019: Avoiding Burn Out From Day to Day Family Life

Download: MP3 (68.0 MB)

Burnout can come in many forms, ranging from small little hiccups to major catastrophes. It’s often not until we start to feel burnout that we think to do something about it, but it’s too late to avoid it. Ideally we’d like to be up and running 100% of the time, but amid all the demands of daily life, how do we keep ourselves from overdoing it?

In this episode Ben and Rachel discuss how implementing purposeful rest helps us to get the downtime we really need while also improving our daily productivity. Some of these approaches are potentially life changing and the benefits spill over into every aspect of our lives.

Highlights, Takeaways, Quick Wins

• Burnout not only affects you emotionally and mentally, but physically as well.
• Burnout can feel like a loss of purpose.
• Even people without children have to let go of some things go.
• If we’re trying to do everything and do it well, we’re going to be living our lives in a constant state of burnout.
• Make stress-relieving activities part of your schedule.
• Eliminate things in your life that aren’t absolutely necessary.
• Sometimes the burnout you experience comes from built up stress that you just haven’t dealt with.
• You don’t have to spend a huge amount of time together as a family if you’re using your time together well.
• Remember the purpose behind the things you do.
• Rest on purpose.
• Rest can be that leaves you feeling energized.
• Align your day-to-day activities with your goals.

Show Notes

• 05:35 Ben: This topic is focused specifically on family life, although many of the things we’re going to talk about also apply to people without kids because no matter who you are, no matter what your circumstances are, you can be in danger of experiencing burnout. Folks who don’t have kids are included in this discussion. We’ve been there before too, feeling burned out as a newly married couple. We look back sometimes and think, “What made us think life was hard back then? It was so easy!” That’s something we say about ourselves, though I would never say that about someone else. At the same time, I remember feeling overwhelmed with day to day life and circumstances even before we had kids. What does it look like for you, Rachel?

What Burnout Looks Like

• 07:26 Rachel: There’s a different burnout between my work and parenting. For parenting, it looks like not practicing as much patience as I need to have with our children or having exceedingly high expectations that I know they can’t meet. It also looks like not taking time to teach, but just correcting, where I’m not teaching a better behavior. It looks like me wanting to go to bed and read and not hang out with them because I’m so tired of the demands and those kinds of things. I’m very much an introvert, so having a household of children and the amount of noise produced in our household is really hard for me sometimes. I get to that dinner hour and it’s almost like I want to hold up a sign that says, “Cannot compute. Nobody talk to me. No more words. I’ve had enough words today.”
• 08:44 Ben: It’s got to be jarring too, because most of the time, you’re coming from an environment that’s completely quiet where you can focus on the one thing that you’re doing, and then suddenly you’re in an environment with several people talking at the same time and loud noises. It feels like you’re being pulled in a million different directions at once.
• 09:11 Rachel: Everyone is trying to talk at once, and it’s an overwhelming thing. When I’m experiencing burnout, I have much less ability to deal with that kind of thing.
• 09:25 Ben: You know how divers have a decompression chamber? You need to have a re-compression chamber so that you can get used to that new environment. When I think about burnout, I think about being stressed and all of the things that go with that. Burnout not only affects you emotionally and mentally, but it also affects you physically. You have felt that tension and that stress before. Sometimes, that’s just part of life that comes and goes, but other times it feels like it’s lingering and it’s not getting better or going away. I also think of this experience I had when I was a kid when I got home from school.
• 10:24 We lived in an apartment building, and in the office, the office manager would keep these nice, warm, delicious cookies for the kids when they got out of school. Our bus was one of the last ones to get to the apartments, so there might be one or two cookies left for grabs by the time we got there. A friend of mine would suddenly become my enemy when we got home because we were both trying to be the first one to get there. We had to run up a hill in order to get to the office, and I had my backpack on.
• 11:35 It was the middle of late fall, so I had all of my heavy clothes on to keep me warm, and there was this feeling of running up the hill and my backpack was holding me back, my clothes making it difficult to run, and trying to go as fast as I can. I was putting so much effort into it, and it just felt like I was crawling. For the amount of effort that I was putting into it, if I was on a high school track, I would have been in an all-out sprint. But there I was, crawling up the hill, and then my friend grabbed me from behind and I tumbled down the hill. He was my friend except for those moments.
• 12:09 Rachel: That’s what burnout feels like for you, Ben—running uphill but getting nowhere, spinning your wheels.

Burnout can feel like a loss of purpose.

• 12:23 Ben: That’s similar to what I just described, but it feels like the things you’re doing on a day to day basis aren’t serving a purpose or getting you anywhere. I also think about the feeling of things falling apart. We experience that sometimes. It’s a very physical reality, looking around the house and feeling like it’s becoming a mess—we’re not keeping up with things. That can feel like burnout as well. It can be very disheartening, especially before or after a trip where we’re supposed to go relax, coming back to the house and feeling like we have to play catch-up.

Let Something Go

• 13:30 I’m not saying that you’re never going to be in situations or circumstances that can cause you to feel that burnout feeling, but I want to focus on practices that make that feeling less frequent and help us work through burnout faster so we can get back to feeling like we’re on top of life. One of the first and most important things is to let things go. Even for a single person who doesn’t have any children, there are more than enough things to do to keep yourself busy and still feel like you can’t do it all. You could make yourself so busy, make so many things vital, and have your list of all the things that have to happen regardless of your circumstances, and you could put yourself in a position where you feel constantly overwhelmed because you cannot get to all of those things. Even the person without children has to let go of some things, and that’s okay. For some people, that’s easy. I have an easier time letting things go, but Rachel has a more difficult time.
• 15:07 Rachel: I don’t know if it’s part personality or if it’s part of a societal problem. There’s a lot expected of women in the workforce and as parents, and we live in this Pinterest world where everything is perfect and moms take beautiful, home-decorated cookies to their kid’s classroom and that kind of thing. We’re expected to keep up with our house, our children, and our job, and be good at all of that stuff. It’s not possible for one person. If we can allow ourselves the freedom to say, “You know what, it’s not my strong point to keep a clean house, and that’s okay. A happy family doesn’t have to live in a clean house.” There are some sanitation issues, of course. We shouldn’t just leave food out on the counter, within reason.

If we’re trying to do everything and do it well, we’re going to be living our lives in a constant state of burnout.

• 16:31 It’s hard to step away from that pressure. It’s hard to be the one to say, “I can’t do it all.” I just wrote a column about how, in parenting, we give up a lot of things. One of the things we’ve given up is having a pretty yard. It’s just not possible. Boys like to dig, and every time we want to maintain the yard, something more important comes up, like twin shenanigans. If we’re trying to maintain perfection, all we’re doing is locking ourselves in chains. We’re only going to reach burnout faster if we keep expecting ourselves to do all of these things well.
• 17:21 Ben: There are a couple of ways we can approach those things on our list that have to be done. It may be that you can have somebody else do them. Sometimes, that requires lowering your expectations for how that’s going to look. Sometimes, it means that you’re going to be spending money, and that’s also okay. When we’re in a position to do so, I’d probably rather pay to have someone take care of the yard, even if I had the time to do it, because I can use that time for better things.
• 18:03 Rachel: I would rather be playing a game of kickball in the cul-de-sac than stressing over how our yard looks.
• 18:13 Ben: You can have someone else do it, or look through your list and eliminate the things that aren’t absolutely necessary. That can be difficult to do, but you have to be really objective with yourself: “Am I wanting this to get done because it really needs to get done, or am I wanting it to get done because it’s an expectation I have?” Part of what goes along with this is getting rid of unnecessary things in general. I’m not talking about items on your schedule, but physical things in your house. We have been going from room to room and removing all of the things that are unnecessary.
• 19:14 Rachel: Or we remove the things that don’t bring joy. There’s a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s kind of extreme, especially for parents. I’m writing a parity for parents called The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up for Children. In case people say, “I can’t give up anything on my list. It’s all necessary,” what’s an example of something you could give up?
• 19:59 Ben: When I was growing up, my parents made me clean my bathroom once a week. Some people, because of how they were raised and the expectations placed on them growing up, believe that’s something that has to happen once a week. You can really get away with cleaning it once every other week. Some things you can get away with once a month. Some things you have to get away with once every other month; it depends on what it is.

Look at the things you’re doing objectively and ask yourself, “Is it really necessary for me to be doing this as often as I am, if at all?”

• 20:54 Rachel: The yard is an example for us. When I was in college, I lived with three other girls, and I was typically the one who kept the place clean. That’s what I do and I did pretty well until we had about three children, when I got overwhelmed and I had to let that go. I had to let go that we were probably going to have more dust on our shelves than I wanted, because there were more important things for me to do. I’m raising these amazing young men, and there isn’t always time to get to the dust. That’s something I’ve had to let go of. I’m okay with a tidy house now; it doesn’t have to be completely clean.

Schedule Stress-Relieving Activities

• 21:54 Ben: The next thing we can do to avoid burnout is to make stress-relieving activities part of our schedules and routines. This is something you have to do on purpose, and it’s not something a lot of people do. A lot of times, when we think of stress-relieving activities, we think of taking a break from working and playing on Facebook, laying down in bed and winding down, watching a movie, or reading a book, and while those things aren’t bad, it’s the randomness that causes them to not be as effective. I like to focus on making it purposeful, making it a part of your schedule. There are some really healthy stress-relieving activities that I like a lot and that are some of the most effective ways to deal with stress.

Sometimes the burnout you experience comes from built up stress that you just haven’t dealt with.

• 23:19 There are a lot of different ways out there to avoid stress, but sometimes, inevitably, the stress builds up. You’ve got to have an outlet for those things so it doesn’t overtake you. One thing we can do to relieve stress is to spend time outside. Be out in nature. I asked in the chat earlier, “What are some ways you avoid burnout?” Charla wrote, “Getting to the beach helps.” I’d like to go, but we’re pretty far away from the beach. I want to go to a beach that has mountains and woods right behind it. The beach is nice because you’ve got the sound of the waves.
• 24:01 Rachel: The reason I don’t like beaches as much is because the only time I’ve ever gone is dead summer here in Texas, and you can only stand on the beach for ten minutes before you start to die. I don’t like swimming in beach water; I had a bad experience as a kid where I almost drowned at a beach.
• 24:27 Ben: Whatever outdoor environment helps you to feel more calm is a great way to relieve stress—it’s scientifically proven. Another way to relieve stress is to get exercise. That doesn’t have to look like running or interval training. With our families, it can be fun activities that we do together. One thing we do pretty regularly is to have dance parties. I don’t know that there’s a workout I do that’s more strenuous than these dance parties. Another thing we can do is meditate. I want to do an episode on meditating as a family and some things you can do to help children, especially, begin to take on that practice.
• 26:10 Do that personally and together as a family. I’m focusing this conversation a little bit on the parents’ experience, but the children also experience burnout. They experience it with us. Sometimes, they experience it when everything seems just fine for us. It’s good to recognize that in ourselves and it’s good to be able to recognize that in our children. They are increasingly leading lives that are filled with stress. There’s way more homework for our young children than there used to be.
• 26:44 Rachel: Our Kindergartener has homework right now. It’s crazy; he’s five. I don’t think I had homework until I was in junior high, and I’m pretty smart. It doesn’t make you smarter to do homework. It only makes parents and children fight.
• 27:10 Ben: Meditating together is a great way to relieve some stress. All of this is part of spending quality time together. When we’re spending time together and building those relationships, we feel less alone. We feel like people understand us, like they understand what we’re going through, what we’re thinking and feeling. Being understood and feeling like you’re part of a family and you’re connected with people relieves a lot of stress. A lot of that stress comes under the guise of feeling like you’re dealing with this on your own.

You don’t have to spend a huge amount of time together if you’re using your time together well.

• 27:55 Rachel: If you’re sitting down to a three hour movie, that might not be as effective as sitting down for fifteen minutes of Janga. You’re sharing this experience. A movie is also a shared experience, and it can be helpful and generate discussions, but if you’re playing a game like Janga, everyone laughs when the tower falls. Everyone is hoping the same thing, that they’re not going to be the one to make it fall. It’s a shared experience that feels a little richer, and you can also have conversation around the table. One of the things we try to do is to think outside the box when it comes to spending time together.
• 28:39 We’ve gone on nature walks and things like that, even though we don’t live in a place that has a lot of nature. There’s a green belt behind our house, and we call that nature. It’s quality time and they’re learning things if they want to. We’ve done family runs together, which is really special. A lot of our boys enjoy running, and it tires them out. They sleep better. Kids who exercise regularly sleep better.

Change Your Perspective

• 29:18 Ben: At the beginning of this episode, I was talking about how everyone, regardless of the circumstances they’re in, is capable of experiencing burnout and the stress of life. I said that because I never want to look at someone else’s circumstances, how many children they have or what kind of job they have, and feel discontent with my own life. At the same time, I can flip that around and use it to my advantage when I look at people who, from the outside, seem to have circumstances that are worse than my own.
• 30:08 Where one helps me protect my own satisfaction, the other helps me feel more gratitude for my circumstances. I’m going against my own advice here by saying that, sometimes, looking at the lives of other people and comparing their negative circumstances to your positive circumstances can help you gain some perspective. You can think, “I’m all stressed out over this, but I have it really good.” This is not to guilt you into feeling better about stuff, but it’s a way you can use that perspective to give you a different picture of what you’re currently going through and experiencing.
• 31:04 Rachel: This works for people like you. I don’t know that it works for people like me. I’m an anxious person, so it’s hard for me to break out of a worst-case-scenario mindset. Thinking of other people’s worse situations only makes me fearful, because what if we have to go through that? That’s how an anxious brain works.
• 31:35 Ben: If you’re an anxious person, ignore everything I just said.
• 31:42 Rachel: If you’re prone to idealism, you can listen to what Ben said. I’m just kidding; I love his idealism.
• 31:51 Ben: It’s a good balance. Another thing we can do to avoid burnout is to realign our day-to-day activities with our goals and our purpose. Sometimes we get so focused on our routine that we lose the connection between the purpose for those activities, why we started them, and the activities themselves. It becomes important for us to take a step back and say, “Why are we doing this again?” You might find that the original purpose for doing that thing is no longer true. During the school year, we make our own lunches. We don’t do store-bought or school lunches.
• 33:02 I have to make bread every night in order to keep up with the bread demand. I use a bread maker, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of time, just a little bit of prep and then it runs. During the school year, it’s necessary for me to do that every day to keep up with it. During the summer, when things are a little bit more relaxed, I don’t have to do as much of that. There are other things we do for lunches because the boys are home and we don’t have to worry about things being portable. I might get so focused on making bread every day, and the reason I was doing it was because, during the school year, it made everything else more convenient. It was part of a series of things that had to happen in order to make the school day run smoothly.
• 34:06 Absent of the school day, I can change that up. There are several things I can change up. If I’m so focused on that single activity and making sure it gets done, I can forget the original purpose. When summer or another break is coming up, we look at our routines and say, “What’s going to stay and what’s going to go? What’s still necessary, and what can we ease up on?” That helps a lot. Otherwise, we tend to stay stuck in these routines, doing things we don’t need to be doing. Now, it may be that an activity is something that you need to continue doing, but you’ve gotten so focused on it that you’ve forgotten the purpose.

Back up and remember the purpose behind the things you do.

• 35:09 There are some things, like homework, that are activities that you wouldn’t choose to have as part of your daily experience, but they are imposed on you. There could be any number of examples for this, but the attitude I try to have is this: if it’s something I have to do, what value can those things bring to my life? What is some hidden value in there even though I wouldn’t choose to do it? Homework can teach your children that they are capable of doing hard things. It causes you to have to trust them, and it causes them to have to develop responsibility. There’s a lot of teamwork to make sure that the homework gets done, gets put in the folder, and gets put in the backpack.
• 36:22 It’s also something that, over time, becomes more and more their responsibility. It can serve a number of functions. Now, I wouldn’t say that homework is the best vehicle for accomplishing building those values, but because those things have to be a part of their lives right now, I would rather focus on the value those activities are providing than how much I dislike them. That shift in attitude helps me avoid burnout over those things. Or, maybe you do need to remove something. Maybe it’s something you need to confront and change or remove from your life altogether, and that’s something we forget sometimes. When we feel dissatisfied, sometimes we forget that it’s possible that it could be something we could change.
• 37:22 I think about the workplace. When we’re doing something, some system that’s been set up for managing clients or doing paperwork, and it’s such a drag because it’s so inefficient. Speak up about that; let someone know. Say, “Hey, I know we’ve been doing it this way for a long time, but here’s a better way. Here’s a way that’s going to make things more efficient.” If you’re in an environment where thinking outside of the box and fresh ideas aren’t welcome, maybe you need to get out of that environment. It’s easier said than done, but it’s not impossible.

Interrupt Your Routine

• 38:15 Another thing we can do to avoid burnout is to call an audible. In football, they have the plays and know what they’re going to do. The quarterback looks around and realizes that another play would be better, so he calls an audible. He does a signal that lets his teammates know, “I know we said we were going to do this, but now we’re going to do this instead.” In our use of the word audible, I’m talking about doing something surprising and unexpected, like showing up and taking the kids out of school for the day, or getting them up in the morning and saying, “Okay, get dressed! We’re going to the museum today instead of you going to school.” It’s a break in routine. The kids almost always appreciate that. They’ve set themselves up emotionally for today to be like any other day, and then, all of a sudden, this fun and surprising thing is happening.
• 40:07 It can be very rejuvenating. Even if you planned that experience and it didn’t surprise you, you get to experience that surprise through your kids, and that’s a lot of fun. It’s a great way to break out of your normal routine. It’s not something you should do all the time, but it’s a way to break routine so you appreciate routine when you’re back in it.
• 40:43 Rachel: Our kids never get perfect attendance. I remember feeling proud of perfect attendance when I was a kid, but sometimes we keep them home from school and they get to hang out with us instead, and we’re really cool people. It’s a much better day.

Make Time to Rest

• 41:03 Ben: This is probably one of the most important ones for avoiding burnout: rest on purpose. This is similar to making stress-relieving activities part of your routine in that it’s something you want to do on purpose, it’s something you want to make time for instead of hoping that one of these days you will find time to rest. More and more, we are finding that rest is not only important to our personal health, but it helps us be more efficient in our work, be better as a family, be more focused on making sure that we’re getting daily tasks done at home. Rest plays a role in all those things.

Rest should be equally as important as personal health, work, family, and daily tasks.

• 42:04 It’s not an escape, it’s not some reward we get for good behavior, but it’s a vital piece. There’s this cycle that can happen with infants where, if they’re not on an eating routine, they begin to believe that the next feeding might not come. Their eating is erratic, so they start to wonder if they’re going to get to eat, and they start to develop this anxiety. It doesn’t matter how often they eat, because they feel that even when they’re being fed regularly. It’s a strange psychological phenomenon. They can cycle into it, and it takes some work to get them on a regular schedule so they cycle out of it.
• 43:24 The same kind of thing happens with rest, and I’m not talking about sleep. I’m talking about time that’s not focused on work, productivity, and getting things done. The same thing happens with our kids and rest. They can develop an anxiety that rest is not going to come, so they seek it out in unhealthy ways. You might notice this in yourself as an adult as well. We have a tendency, when we’re not getting the rest we need, to seek it out in ways that are unhealthy, like Facebook or Netflix.
• 44:15 Rachel: I read a lot, but it’s not to escape. It’s because I really enjoy reading.
• 44:22 Ben: I don’t think reading is as unhealthy. When your rest isn’t purposeful, you tend to go to things that are quick-fixes, that put a bandaid on it. We need to avoid that. It’s not just making sure that we are getting enough rest, but it’s about getting rid of the anxiety that rest might not come.

You have to schedule rest; put it on your calendar in daily and weekly increments.

• 45:10 Rachel: I’m not great about the daily ones, but I have a practice with my work where I take a week off every seven weeks.
• 45:29 Ben: It’s important that we make rest a part of our daily experience as well. If we have a tendency to seek out rest on things that aren’t very healthy, if we know that we’re going to waste at least 15 minutes today playing around on the internet and doing something, why not schedule that 15 or 30 minutes somewhere in your day? Have that time set aside to do something restful. Restful things can still be activities, but they are activities that don’t have restraints, due dates, or the same kind of pressure that normal activities do. It could be as simple as sitting and thinking about things. Schedule rest time rather than letting that need for rest dictate how you spend your time throughout the day. You should do this on a weekly basis as well. You don’t necessarily have to spend an entire day, but you should have some time that you can take during a day, maybe three or four hours, where you allow yourself to rest.
• 46:56 Rachel: I’ve found that a lot of times when I’m stressed, I tend to not work as well. I don’t know if that’s a symptom of not resting enough, or if it’s just being stressed.
• 47:18 Ben: It could actually be stress that’s built up that is keeping you from being as efficient as you should be. It could be that you haven’t gotten enough rest. As we’ve said, when you get enough rest, you’re able to be more efficient with your work. I think it comes down to your focus.
• 47:41 Rachel: One of the things I try to do, and I didn’t do it this week which is probably why work felt really hard for me, is that at the beginning of the week, I try to have an info-dump. I dump everything that’s in my brain, all the things that need to be done, all the projects I have on my plate. I dump it all on a document and say, “There it is!” Now it doesn’t have to take up valuable mental space. I didn’t do that this week, and I felt a little more stressed. There were more things on my mind. When you’re a creative person, it’s difficult to create good things when your mind feels really heavy. I don’t know if that’s a rest practice, but it’s a good practice. Because I didn’t do it this week, I can see the difference between last week and this week.
• 48:32 Ben: I think it can be. We need to redefine rest. When we think of rest, we often think of sitting somewhere and not doing anything, but rest can be anything that leaves you feeling energized, rejuvenated, and with a greater sense of energy and focus. If doing a brain dump gives that to you, then it is a restful activity. A lot of times, rest can be a change in routine.
• 49:14 You have normal things you do throughout your day, but you get to your scheduled time of rest, and that’s when you get to work on a project you don’t get to work on during your regular work time. For me, it could be something like making music. I do a lot of design work, so in my scheduled rest time, I get to sit down and write a song and work on music. Even though it’s work, it energizes me. I get back to my regular work stuff and I feel like I have more focus.

Small Scale Sabbaticals

• 50:06 Robert Guzzo posted this in the chat, and it was so great and applicable to today’s topic that I wanted to bring it in. He titled his post in the chat Battling Burnout. He said, “Hey Community, my wife and I don’t usually take Small Scale Sabbaticals for our business.” Small Scale Sabbaticals is an idea that Sean McCabe uses for himself and his employees, and for the seanwes network that we’re on (Related: tv008 Small Scale Sabbaticals). Every seventh week, the entire network takes the week off. His employees are all still paid during that week, but they have the entire week off. No shows go out, no blogs or newsletters go out, and he implemented that because he realized the amount of focus and clarity it gave him during the working times.
• 51:13 This is something he and I talked about a lot early on while he was developing this idea, and it’s something I’ve since really wanted to make a part of our family life. I’ll continue Robert’s comment here: “But by a strange coincidence, we found ourselves taking our first sabbatical at the same time as the seanwes team last week, and by coincidence, I mean that my wife Stasha was dealing with legitimate burnout. Looking back, the signs were clear, yet for the last 12 months, we had not taken a break for more than one or two days at a stretch. Here’s her post on the topic: ‘If you’re getting close to burnout, I hope this helps you take a step back and make some space to recharge.’ When we’re immersed in the go-go-go-go mindset, we can’t imagine even one thing falling off our plates. What we don’t realize is that the entire plate has the potential to shatter if we don’t take some of the weight off.
• 52:24 “Here’s the amazing thing: we’ve had more creative and energizing ideas in this post-sabbatical week than we’ve had for months. We are strongly considering incorporating Small Scale Sabbaticals into our work schedules. Is there anyone out there who takes time away from work, even if it’s for three or four days? How often do you schedule it? Do you try and do it every seven weeks, like Sean? Or do you schedule it less frequently?” I love this post because it highlighted one of the most important aspects of avoiding burnout, which is taking what many would see as an unconventional approach to taking time off.
• 53:13 Rachel: I do it every seven weeks, Robert. It doesn’t coincide with the seanwes show. I usually do the podcast on the week that I’m taking a sabbath. I’m a writer, and when I take a sabbath week, I don’t do any writing. There’s only one writing that I do, and that’s my morning writing. It’s sort of like an info-dump, this random putting everything down that’s in my head so I can meet the day better. I don’t do any other writing, and a lot of times, I’ll work on learning about writing, learning a new genre of writing, or just learning something new about business or parenting. The most recent sabbath I took coincided with the last week of summer for our kids.
• 54:11 Ben and I break up our day straight down the middle. We’re really working from 5am to 5pm, but we tag-team it around noon. I spent the time I would normally spend working, which is about five and a half hours, learning some new things but then I scheduled a whole hour where I took each one of our children, by himself, and just hung out with him. We did puzzles, and the oldest one wanted to draw pictures and have me write a story around those pictures, sort of like a picture book. We just hung out and talked. I was able to open conversations about how they felt about starting this new school year, and it was such a special time.

We’re trying to incorporate sabbaticals as a family and see what it looks like to take a whole week and just hang out.

• 55:24 That’s hard when your kids are in school, obviously, because you can’t excuse them from school for a whole week. In the summer time, we can take advantage of some of those things. I set up my sabbaths to coincide with a lot of the holidays that happen with our school, so when they have two weeks off at Christmas, I take two weeks off at Christmas, too. As a disclaimer, I am not the main breadwinner in our family, so maybe this is easier for me, because I don’t have to worry about lost wages when I take a week off. I don’t know how this is from the perspective of the main breadwinner; I’m sure there’s so much more pressure on that sort of thing.
• 56:13 Ben: I have yet to put this into practice, which is something I’m going to be doing very soon. When Rachel takes her next sabbatical week, I plan on taking mine. I’ve observed that the amount of clarity, focus, and creativity you achieve after having a sabbatical more than offsets the costs of any lost wages from that time. I’m banking on taking that sabbatical week, allowing myself to rest during that time, and that in the weeks following, that investment in myself is going to pay me back and even exceed that amount. I’ve observed this and seen it happen for person after person. We just read a comment from Robert, who said that he has found that to be true.
• 57:34 It’s getting more and more difficult for me to say, “That’s not something I can do because I have to focus on working.” I believe that I can no longer afford not to take that rest time. Maybe that week off is more stressful in other ways because you’re trying to be more lax with the children. Simon in the chat says, “We don’t have breaks with kids.”
• 58:12 Rachel: It’s true. What does a sabbath look like as a family, especially when you have young children who can’t do much for themselves?
• 58:20 Ben: You also have kids in school. Yes, there are some responsibilities you continue to have, but one of the ways we are purposeful about resting as a family is being a little bit more relaxed about some of the day-to-day requirements we have of the kids. Believe it or not, it’s easier for us to do things ourselves than it is for us to have the kids do their chores. Getting the kids into that rhythm too is really great, especially when they see that it’s something you’re doing together as a family. When you spend that time together, when you’re connected, during the times when you are on a regular schedule, that connection makes your kids want to listen to you, follow your instructions, and do the things you’re asking them to do.
• 59:26 It’s still a little bit of a battle from time to time, but the deeper that connection and the stronger that relationship, the more compliant they will want to be naturally. That’s a huge payoff. There are a lot of great reasons to implement the Small Scale Sabbatical, which is taking a week off every seventh week. It’s scary. Some people listening to this are thinking, “There’s no way,” so it might just be something you have to try out in faith and experience for yourself. I have the benefit of seeing so many people around me that it’s working for that now I feel like I’m doing myself a disservice if I don’t try it. I encourage you to try that.
• 1:00:28 Something I’m going to start doing when I schedule Small Scale Sabbaticals is to make a list of all the things I want to do during that time. This isn’t to make myself busy, but these are things that I would normally allow to be a distraction to the work I’m doing. It’s things like writing songs or working on a piece of artwork for myself. When I feel resistance in my work, when things get difficult or I’m doing things I don’t enjoy as much, I will escape to these other activities. If I have them written down, I know that even though I’m not getting to those things right now, during the sabbatical I have scheduled time where I’m free to work on those things without feeling guilty. I’m more likely to stay focused on what I’m supposed to be focused on because I know that I’ll get to those other things.
• 1:01:35 That makes it kind of fun. Making that list is something you can do together as a family, too. You can say, “Okay, on the next sabbatical, what are some things we’re going to do because we’ll have the freedom to do it?”

Avoid Family Burnout

• 1:02:05 Rachel: I really do feel like family burnout is also a thing, and I think it’s when we’re trying so hard and kids are just hard. There are a lot of times that I want to walk out of the house and say, “Fend for yourself. Pour your own milk. Tie your own shoes.” We don’t have the luxury of doing that, because we’re awesome parents. By awesome, I mean that we stick around. It’s important to have that space from the children, too. Another portion of resting includes taking time away from your children.

It’s really important to institute some kind of time to be away from your children.

• 1:02:57 Ben: It’s not just on a periodic basis. This is something we’ve built into our daily schedules, too. There’s a time when we’re only accessible for emergencies, and they understand that expectation. They’re not great at upholding it. We’re working on it. We don’t want them to believe that we don’t want them around us, but we want to help them understand that there’s a benefit to them when we get some time to ourselves away from them. We protect that not just for ourselves, but also for their benefit.
• 1:03:52 That’s something we’ve instituted daily. The last hour to hour and a half at night before we go to bed is time we’ve set aside for ourselves, in addition to time we’ve carved out in the morning. One of the things we try to do every quarter is to take an extended weekend to ourselves and we send the kids away to the grandparents.
• 1:04:25 Rachel: We look forward to that so much. Right now, our anniversary is in October. I am so looking forward to that weekend.
• 1:04:35 Ben: Me too. We love our kids dearly, but sometimes it does become this light at the end of the tunnel.
• 1:04:54 Rachel: It’s just a lot of work day after day. When you’re in a profession that you really love, like writing is for me, that doesn’t feel like work. When I’m cooking dinner or chopping carrots for their lunch, that’s not what I love doing, so it feels like work. There are a million touches like that every single day. I love when we get to read stories together. That’s my favorite time. I could do that forever, if that’s all they needed to do.