The Radical Sabbatical

Don't Wait for Burnout to Give Yourself Permission to Stop

We've been taught to think about sabbaticals as something extraordinary.

Professors take them.

Executives negotiate them.

People take them between careers.

They're usually long, carefully planned, and often happen after years of relentless work.

I think we need a different definition.

A Radical Sabbatical is an intentional break from your normal or routine life for the purpose of restoring your physical, mental and emotional health; reconnecting with yourself, Source and others; and remembering that you are at choice about how you live your life.

It might last a day.

It might last a week.

It might last 30 days.

It might last a year.

What makes it radical isn't its length.

It's the decision to stop before your life forces you to.

Burnout Is a Terrible Recovery Plan

Most of us have learned to rest reactively.

We push until we're exhausted.

We ignore the headache.

We ignore the aching back.

We ignore the irritability.

We ignore the voice telling us to go outside, take a walk, call a friend, cancel something, or simply lie down.

Then eventually our body, mind or circumstances make the decision for us.

What if we stopped treating recovery as something we earn after depletion and started treating it as part of the normal rhythm of a healthy life?

Before burnout, schedule recovery.

The challenge is discovering how much recovery you actually need.

Unfortunately, many of us discover that threshold by crossing it.

Maybe you learn that three months is your limit before you need to get away from your normal routine. Maybe you need one completely unscheduled day every month. Maybe you need a quarterly long weekend and several weeks away every year.

There isn't a universal prescription.

Your body is constantly giving you data.

The practice is learning to listen before it has to scream.

Your Body Has Probably Been Talking to You All Day

Think about an ordinary workday.

You're sitting at your desk.

Your back starts hurting.

You hear the thought:

Get up and stretch.

Then another:

Go outside. Take a walk.

And what do you do?

"I'll go after I finish this."

Except "this" becomes another email, another task, another meeting and another hour.

We do this with bigger signals too.

I need a vacation.

I miss my friends.

I haven't been outside enough.

I need more movement.

I don't want to do this anymore.

I'm exhausted.

We hear ourselves.

We just don't always listen.

One of the simplest questions I've learned to ask is:

What fills my emotional tank?

Know Your Tank Fillers

For me, certain things have always been essential to staying sane, healthy and happy.

When I worked in public accounting and corporate finance, exercise was one of them. I needed the gym at least three days a week.

During my public accounting years in Massachusetts, that sometimes meant going to the gym at 5:00 a.m. in a snowstorm.

Travel was another.

Every year beginning July 1, I took three weeks off and went somewhere in the world without access to work or technology.

Nature was another.

Every spring and fall, I went tent camping for at least a long weekend.

Looking back, those weren't indulgences.

They were my recovery rhythm.

Eventually I realized that environment mattered too.

I consciously chose to live somewhere that better matched the lifestyle I wanted and moved to San Diego.

Thirty years later, I still wake up feeling grateful that I live here.

When I became an entrepreneur, some of those rituals changed.

Yoga eventually replaced the gym, although I've since learned that it wasn't a complete replacement for what my body needed. Chronic pain has challenged me for much of the last decade, and restoring my physical health has become an important priority.

Travel remained a huge tank filler.

After I got married, my husband and I traveled about 12 weeks every year. We always visited family on the East Coast and usually went overseas for a new adventure.

Then COVID changed everything.

We stopped traveling while we cared for my mom in her 80s.

When she eventually went home, we decided to make up for lost time.

We left on a two-year Parks, Puppies & Pickleball RV Tour, visited National Parks we'd dreamed of seeing, and adopted our furbaby.

But there was one problem.

I brought work with me.

Taking Your Laptop Somewhere Beautiful Isn't Necessarily a Vacation

I installed a mini cell tower in our RV so I could work continuously while we traveled.

I worked from the tiny co-captain's chair with my laptop and extra screens.

I worked at picnic tables surrounded by mountains.

It was beautiful.

It was adventurous.

It gave us freedom.

But it wasn't always rest.

That distinction matters.

Sometimes we change our location without changing our relationship to responsibility.

You can answer email from a beach.

You can run payroll from the mountains.

You can take a Zoom call overlooking a National Park.

It may be vastly preferable to sitting in an office—but your nervous system still knows you're working.

A Radical Sabbatical asks a different question:

What would happen if I actually stopped?

The Best Time to Stop Is Often When You Think You Can't

During 26 years of entrepreneurship and three ventures, I pushed the boundaries of burnout more times than I'd like to admit.

And I discovered something counterintuitive.

The moment when you are convinced that you absolutely cannot stop may be the moment when stopping becomes most important.

When your internal dialogue sounds like:

There's too much to do.

I don't have enough time.

Everyone needs something from me.

I'm overwhelmed.

If I stop now, everything will fall apart.

Try the opposite.

Cancel the appointments.

Clear a few days.

Take a well-being break.

I started thinking of these emergency breaks as my Get Out of Jail Free card.

They helped me continue through 26 years of entrepreneurship and many moments when I wanted to quit.

Sometimes stopping for three days can change what three months of pushing harder cannot.

Sometimes You Need Longer

I've also learned that some transitions require more than a long weekend.

After selling my practice, I took a year off while my husband and I tried to conceive.

That year was a reset.

It allowed us to prioritize our family rather than automatically prioritizing everyone else's needs.

And now I'm at another major transition.

After 26 years of owning businesses, my final franchise chapter ended on July 31.

This time I'm giving myself 30 days.

I'm calling it my Radical Sabbatical.

My 30-Day Radical Sabbatical

The rules are intentionally simple.

I'm doing things that give me joy.

I'm eating food for pleasure.

I'm waking up and deciding what I want to do.

The appointments remaining on my calendar are things that are fun or support my well-being.

And I did something that may have been more important than anything else:

I deleted my to-do list.

Not literally every responsibility. There are still things in life that genuinely must be handled.

But I became ruthless about distinguishing must from should, could, someday, andI've been carrying this around because I once said I would.

More than 100 items came off the list.

I reduced it to approximately 10 things I genuinely needed to address before my sabbatical and another 10 that can wait until afterward.

Everything else was released.

Not postponed.

Not transferred onto another beautifully organized list.

Released.

That alone created an enormous sense of freedom.

How to Design Your Own Radical Sabbatical

Don't copy mine.

The whole point is to discover what you need.

Start with your body.

What has it been asking you for?

Then ask yourself:

What fills my emotional tank?

Think about the experiences after which you feel more like yourself—not merely entertained or distracted, but restored.

Maybe it's movement.

Maybe it's nature.

Maybe it's travel.

Maybe it's sleeping without an alarm.

Maybe it's being around people you love.

Maybe it's solitude.

Maybe it's music, creativity, spirituality, gardening, reading, cooking, surfing, camping or doing absolutely nothing.

Then determine the smallest amount of time that would make a meaningful difference.

A Radical Sabbatical could be:

• One hour:Turn everything off, go outside and move your body.

• One day:No work, errands or obligations—only things that restore you.

• Three days:Cancel everything possible and let your nervous system settle.

• One week:Step completely outside your normal routine.

• Thirty days:Release unnecessary commitments and rediscover how you actually want to spend your days.

• A year:Give yourself enough space for a major life transition, healing period or reinvention.

The duration isn't what makes it radical.

Choice does.

Overwhelm and the Power of Subtraction

I've come to believe that overwhelm is, at least in part, a choice.

Not because life's circumstances aren't sometimes genuinely overwhelming. They absolutely are.

But we often have more agency than we realize over what remains on our plates.

We can stop volunteering for something.

We can cancel an appointment.

We can disappoint someone.

We can decide that something we once committed to no longer belongs in our lives.

We can delete 100 things from a list.

We're constantly taught to manage our lives through addition:

A better productivity system.

A better calendar.

A better morning routine.

A new app.

Another habit.

Another strategy.

Radical Sabbatical is about subtraction.

What can I stop?

What can I release?

What doesn't need to happen?

What am I doing simply because I've always done it?

What would create space?

And then:

What do I want to put back into that space?

Don't Wait Until You Break

Recovery shouldn't be an emergency intervention.

It should be a rhythm.

Perhaps your rhythm is a well-being day every month, a long weekend every quarter and several weeks every year.

Perhaps it's something completely different.

You may have to experiment to discover it.

Notice how long you can operate normally before you begin losing your energy, creativity, patience, health or joy.

Then don't schedule your next break at that point.

Schedule it before.

Rest before you're exhausted.

Reconnect before you're lonely.

Move before your body is screaming.

Take the trip before you've forgotten why you work so hard in the first place.

And occasionally, give yourself permission to wake up without asking:

"What do I have to do today?"

Ask instead:

"What do I want to do today?"

Then listen to the answer.

Whether your Radical Sabbatical lasts one day, 30 days or an entire year, make it yours.

There are no rules to follow and no gold stars for doing it correctly.

The whole point is remembering that this is your life.

You get to creatively design it.

Have fun with it.

If you're ready to stop waiting for permission and start building recovery into your own rhythm, come find a community of women doing exactly that at https://cpamoms.com/start.