The Proven Benefits of Taking A Vacation

And if you want to be a high performance being, then start treating your brain, okay, as a, as an electromagnetic switching station, which it is. But also if you give yourself the mental, emotional and physical rest, it can recalibrate to operate at a higher level. Is there a neuroscience to taking time off or a neuroscience benefit to taking time off? And one of the things that I always like to discuss is around something that I was taught many, many years ago when we talk about time off. I learned something so critical so many years ago, it was a game changer for me. So are you ready to learn what that one thing is? We're going to be talking about the proven benefits of time off. Now. I'm at my home in Telluride, Colorado right now. I am skiing. First was with my family last week and then with some friends of mine this week. You may see people walking in the background, and then my wife comes in for us to have a little bit of fun for the final week. So here's something that I learned many, many years ago. What do most people do? Most people work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And then they wonder, when can I take some time off? Does that sound familiar? Decide when you want to have time off and then fit work into the rest of the time. So instead of fitting vacation time and time off into what's left after work, why not fit work into what time is left after you take the time off? So let me share a couple things with you. First and foremost, for those of you in the United States, all right, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the United States, according to the center for Economic Policy Research, all right, they basically have gone as far as to call the United States the no vacation nation, right? And Since March of 2020, an overwhelming majority of U.S. employees have short to postpone or canceled their vacations. Now, have you canceled your vacations because of maybe Covid. Have you canceled your vacations because things are, you know, up in the air? Right. Don't you think that creates more stress? So think about this. What are some of the benefits of vacation? I'm going to share with you a couple of my techniques for me, all right? And this is a really important issue when you're talking about brain health, focus attention and your attention units, which I'll talk about in just a moment. But are you familiar with the word mindfulness? Mindfulness is really a state of awareness when we're working, working, working, working, working. Okay? It's harder and harder for us to be aware of Our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our sensations, and even the behaviors and the habitual patterns that cause us to be stressed out, maybe feel anxious, et cetera. Now, according to the Journal of Positive Psychology, okay, when we take vacations, whether it's during the day, a little mini vacation, whether it'. Whether it's during the week or a weekend, whether it's during the month, okay, we become more mindful. Why? Let me explain something to you. When we are in a habitual state of doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, our daily routines, we keep using something called attention units. So when you and I wake up, when we woke up this morning, let's say we had attention units, 10 of them. Well, if we habitually, you know, do the same thing over and over and over again, we use up those attention units, which means we don't have time to replenish the battery. Let me give you an example. You see, on the back of my cell phone right now, I've got a little charger on my battery with some notes, of course, for today's session. Now, why do we recharge our battery? Why do we recharge our battery? Because every single day, you know, after your battery is charged, guess what happens? You use up the battery, and then it doesn't function as fast or as well, right? Well, why not consider that you and I operate the exact same way? You know, we have certain number of attention units, and if we don't replenish the battery daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, guess what happens? The easy stuff is hard, and the hard stuff is nearly impossible. So not only does taking time off cause you to be more mindful, so you can actually have some unfocused time. Unfocused time is just as important, according to latest neuroscience research as focus time. But it also, according to Psychology and Health 2019, improves your heart health. Why? Because the stress hormones aren't consistently being activated. The cortisol, the epinephrine, the norepinephrine, when we are working, working, working, working, working. Does that make sense? So when we increase mindfulness, when we are giving our heart a rest, do we not also reduce the stress levels in our body? There is eustress e u s t r e s s. That's good stress. And a little bit of good stress is great for us. But too much stress causes us to feel anxious, causes us to feel more tired. It takes away from our ability, for example, to be in better health, to lose fat for some of you to not sleep as well. Right? And when we take vacations, how Many of you felt rejuvenated after a vacation, right? Anybody feel rejuvenated after vacation? Whether it's a day or a week, when we take some vacation. And let me ask you a question. Is meditation, for example, a little mini vacation? I call that inner size, right? Working a neuro muscle. When we meditate, we can learn how to shut off the world and shut off the daily stress and the anxiety, right? So when we take some time off, you know, for 10 minutes, an hour, three hours, five hours, okay? When we meditate, when we just even take time off to watch some silly, silly TV stuff, to get away from the work that we do every single day, from the normal routine of the day, we're actually re energizing, replenishing the attention units. And when our attention units are high, then guess what happens? When our attention units are high, our focus units are high. When our focus units are high, it activates the motivational center in our brain. When the motivational center is active, where we say, I have the motive for action, I then take action on the things that I know I should do and should not and stop doing the things I should not do. When we are tired, when we are stressed out, when we are burnt out, it's hard for us to take action on the things that we know we should do and want to do, right? So when we start talking about time off, vacationing, it's as important, if not more important, than the working time. So let me share with you, okay, A continuity of the. What I mentioned before, I was taught at the end of each year, when I'm planning the following year, I was taught to do this. Take a look at your calendar and any one of you can do this, okay? Right now, for the next week, for the next month, for the next quarter, for the next balance of the year, okay, here's what I do. I look at my calendar. I usually will sit with my wife, okay, and, and we do our planning session and we ask ourselves, okay, where do we want to travel this year? Where do we want a vacation? And we make a list of everywhere we want to travel, everything that we want to do, everything we want to experience. And now I'm at the point where I take about three months a year off. So right now I'm on a three week vacation. It's a workcation. I'm skiing in Colorado where we have a home. And so I'm skiing with my family, my friends, and I'm working a little bit. And right after this call, I'm going up to the Mountain where it just snowed four inches last night. And so I'm going to be doing some spring skiing. But the point I want to make is we take the vacations that we want to have, and then we put it into our calendar first. And so I like to work on six weeks on, one week off. Okay? Six weeks on, one week off on a regular schedule. Then every quarter, every 90 days, take two weeks off. In the summer, take one month off. So six weeks on, one week off. Every quarter, take two weeks off. And then in the summer, take a whole month off, where I'm replenishing, thinking, and having fun. Now, every day when I wake up, I have a ritual, okay, I want to share with you. I have a system and a ritual for high performance, right? And why do I do that? I do that because I want my brain and my heart and my body to move into action. So every day when I wake up, you know what the first thing is that I do? Can anybody guess? What's the first thing that I do, other than go to the bathroom? What's the first thing that I do every day? No matter where I am in the world, the first thing I do is meditate. Why? Meditation is a different state of consciousness than sleeping. We have an awake state. We have dreaming. We have sleeping and meditative. There are four states, okay, of consciousness and meditation. Why do I meditate? Well, meditation actually calibrates my brain to be in harmony and synchronicity. Meditation allows me to pay attention, in some cases to my thoughts, to be attention to my emotions, to pay attention to my feelings and sensations. But meditation, also, with practice, allows me to have no thoughts. No thoughts. That's an advanced state of meditation. But the first state of meditation is mindfulness. So when you become aware of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and behaviors, if you're feeling stressed or anxious or you have anxiety, can't you just take a little bit of a break to reduce that? So when we set up rituals for time off, it could be 10 minutes of time off, which allows you to recalibrate the neurological system. I also do a few inner sizes every single day. A few inner sizes. Now, let me explain. We exercise to strengthen our physical body and organs and muscles, right? Well, what about inner sizing? Right? Your focus neuromuscle, your attention neuromuscle, your mindfulness neuromuscle, your habitual neuromuscle. So I do these little inner sizes. Like, one of them is called take six. Calm the circuits. You could do this at any time, which just means that you do some breathing. Inner sizes. You breathe in slowly through your nose, as slowly as you can, sitting quietly, preferably with eyes closed, right? And then when you breathe out, you breathe out as if you're breathing out through a straw like this. Now, when you do that six times, you may not be aware, but think about this. Your brain has three core networks, Salience, executive and default mode network. But it has a whole bunch of circuits that turn on or off, right? Your fear circuit, your focus circuit, your motivational circuit, your doubt circuit, your anxiety circuit, your stress circuit, all these circuits turn on or off. Well, are you aware that a short 1 1/2 minute inner size deactivates the stress circuit and actually charges the battery, right? Your attention units again just with six deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth. That's as simple as of an inner size little mini vacation. Now if you turned that breathing into five minutes or 10 minutes, and you just focused on your breath, in through your nose, out through your mouth, and if you had a thought, all you did was bring back to your breath, let the thought go, bring back to your breath. You're actually giving yourself, for every 10 minute little mini meditation you're doing, you're giving yourself the equivalent of two to three hours hours of rest. So you could do a minute and a half, you could do five or 10 minutes, you could do a few hours, you could do, you know, you could do a few days. But the whole idea is this. Are you deliberately taking mini vacations to reset, recalibrate, re energize your brain? Are you energizing and strengthening the corner muscle so you increase your capacity? Here's what I can share with you. My rest and recovery rituals allow me to perform at a very high level. Okay? When I'm actually working, which I actually never work, I play. I love what I do, right? So think about this, okay, I'm going to come back to stress for just a moment. Would you agree that what causes me stress may be different than what causes you stress? And what triggers my stress circuit is probably different than what's triggers your stress circuit, right? Is it not true that our stress circuit is activated? Pay close attention to this. Is it not true that my. And your stress circuit is activated when the current demand exceeds our. When the current demand exceeds either our mental, our emotional, our physical or financial capacity? Let me repeat. Is it not true that the stress circuit on every human being activates when the demand exceeds their current mental, emotional, physical or financial capacity? So if something requires your mental attention and capacity and you are burnt out, you are tired, you are stressed, okay? Because of so much work, then that stress circuit activates. That's what releases the stress hormones and that's what causes us to lose motivation. And that's what causes not to want to take action and do the trivial many things instead of the critical few. What about if something requires more of our emotional capacity, but we just don't have the energy to be able to deal with it right now? Isn't that what causes stress? What about financial? If something, okay, exceeds our financial capacity, where we have bills that are due, credit cards that are due, we want to buy something we can't afford, we're running on this treadmill of not enough money at the end of the month. That activates the stress signal, it causes more stress. If we don't take the time to vacation to release the stress, replenish, rejuvenate, which fills up our battery so that we can actually fix the issue that's causing the stress, then we don't perform at the highest level. Does this make sense? So I want to tie this back to vacations. When we get a mental vacation, we actually increase our capacity to deal with stress. When we get an emotional vacation from the stress and the daily grind, we increase our capacity. When we get a physical rest, okay, we increase our capacity. When we increase the mental, emotion and physical capacity, we can then focus, for example, on the things that are really important to make our lives a little bit easier. And isn't that what we all want? A little bit more peace of mind, a little bit more choice, freedom, a little bit more fun. Right? And so Nellie's all of this is in my inner size book. Yes. And my team can put up a link for anybody who wants to buy the inner size. Inner size, Right. Inner size, your neuro muscles increases and strengthens your capacity. Is it possible that stress becomes a habit? Is it possible that not taking time off for ourselves becomes a habit? Is it possible that dealing with our anxiety and dealing with what is normal for us becomes a habit? So what does vacation do for you? It helps you break the habit of disempowering patterns. We have gotten so focused on work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. Not understanding that it actually creates a low performance human being over time. And if you want to be a high performance being, then start treating your brain, okay, as a, as an electromagnetic switching station, which it is. But also if you give yourself the mental, emotional and physical rest, it can Recalibrate to operate at a higher level. So our vacation's important. So here's one of the things I do almost every single time with my $100,000 a day clients. I assess their stress levels, I assess their burnout level, I assess their rituals. And 9 out of 10 of my private clients are overworked and overstressed. And they don't have replenishing, rejuvenating inner sizes or rituals. They are doing things that is expiring them and they're not doing enough things that inspire them. So are you doing things that inspire you, fill you up with energy, or. Or are you consistently burning the candle at both ends with things that expire you? Right? Do you get that? What inspires you? What expires you? What gives you energy? What takes away your energy? And if it's true, and if it's true that we are all energy, vibrating packets of energy called quanta, then if we are expending more energy than we're receiving, we start to go into a depletion mode. Mode, right? In a depletion mode, okay? We are using reserves. When we get past the reserves, we get triggered with stress and anxiety and all of the bad neurochemicals, okay, that affect your heart, affect your brain, affect your ability to metabolize food properly, affect your ability to lose weight and get into shape. There are so many disempowering, okay, Results and effects of not taking enough vacation or time off. So here's what I'd like to do. Talk, talk, talk. Talk. Talk is cheap, right? I want you to show yourself that you are a woman and a man of action. You're a human being of action. So I want to see a level of commit, One action step you are committed to taking today based on what I have just shared. Skip all this. Let me hop on to Instagram or Facebook or, or whatever it is and just listen and not take action. The only way you are going to make progress is if you make a commitment and take action. You remember the law of attraction that says, you know, you will attract what you think about and believe bullshit, you will attract what you are in action towards. So attraction. The last six letters are action. So what's one thing that you commit to yourself? Forget about committing to me or anybody else. What's one thing you commit to yourself to doing today? All right, to give yourself a little mini vacation. I've given you a whole bunch of options. Hey, this is John. And if you like that video, watch the next video because it is packed with things that you can do right now to achieve success way faster than ever before.