feels good. Doing something that makes you feel proud of yourself can look different based on the person, context, and activity. For one person, doing a one mile hike is an achievement. For someone else, getting to bed at 11 PM will give you that feeling. Creating something (woodworking, pottery, art, drawing), achieving something (completing a triathlon, doing a backpacking trip, traveling somewhere new), or experiencing something (attending an art exhibit, going to a festival, planning a camping trip) can all be a part of it. Being consistent with doing things that make us proud of ourselves helps develop the mindset that: no matter what happens with work, you will be fine.