Unplugging is the Best Work Strategy

In our hustle culture and an “always on” mindset make breaks difficult for high performers and entrepreneurs.

In thsi episode I'm sharing three benefits that I experienced last week by taking an unplugged vacation after five years.

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Transcript

 Welcome to the Nine to Five Wellness Podcast, a show about corporate wellness solutions with innovators and forward-thinking leaders who are at the forefront of the workplace wellness movement. I'm your host, Aisha Tahir.

 Hello everyone. Welcome to episode number 112 of the Nine to Five Wellness Podcast.   Last week I was traveling. I went to San Luis Obispo. It's in Central California to visit My oldest son, -- he's a sophomore at Cal Poly. I visited him over there and I took my younger two boys with me. So it was a nice family vacation. And that's why I couldn't release any new episodes last week.

And I actually took a real vacation for the first time in five years. I'm going to make a confession on this episode that I have not taken a completely unplugged from work vacation since 2021, when I really started working hard on the virtual aspect of my business. And I've always traveled with my laptop and I work while I'm away. So I had this realization earlier this year that.

I've been struggling with my relationship that I have with my laptop. As a business owner, I've gotten into the habit of taking my laptop with me everywhere, even to the beach. Yeah. I mean, I literally take it everywhere so that I can work, and don't take me wrong. I absolutely love what I do and sometimes work.

It doesn't feel like work at all. I'm building a business on my own terms that supports my health and my goals. So I need to be flexible and I understand that, but there is, real value. In completely unplugging, and that's what I wanna talk about today.

And guess what I know better. The benefits of taking time off from work far outweigh chaining yourself to your laptop in the name of productivity.

That truth doesn't make it easier to set that out of office Message though, and hit the vacation highway. Trust me. It doesn't, especially if you're a high performer or an entrepreneur, it's just so much harder to do that. It's so easy to feel guilty about taking time off because we live in this always on culture. I know for myself that I worry about piling my work onto my work colleagues at work or falling behind on my business responsibilities. And I'm here to tell you one of the best gifts you can give yourself is the permission to take a break, a real break. I'm talking about.

I'm a big believer of consistency and that consistency is key to everything, but breakthroughs also come from stepping away from work and from giving yourself some white space, which means giving yourself some time to recharge and rest. Most of my patients often feel like that their brain is just full like a browser with a hundred tabs open, and three of them are playing music they really even can't find, they're endlessly scrolling through emails, forgetting what they just read, who they responded to, and I can go on and on and on. And I started realizing that that's exactly what was happening to me because I hadn't stepped away from my laptop for more than 24 hours in the last five years.

And if all of this sounds familiar to you, then this episode is for you. Today I'm talking about a radical, often misunderstood concept, the complete. Total unplugged break from work.

No, not a workation. Not checking emails. Just in case a real break. You're going to learn why taking a break can be so challenging for high performing executives and. What are the benefits of taking a real break? And these benefits are backed by science. You know that the things I share on this podcast are always evidence-based, and are backed by science.

I'll also give you some tips on how to organize your schedule so you can actually take a break from work in your life, whether you're employed or an entrepreneur, and your business and your work keeps on running smoothly while you're away. But before I go into the benefits, I wanna touch upon the danger of the all day, every day Sprint, 365 days a year.

 We live in a hustle culture. We live in a hustle culture that treats work like an all day sprint

that treats work like an all day sprint, 365 days a year. But here's the truth, work and business. It's a marathon because you know what happens if you run a marathon at a sprint pace? You crash. You hit a wall sooner than you want to, and yes, that is what leads to burnout.

According to the Harvard Business Review, 59% of employees report feeling burned out and that leads directly to lower productivity. Approximately 24% of American workers did not take a single day of their earned paid time off or PTO in the last year.

I'm talking about 2025. Let that just sink in Further, roughly 62% of employees do not use all of their vacation time. When asked, what are the most common reasons, those are heavy workloads, fear of falling behind and perceived company pressure. Now, let me tell you, we think that pushing through working on vacations are not taking vacations at all, is gonna make us valuable.

In reality, it makes us inefficient. Your brain is a calorie burning machine. It takes up only a fraction of your body weight, but it burns one fifth of your daily calories. When you work nonstop, you aren't just tired, you are running on empty.

So, that is the real danger of not taking vacations, that you are headed towards burnout.

Now here are three benefits that I can already feel from going on a real vacation,   I have come back with a sense of gratitude and I feel way more grounded and present. When I, when I unplugged from the online noise, I, I realized because what, because when I unplugged from the online noise, I could pay more attention to my in real life relationship with my kids.

I was more present in the moment. And I am so grateful for those moments. I realized that I was missing the small, quiet in between moments with my boys. They are teenagers now, so they spend a lot of time outside of the house with their friends. The moments my kids didn't have words to ask for, or they wouldn't say it because I'm always busy running my business.

But they were looking for those from me. Let me give you an example. I had so much fun playing imposter. It's this game my kids taught me, where there's a word. That you see on the screen and one of the players doesn't know the word and that player is supposed to be imposter and the other players are supposed to guess who the imposter is. And I had so much fun that we played together. I had fun thrifting with them. And we had super fun exploring this record store in downtown slo. We talked about our favorite artists and dance that we dig and why. And I bought some vinyls to display on my record wall too. The biggest surprise for me was how much time I have in the day. I often catch myself saying I don't have time, but once I disconnected, I also realized that I had plenty of time.

I was just spending it on. Digital junk food. That hour that I used to spend scrolling that became a walk outside with my kids, 20 minutes of checking comments became planning our next meal out, and I am so grateful for those moments.

The second benefit that I immediately felt was that it boosted my creativity.. I did a little bit of research on this before I started recording the podcast, and what I learned was that when you are stuck in a routine, your brain stays in the same patterns.

Stepping away allows you to unclutter your mind, which can lead to some aha breakthrough moments. When you return, when you're stuck in a routine, grinding through the same tasks, sitting at the same desk. Your brain stays in the same well worn. Patterns. And those are good because like you need to do certain tasks on autopilot, like driving, right?

It's like driving on a highway with cruise control on like when I drive to my work to Princeton, I can actually now drive. While I'm a little sleepy too, I don't try to do that, but I'm just saying because I'm an autopilot. But then you are not exploring new routes. That's the downside.  But when you step away and you allow your brain to unclutter.

Then you can actually explore new ways to do things, new routes, new ways of producing content, new content to produce. So I have so many ideas about new podcast episode topics, and I can't wait to share those with you. Our brains have evolved to do two. Our brains have evolved to do two things exceptionally well.

Solve problems and build cool stuff. That's exactly why content creation feels so electric right now. We are literally wired to output, but there is a massive catch,  a biological glitch, if you wanna call it in the system , that might be killing your best ideas, and that is.

That you are staying stuck in the same routine. And here's the science behind it. Once your brain understands the relationship between things, once it figures out your routine, your office, or your creative process. It stores that info in a neat little box and stops working hard.

When life becomes predictable, your brain goes on autopilot. When you're on autopilot,

your creativity dips it craters. So you are on cruise control, but our brain craves novelty. Our dopamine systems are primed for it. And this is where the magic of the getaway comes in. When you take a vacation, you're forcing your brain to reset the new environment, new sites, and those new restaurants are like high octane fuel for your neurons.

You are breaking the predictability loop by experiencing things that don't fit into your daily boxes. You're essentially rewiring your creative circuits. You aren't just taking a break from work. You're building a better brain for work. How cool is that? And this is how you get those breakthrough moments.

 The wait, why didn't I think of that before moment, right? We've all been there now. The last benefit that I wanna discuss, which I experienced, was that it prevented continuous cycle of stress. I didn't step away from work for more than 48 hours at all. Since September of 2024 and 2025 was a rough year for me. So I was starting to feel this mental and physical burden of staying on. I knew I needed a reset. And here's why. Because if you think of your brain, it's like a high performance computer. If you never restarted, eventually it freezes. And I think I was going towards that.

So a vacation I figured was gonna be a necessary restart and especially unplugging completely is gonna  just help me wind down. So it reduced my chronic stress from overworking. The reason chronic stress is bad is because if you carry tress it leads to higher cortisol levels, which causes tension, headaches, digestive issues, and poor sleep. And my sleep was getting impacted, so I knew something was off.  Taking a break from your routine isn't just about fun. It's essential maintenance for your health.

 A long-term study found that people who didn't take annual vacations were 30% more likely to have a heart attack than those who did. So taking a break is quite literally a strategy for health and longevity.

So these are the top three benefits that I experienced from taking a complete break from work. Yes, I hit the reset button. I'm so proud of it and I'm so happy about it. Now there are a few things you might wanna put in order before you leave and I wanna give you some tips so that you can have a relaxing

work free vacation. You don't want people calling you with questions while you're away because then that is not unplugging at all. So the first thing I would suggest you do is make sure you have a trusted team member to handle your responsibilities and provide them with any necessary information before you leave.

Inform your clients and colleagues well in advance of your absence. And I started doing that. I wanna say a couple of months ago, letting people know that I will be stepping away from my business. I'm taking a week off, and then I started directing them to someone who was covering me, my virtual assistant.

Second thing that I did was I created a brain dump, and I love that I created a brain dump That helped me so much because I could document. All the active project statuses, passwords, pending tasks in a single document, and then the things that my virtual assistant could cover, I shared those with her so that I didn't have any loose ends when I stepped away.

Another tip is to set up auto replies for email, so you can go into your email provider's settings if you wanna change your auto reply or you're going away message, you can do that. You can specify the dates that you're gonna be away.

And then last thing is clean up your workspace, your physical desk, and your digital files. You will come back to a clean environment and that reduces the mental load. You won't feel like you missed out, or now you have to catch up like crazy. So that makes it so much easier to leave work behind and and totally unplug.

 when I reflect back on why I didn't take a break for so long, I realized that the real reason I didn't take a complete vacation, was guilt. I didn't wanna feel weak, I didn't wanna miss out on work. But I've decided that I am gonna be reframing this thinking process. Taking a break is not laziness.  It is an investment in my long-term success of my business and my health. Actually i'd love to experience an off-grid vacation and disconnect completely for a week. I dunno when that's gonna be possible, but hopefully, hopefully sometime, you know, in the next year, I'd love to see what that would feel like.

So if you are like me and are waiting for the right time to take a break. Guess what? It's probably right now, if you're feeling really stressed out from work and things are not making sense and things, most probably, it's because you need a reset waiting until you're fully drained isn't gonna be a good strategy. So Unplugged vacations are preventative care, not just an emergency response to burnout. So consider this your permission slip from me, your exercise physiologist, and your coach that close the laptop.

Mute the notifications and go find your destination to recharge.

 Thank you so much for listening to this podcast today. It's always so much fun chatting with you. Now, take a mini break from your desk, away from your laptop and from your phone. Step away for five minutes. Go and walk around and then come back to your desk so that you have a refresh.

I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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