Slowing down to move forward: A sabbatical story

Welcome back readers! You may have missed me last month since I did not publish a blog. I was pleasantly surprised and humbled to get a few queries from my close circle inquiring about it. The reason? Well, I had nothing to write.?

Somewhere in mid-July, I recognized that I was increasingly feeling burnt out. Other than working out in the mornings, I wasn’t really feeling excited by anything else. I needed to explore this weird but new feeling and I decided to take a sabbatical from my work. Moreover, I decided I won’t write for the sake of it, especially when it would be half-hearted. So, I am back now, rejuvenated and excited to write about, well I’m sure you guessed it, my sabbatical.?

Why a sabbatical?

If you’ve been following this blog, you probably remember how I started the year with a few goals and one of the most important ones was to focus on my health and fitness. The urge to double down on it and improve grew every months and because of it, I was adding on newer, healthier habits every few days - looking at ingredient lists before buying groceries, reading books on strength training and longevity, staying off alcohol, reading up on what kind of exercises I needed to do as I grew older, making my own Kombucha, and so on.?

Somewhere around mid-July, I started feeling overwhelmed. I wanted to do all of this, as it definitely made me happier, but with my routine and work and the lifestyle I had built over the years, adding every small habit seemed like a task. It was strange - every aspect of my life made me feel great - my adorable doggos, my family, my work and this new lifestyle I was building, but suddenly in July, doing it all together was becoming a chore.?

Taking the plunge?

I am grateful to the people I work with to be accommodating enough to respect my sabbatical decision. I needed to get my internal workings in order to get back to work with full steam, and they understood that.?

I decided to take a step back in order to create space for everything I wanted to do. Spend time with my family, travel with my dogs, continue to focus on fitness and diet, and just figure out how it could all fit together seamlessly. Three small trips, one long vacation with my parents, and a lot of reflection time has made me come to a simple but significant realisation. We complicate life a little too much, when all we need to do is disentangle it.?

This disentanglement can only happen when there is space to think and probe what the real hurdles are. My one month long sabbatical helped me recognize some of them:?

Habit stacking vs habit integration

I was adding habits on top of each other, without integrating them into my existing lifestyle. For instance, a major cause of my cribbing stemmed from traffic and the unpredictability of finding transport. It should not be a factor that impedes happiness, when all else is working fine. But it was. I had added the “habit” of working out in the morning, which required me to travel to the gym, back, get ready for work, travel to work, and then back in the evening. The entire ordeal was getting to me.?

During my sabbatical, I was going to the gym without having to travel multiple times. But I was also missing work. So it clearly wasn’t the work that was the problem. A bit of self-probing made me realise that it was the travel that was getting to me more than the work.

Trivial as it may sound, just changing my morning timeline for the gym a bit, to make it more efficient seemed to be the simple solution I was incapable of thinking of. Simply because I didn't have the space to recognize the stressor.?

Experimenting for optimal performance

During my sabbatical, I went for a few evening workouts and a few late morning workouts. My observation was that my gym performance tended to be better at these times than the early morning workouts I was doing previously. A podcast episode I chanced upon stated that working out on an empty stomach, particularly for women, was not optimal. I made that small change and it made a world of difference.?

I decided to workout only after I had had a good breakfast, and that needed me to go for a later class. A bonus consequence of this approach is that I will now be able to manage my commute more efficiently through the day, also saving me time spent amidst traffic.

The fallacy of seeking too much convenience

A major side-effect of the lifestyle we lead today is our over-reliance on convenience. Need groceries? Delivered at our doorstep. Need to get laundry done? Pickup and drop available. We’ve heard so many pundits tell us we are becoming a lazy generation that it has almost become white noise to our ears. But this break made me realise they are kinda right.?

During my break, I stayed with my parents for a fortnight. I was staying with them for this long a period after many years. My dad, after decades of working and reaching a pretty enviable position at his work, still gets up and travels one and a half hour to work and back, still puts in the hard yards, and doesn’t crib about small things that didn’t go his way. Observing that was humbling, to say the least. My husband and I discussed this and realised how easy it is for all of us to get annoyed at the smallest of things that don't go our way at work. Of course, there are certain things we need to stand up for but recognizing the big from the myriad of small issues is something I have resolved to do henceforth. This resolution is strangely liberating.?

Restored faith in scheduling life

I have never been a huge fan of creating a calendarised schedule of what my day looks like outside of work. While scheduling allows me to work efficiently, I always thought doing so outside of work would be too restrictive. As the things I want to and intend to do personally increased over this year, this no-scheduling approach seemed vain. I needed to create a broad schedule to accommodate everything and intertwine it efficiently, so that no aspect of my life seemed like too much. So here’s to sort of scheduling daily tasks and seeing where it takes me.?

Slowing down was essential for me to move forward. I believe the power of slowing down is super underrated and I too did not pay it much heed. Until now.?

This long and important break has put a lot of things in perspective (I’ve only covered a few of them here) and bolstered my faith in my fitness commitment. I am sure everyone’s experience after a long break from work is bound to be different - some might make career switches altogether and others might make big changes in their lives. For me, it has been about realising that all I need is small tweaks to seamlessly integrate the things I care most about.?

Whatever the experience may be, my faith in the power of a good, relaxing sabbatical has definitely been strengthened. :)