Taking a Break

It’s been three years since I started this blog. My first blog post went live on October 7, 2019. A year later, I wrote a post celebrating my blog’s one-year anniversary. Somehow I let the two-year anniversary go unobserved. I’m not sure how that happened! In any case, my blog has now been live for three years, and I’m glad to say that writing it has been one of the most enjoyable activities I’ve ever done, which is saying a lot, considering all the activities I’ve tried over the years as a lifelong learner.

Despite my enjoyment of blogging, in this post, I’m announcing that I’m taking a break from it for a while. I expect to take about two months off from writing my blog, which will mean I’ll be back at it in January. However, I may take off even longer than that. Only time will tell! Are you curious about why someone would want to take a break? Interestingly enough, there’s a lot of research out there about the benefits of taking breaks. Read on to learn more!

 

Break Time (Flickr/DonkeyHotey)

Sleep as a Restorative Daily Break

One form of break we hopefully all take each day comes in the form of sleep. A report from the Harvard University Division of Sleep Medicine noted that a lack of sleep can shorten your lifespan and raise your chances of developing such conditions as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Too little sleep can also increase inflammation and can lower your ability to fight off infections. In fact, the report indicated that researchers have found those who get too little sleep are three times more likely to come down with the common cold than those who get enough sleep!

Other researchers found that repeatedly getting too little sleep is related to sports injuries. The CDC and the NIH have also done research into the effects of too little sleep and found it can lead to vehicle crashes, work injuries, dementia, and depression. With lists like these of the dangers of not taking a good break for sleep every day, we should all jump on Arianna Huffington’s bandwagon and make sleep a priority (she’s even written a book on the subject)!

In the meantime, according to that Harvard University report, getting enough sleep has been associated with such positive outcomes as tissue repair and muscle growth. Additionally, the NIH has noted that getting adequate sleep not only prepares the brain for leaning, being creative, and remembering but also helps the brain eliminate toxins that can cause such diseases as Alzheimer’s. These are great incentives for taking that daily break for sleep!

Taking Breaks to Improve Learning

While the NIH focused on sleep as a type of break necessary to prepare the brain for learning, other breaks can also improve learning. As the Learning Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has noted, the region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex can get overloaded by heavy thinking throughout the day, so when studying or learning something new, it can be helpful to take breaks to let the brain recuperate. Breaks as short as one minute to as long as half an hour can be effective.

What kinds of breaks might be refreshing and rejuvenating for the brain when learning? The folks at UNC Chapel Hill suggested that moving your body by changing your location or even completing a short chore can be helpful, as can taking time to provide your body and/or brain with nourishment, such as by eating a healthy snack, having something to drink, or taking a few minutes to meditate. They also suggested rejuvenating yourself with a break to socialize, such as by calling a friend or chatting with a family member.

Cornell Health at Cornell University has offered a few other suggestions. These include going for a walk, taking a shower, doing some deep breathing exercises, stretching, laughing, or dancing. As they pointed out, taking a break can be a great tool to help you re-focus, become more productive, and feel more energetic when studying. What’s not to like about that?

Vacations as a Break from Work

Did you know that among the 38 countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), the United States has the least number of minimum required days off for workers? A recent OECD report showed that while the United States requires full-time employees be given 10 public holidays off each year, every other country in the OECD requires not only paid time off for public holidays but also a minimum number of paid vacation days. The country with the most minimum required days off is Austria with 38. Even at the lower end of the scale, Canadian workers are guaranteed twice as many days off as workers in the US with 20, and, with a total of 15 days off per year, Mexican workers get five more days off than workers in the United States.

These numbers are troubling for full-time employees in the United States, as breaks from work have been shown to benefit health. Rachel Scott, who holds a PhD in psychology and specializes in stress management, explained in an article for Verywell Mind that vacations from work are essential for alleviating stress. As she noted, chronic stress of any kind, including work-related stress, can cause headaches, gastrointestinal distress, and high blood pressure, with high blood pressure particularly dangerous because it can lead to heart disease or stroke.

Dr. Scott noted in her article that vacations, days off to attend to mental health, and regular self-care can all help avoid these physical drawbacks to chronic stress caused by overwork, and they can also help avoid burnout. Some of the warning signs of burnout include feeling cynical about work, having trouble concentrating on work, lacking motivation about work, being frustrated by work, or performing poorly on work tasks. If you notice any of these signs, it’s probably time to take a break! Whether you take an afternoon off for a walk or a movie or a week off for a staycation, a playcation, or a vacation, you can help yourself feel better.

Taking a Break from a Relationship

Another popular type of break is taking a break from a relationship. These breaks usually occur in the context of a romantic relationship, but they can apply to friend relationships or family relationships, too. Ann Rosen Spector, who holds a PhD in clinical psychology, was interviewed for an article in Women’s Health, and she noted that taking a break to get distance from another person or people can be a healing experience because it can allow the people involved to repair what’s not working in the relationship.

Janet Brito, another clinical psychologist with a PhD in the subject, noted in the same article that relationship breaks are defined as specified periods of time in which communication between the people involved is limited. Such breaks also come with the expectation that the people involved will follow mutually agreed upon rules, such as a few Brito suggested: avoiding each other’s friends or family, agreeing on how to address the questions of any kids involved, maintaining shared responsibilities, and making a plan together about what you will do differently in the future.

The benefits of taking a break to improve your relationship are many. A Harvard Medical School article noted that if you take time away from each other, set boundaries for the relationship going forward, release expectations about the relationship, and learn to communicate your feelings about the relationship, you can gain some necessary perspective on the value of your relationship. As a result, you can benefit from the stress-relieving properties strong relationships have for those involved. And this applies to all kinds of relationships, not just romantic ones!

In Summary

So there you have them, lots of good reasons to take a break once in a while. I know, it’s easy to avoid taking a break. You might be afraid of taking a relationship break only to find out you’d be better off without that relationship. Or you might think, “I’m on a roll, in the groove, or feeling the flow of a work project, and I don’t want to stop!” Or maybe you don’t feel you have enough time for a full night’s sleep because you want to watch that football/baseball/or other sports game through to the end. However, expert advice points to the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of taking all sorts of breaks on a regular basis. When was the last time you took a break? Maybe it’s time to schedule one for yourself!

My Article in Fulbright Chronicles

I’ve mentioned before in this blog how much my experience as a Fulbrighter has affected my life. In Part I of that blog post series, I focused on how the year I spent in South Korea shaped me, and in Part II, I wrote about the continuing impact that experience has had on my life. Now, I’ve written about both of those topics and more in an article published in the latest issue of Fulbright Chronicles. The full issue, issue three of volume one, has just been released, and my article, "The Role of Rhetorical Ethos in Developing Mutual Understanding: An Autoethnographic Study of One Fulbrighter to South Korea," appears in it.

As Fulbright Chronicles explains on its website, it “is a quarterly periodical established and edited by alumni of the global Fulbright program.” The journal notes it is “a space for Fulbrighters to share their important work with a broad audience.” One type of article the journal publishes “address[es] contemporary issues that affect the Fulbright program and its global community.” Other articles the journal publishes “explore how [the] Fulbright experience contributed to knowledge and cross-cultural understanding.”

My article fits in the latter category. Just as in my previous blog posts where I discussed my experiences with cross-cultural understanding as a Fulbrighter to Korea, I did the same in my Fulbright Chronicles article. However, in my article I also discussed how my Fulbright experience contributed to knowledge in my academic field of rhetoric and composition.

 

A photo of me in Gyeongju, South Korea. (Personal collection/Karen P. Peirce)

 

I haven’t written about my work in rhetoric and composition in this blog before, so I’ll take just a moment here to introduce the field. The study of composition is the study of the teaching of writing. This area of my academic field focuses on theories and practices related to classroom experiences that involve writing. The other part of my academic field consists of the study of rhetoric. Although rhetoric is a word that sometimes is used pejoratively or as a put-down to mean empty words (“that’s just rhetoric”), the study of rhetoric is a substantive discipline traced to the ancient Greeks in western culture and other ancient societies in other cultures. Rhetoric as a field interests itself in, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary puts it, “the art of speaking or writing effectively.” What distinguishes rhetoric from composition is that, while both are interested in the study of writing, composition is interested in what happens in the teaching of writing, whereas rhetoric applies to writing in any context.

The research I wrote about in my Fulbright Chronicles article involves how a particular area of rhetoric, known as ethos, can influence mutual understanding across difference. I’ve studied and published about this topic over the years, and I reference that work in my article. In overview, ethos is often taught in composition classrooms as credibility. When writing persuasive arguments, students are taught that they need to establish a credible ethos by citing experts, for example, in order to convince the audience that the argument being advanced should be believed. However, if the aim is not to make an argument but is rather to achieve mutual understanding across difference, I have proposed that a different sort of ethos is more effective. If you’d like to know more about this, you can find the details in my Fulbright Chronicles article.

If you take the time to read my article, I’d love to know what you think of it. I’d be interested to hear whether you’ve had a similarly impactful experience in your life. What has shaped your personal and professional trajectory?