Hello kittens! Kat is back with Mental Health Mondays and today is Labor Day. Yes, it’s a holiday but the labor and the grind never seems to end. The summer has come to a close for those who have returned to college and will be ending for kids soon too, so it all feels as if we can kiss the sun goodbye and curl up in a ball in our beds to cry until winter break. The pains and hurdles of assignments, projects, jobs, responsibilities, and whatever else is weighing can be alleviated with some simple implementation of a beautiful thing that has been gaining some awareness in recent years: the mental health break.

         Not to be confused with “having a mental health break” which is another way of saying a mental breakdown, it is actually what one might call the opposite of having a mental break. It’s a break for your mental health! It’s not a panacea for the world at large, but in the mental health community and for every individual suffering with a mental disability or just plain old stress, this could really make a positive difference. Charlotte Fritz, PhD, an associate professor in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology at Portland State University in Oregon says, “Taking regular breaks helps us to be more resilient when stressors arise, and they function as an intervention to help us deal with the daily grind.” So if you’ve been reading a textbook for a couple hours, put it down and step away. Relax and do something you enjoy for a while because it will help you in the long run by mentally fortifying you to combat stressors in the future. 

Being a hard worker is definitely a good approach to life but at the same time we must remain aware that our minds must rest and energize to recuperate, not just through sleep and exercise, but through mental breaks. So now that you know mental breaks are actually positive toward your mental health you might have some questions like: How long should my breaks be? What kind of things would be most beneficial to my mental health during my break? Will mental breaks solve all my problems and answer the meaning to life? Okay, okay. So that’s quite a bit of questions. So let me break it down.

There was a study done by William S. Helton, PhD, a professor of human factors and applied cognition at George Mason University in which he gave university students a test that had them watch train routes for 45 minutes. One group had no break for 45 minutes. The other group had a 5 minute break halfway through and were assigned at random to different relaxing activities but without leaving the room. As you probably guessed, the ones who took the 5 minute break performed the task better. This just goes to show how 5 minutes can go a long way to improving not only your focus and quality of work but how taking care of your mental health and making time for breaks is necessary to function. So as far as how long your break should be, I would suggest honestly assessing yourself and recognizing if maybe you have a tendency to lean toward burnout or if you can push on for 2-3 hours no problem reading dense text. Depending on the person you are maybe you could watch a tv episode for 20-30 minutes then return to your work or maybe 10-15 minutes of listening to music, drinking tea, and journaling. 

Whoever said television is for dumb people is not only probably a rude, mean person who judges people based on their intelligence, but also probably never actually tried to seek the benefits of television. Amy Cooper Hakim Ph.D wrote in Psychology Today, “We take a mental break when we immerse ourselves in a TV show, much like the way that we feel when we are binge reading a good novel. There is something fulfilling and gratifying when we follow the lives of characters, and escape from our everyday lives and stressors.” Of course, staying up into the wee hours of the morning will take a toll on you mentally because your sleep schedule will be compromised but I believe the point Cooper is making is that people need to escape from the mundanity of life in order to alleviate stress and be happy. Maybe because their “ship” on their show finally set sail or their favorite character had great development, whichever reason, they’ll feel a sense of joy. But if you’re not that rude, mean person who judges people but rather just don’t watch much television, there are other activities that are beneficial to your mental health. Whether you already have a hobby that you like or maybe there’s been a fun project you’ve been meaning to do but keep putting off or maybe you want to better your physical and/or intellectual health, manage your time to make breaks in your day to complete these things for better mental health.

Will mental health breaks solve everything? I want to say no, but I feel like the answer isn’t black and white. It’s not even gray. It’s more like yellow sunlight peeking through gray clouds. More than a silver lining, it’s a beacon of hope amidst the problems of the world and our own personal problems. It may not solve the issues we have at home, work, school, or wherever else we feel we may need to “fix” or “perfect” or even simply improve, but they do help make living easier so that we can prevent mental breakdowns and more importantly begin to create safe, non-judgmental, open discourse on mental health.

Enjoy your Labor Day, kittens and see you next week~

Resources:

1. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/break

2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/working-difficult-people/201712/taking-mental-break