Burned Out and Fed Up? Maybe All You Need Is a Break

A sabbatical may be just the thing to help you recharge and reconnect.

Are you feeling greater stress and finding that you are sick more often? Do you long for a week, or even a weekend, where work does not interfere with your life? Has the stress of disgruntled co-workers dampened your outlook?

You are not alone.

The financial crisis or Great Recession, as it is often called, has taken its toll on all of usfrom loss of jobs, to loss of savings and retirement funds, to loss of trust in our institutions. Were burned out, stressed out, and highly skeptical of our employers.

It is no surprise that 63 percent of Americans are working more than 40 hours per week, as revealed by a recent Expedia.com survey. They also are leaving unused $21 billion worth of vacation time annually. More than 34 percent of Americans dont take all of the vacation allotted to them compared with 24 percent of Germans and 22 percent of the French.

The signs of stress and burnout are not hard to identify: lack of sleep, overeating, irritability, hopelessness, depression, illness, increased cynicism, decreased productivity, more mistakes, anger and confusion, and self-doubt. Our personal creativity and ability to deal with ambiguity falters. Our work stress carries over to our personal life and often our children react, albeit unconsciously, and our relationships suffer.

So how do you stay engaged at work and create an environment that fosters your creativity while keeping your life in balance? One increasingly accepted answer is to give yourself the "gift of time" by taking a sabbatical, or what some call a "reboot break," from work for anywhere from one month to three monthsor maybe even a year.

The emergence of sabbaticals

The most recent Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list includes 21 companies that offer sabbaticals. Unlike academic sabbaticals, they dont have to involve research, teaching plans, or even a work-related plan. Workplace sabbaticals can be motivated by the need to refresh and renew, to learn new skills, to travel, to work in political campaigns, to volunteer, or to reconnect with family and friends.

Of the people interviewed for research on sabbaticals, all cited benefits such as being healthier, more creative, more resilient, more balanced in their lives, more connected to themselves and others, more fun to be around, and smarter about their career and job priorities. All found ways to integrate what they did on their time off into their day-to-day livessomething called living the lifelong sabbatical.

The time you take for yourself will help you to reflect on whats important in your life; have time and space to heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually; and energize you to learn something new. It is life changing.

Give yourself permission

The first step is getting over the common fears of "I cant afford it," "I will become irrelevant to my company," or "I cant step out of the career track." The reality is that many Type A peoplefrom corporate executives and entrepreneurs to medical and legal professionalsdo take time off and come back the better for it and ready to handle new challenges. My father had an adage, "You have to nourish yourself to nourish

others." It is a good principle to follow.

There are basically three types of sabbaticals:

• the workplace sabbatical, where you come back to the same organization
• the between gigs sabbatical, where you leave your organization to explore a new job or career
• the unexpected sabbatical, where you are out of a job because of economic or downsizing reasons.

In interviews with more than 300 people who have taken time off from work, the single most important factor mentioned was having a plan. Components include visualizing what you want to do on your break, how much time you want to take off, where you want to travel, who you need to communicate with, and, most importantly, how you will fund it.

Funding your freedom

What if your organization doesnt have a sabbatical program? Funding is one of the biggest hurdles, but there are a number of ways you can afford a sabbatical.

Of course, the first people to talk to are your boss and the human resources department. Even if there is no formal sabbatical program, by creating a business case for why taking time off will help you as well as the organization, you may be able to customize a program for yourself, keep benefits and 401k contributions flowing, and know that you will have your position responsibilities covered while you are on break.

There are four main ways to fund your freedom:

• Get your organization to fund a sabbatical by creating a business case and rationale for why it will benefit you and it mutually.
• Save ahead of time by creating a "sabbatical account" that you and others contribute to (instead of yet another sweater for your birthday!).
• Use a windfall such as a tax return, inheritance, sale of an asset, or bonus.

  Make money while taking time off.

There are research grants, teaching and lecturing opportunities, travel companion gigs, and other ways to make money on your reboot break.

When I took my first sabbatical, I was mid-career and wanted to leave the academic world for the corporate world. My husband and I planned for a year before we took off a year to explore China, India, and Japan. We rented our house in Washington, D.C., for the year to a French attach, sold one of our cars, and got the U.S. Information Agency to fund some of the travel expenses in exchange for an opportunity to lecture and meet executives, public policy experts, and academics in Asia.

It was a fabulous experience capped by Dun and Bradstreet holding an executive position for me (unknown to me while we were traveling) because they thought if I had the guts to take off a year mid-career, I was the kind of innovator and risk taker they wanted for a new division.

Here are the tools that seem to work for people who are planning time off from work.

• A sabbatical fund: Start setting aside money now to be used for your time off of work and add to it on a regular basis.
• Visualization: Take the time to walk, think, and write down what you would like to do if you had the time to do it.
• Journaling: Keep track of your thoughts daily as you go through the process.
• Planning and budgeting: Outline what you need to do to make the sabbatical happen and how youll fund your freedom.
• Goal setting: Use a mechanism to lay out your goals in all areas of your life, not just your career, so that your life becomes more balancedone of the most important long-term effects of taking time off.
• Business plan: Use this for talking with your employer about why you need to take a sabbatical and the benefits; write out your announcement to your boss and colleagues in advance.

To get started, try a small-risks exercise by listing five new things you have never done and do them in the next month. It might be five new types of food to eat or cook, five new ways to walk or drive to work, or five new types of music to listen to. You can start small and build upon your risk-taking to take bigger leaps.

These are just a few examples of how you can take charge of your life and give yourself the gift of time. Just do itfor yourself, your family, your friends, and your employer.