I'm flying to Thailand this week with a couple of friends for an eight-day vacation.
There’s no presentation at the other end. No workshop, no filming, nobody expecting anything from me when I land.
I sat down to work out when I last did that, and I honestly couldn't tell you the year.
Which is strange, because if you looked at my calendar or my Instagram, you'd think I was away on vacation constantly.
And I fall for it myself. I get to the end of a year and think, well, that was a lot of travel. Lots of time away.
It really isn't, though.
Here's what a work trip actually looks like for me.
I get there a week early so that I can enjoy wherever I am, get over the jet lag, and prepare. For that week I'm preoccupied. Rehearsing, rewriting, checking the run of show, half-present with everyone around me, a little bit irritable and on edge, usually in a hotel by myself.
Then I deliver. Then I stay another week to enjoy myself, and mostly I don't, because I'm too wrung out from the week before to do anything with it.
Then I fly home. And for the week after, I'm exhausted, not from the work exactly... from the whole shape of it.
So the trip gets filed under "time away".
And almost none of it was.
I think a lot of us do this. We count the places and file them as rest and relaxation. Being somewhere lovely and actually resting there get written down as the same thing, when only one of them happened.
Now, here's what I've done in the last few days, which is a bit ridiculous.
I've recorded four videos so that my Tired & Wired community has something to watch while I'm gone. I've written and recorded more than ten meditations, which is a lot more than I'd usually do in a stretch like that. I've been working like a maniac right up until the door, so that everything keeps running smoothly while I'm away.
Some of that is sensible. Things do need to keep going.
But if I turn the coach’s lens on myself for a second (annoyingly, I can’t help it), there's something else in it.
I think I was earning the holiday.
I don't think I'll let myself enjoy it until I feel I've paid for it.
And the currency I pay in is tiredness.
That's the bit that gets me. We work ourselves into the ground so we qualify for the rest, and then arrive too flattened to use it. The permission slip is exhaustion, and we hand it to ourselves at the airport, already spent.
Where that comes from, I can only guess at. But for a lot of us, rest was never simply given. It came after. After the homework, after the jobs around the house, after the grades came back. And if you sat down before the list was finished, something in the atmosphere might have changed... someone’s mood, someone’s warmth, how pleased with you somebody was.
So we learned the order. Earn first. Rest second.
Problem is… nobody ever tells you when you've earned enough.
There's a physical side to it as well. The body doesn't come down because the plane landed. Coming down takes days, and for a lot of people the first two or three days of a break are exactly that, with a travel day at each end. Which is why a long weekend can leave you feeling worse than before, and why you can be lying on a beach with your shoulders still up around your ears.
I'm not writing this from the other side of it. I haven't even gone yet. I've no idea how good I'll be at this, and there's a small part of me that's a little uneasy and anxious about eight days with nothing to produce.
(Are these newsletters just my personal journal at this point? 😂)
But here's what I'd suggest, for both of us.
You don't have to earn the time off. It isn't a reward for the sprint before it, and it isn't a top-up so you can go faster afterwards. It's allowed to just be time.
And if you've got a break coming, the one thing worth doing is leaving the week afterwards emptier than you think you need to.
Right. I'm going to go and pack (after I’ve recorded one last meditation, obviously).
Chibs 💙
PS. Tired & Wired is my small room for people who are tired of running on empty. We meet live every week, and this type of stuff is more or less what we talk about. The first seven days are free if you'd like a look before you decide anything → https://www.skool.com/chibs, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee if you need more time
If your body is still running at speed with nothing left to spend it on, this is the short one I'd put on 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Release Tension You Didn't Know You Were Holding | Guided Body Relaxation
And if you're somewhere lovely, and the jet lag has kicked in, and you're still wide awake at 3am, play this one 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Wide Awake at 3am, Drifting Into Bliss | Floating Sleep Hypnosis to Let Go and Rest
