Six months ago, I reflected upon and wrote extensively about my experience of taking a two-month long career break to Bali.

It had been fantastic. I felt like a new person.

One thing that had crossed my mind, along with many others I am sure, is what the extended and longer-term benefits of a career break may be.

In this article I explain why my career break was successful, and how you can reap the longer-term benefits if you’re willing to keep putting in the work.

Sharpening the saw.

In the title of my original article about my career break, I referred to the famous “sharpening the saw” parable from Stephen Covey’s infamous and inspiring book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The parable describes a woodcutter who is slavishly hacking away at a tree; a passer-by suggests to the woodcutter that he take time to pause and sharpen his saw, for this would surely make his job easier.

Before my career break things had very much felt like this for me in London. I was progressing well with my career but felt like I was constantly working hard and not really giving myself proper time for personal development. There was little “saw sharpening”.

The career break.

As a brief summary, I left the UK having had a successful job as a clinical psychologist with a bunch of professional connections, family, friends etc.

Life was basically very good.

I had craved the adventure of living somewhere new, so my wife and I gritted our teeth through an extremely arduous process to get visas to move to Australia. By the time we got our visas, I didn’t have a job to go to, so I took my two-month career break in between leaving the UK and arriving in Australia.

It was scary.

It felt like a risky move.

My mind was telling me all sorts of stories to try and prevent me from doing it, but I did it anyway.

Whilst I could go ahead and list all the benefits I recorded as the career break concluded, what is more pertinent here is how I feel six months later:

• I am living with consistently high levels of life satisfaction.

• Positive emotions abound: This colourful emotional palette regularly includes splashes of happiness; elation; joy; pride; love; intrigue; curiosity; and fulfilment. The canvas of my life is vividly decorated by these feelings. Whilst I of course experience negative emotions as well, these are much more transient and less troubling than they have ever been.

• I feel incredibly driven and motivated in my work, and in the other activities and hobbies that I do. Most days there is a vibrancy that was not always there before.

• Moreover, objectively, I have been advancing in my new role and producing consistently positive outcomes with my clients and contributing exciting things to my organisation.

How is it that life can be so enriching?

Could this all just be some sort of illusion created by being in a new and exciting country?

I don’t think so.

Behaviour change.

During my time away I didn’t just have a break from work and relax. I was active in my recuperation and spent a lot of time doing things. These were things that gave me a sense of mastery.

In support of my own experience, research has shown that people who agree with the following questionnaire items tend to have better outcomes in terms of perceived life satisfaction following periods away from their job:

I did things that challenged me.

I did things to broaden my horizons.

I sought out intellectual challenges.

I learned new things.

Importantly, I also chose to make several key changes to my lifestyle on my career break:

• I gave up artificial sweetener (I was putting it in hot drinks like it was going out of fashion).

• I gave up a Diet Coke habit that had stealthily crept up on me.

• I cut down drinking alcohol to perhaps one drink per week.

• I committed to a daily meditation practice and chose to work on reacting less to situations, instead learning how to respond calmly and mindfully to things in my life. Essentially, I committed to practicing mindfulness in all aspects of my life.

• I committed to working out every day.

• I developed a routine that maximised sleep quality.

Additionally, when I was in Bali on my career break I spent some serious time determining what things were important to me, how I wanted to live my life, and decided what things I needed to do to achieve that.

In other words, I clarified my values and set myself goals.

I did things like writing a personal mission statement and imagined myself in an ideal future and thought about what I needed to do to get there.

Continue your efforts, reap the rewards.

Crucially, I have continued all of the above changes in lifestyle and behaviour. You could say, I’ve done some habit pruning: I’ve eliminated the less helpful ones and begun or developed others that are more in line with who I want to be and what I want my life to stand for.

Conscious decisions to create positive routines and habits back then have enabled me to optimise life and reduce suffering and its impact now.

Moving to a new country has allowed me to transplant this updated and invigorated “me” into the next chapter of my journey.

The skills I learned whilst on the break have helped me do that courageously and allowed me to embrace the challenge of re-establishing a life on the other side of the world.

Whilst I have moved countries, I believe that it will be possible for people to take the upgraded and improved version of “me” back home, wherever that may be. Make it your very own hero’s journey, returning back to the homeland having learned important lessons and vanquished evil –  overcome some of your own demons and return feeling enlightened.

Time away from work leads to creativity.

One of the benefits of my career break was the opportunity to spend time self-reflecting and accessing parts of myself that were normally subjugated by the pressures and demands of day-to-day life.

I found myself unintentionally creative.

The emergence of creative thoughts was at times experienced as rather ego dystonic; they didn’t feel like they came from me. I wrote poetry. I came up with an idea for a screenplay. I came up with several business ideas.

Who was doing all this thinking?

“Nathan isn’t this sort of thinker”, I would think.

I realised that the life you live continually reaffirms and reinforces aspects of your identity. If you extricate yourself from these well-worn grooves, however, it can free you up to other opportunities. You can suddenly be “someone who writes a novel”.

It didn’t surprise me to find a study that showed time away from work leads to recovery, which then facilitates creativity, which in turn affects life satisfaction.

Since coming back from my break, this sense of creativity has persisted.

It’s almost as if I was given a glimpse of what I could be, like I was looking into a parallel universe, peering through a portal. Whilst in science fiction films stepping through a portal is sure to get you into trouble, I seem to have stepped through this one with seemingly no negative consequences.

Realising that it was possible, it has changed my perspective on who I am and what kinds of things it’s okay for me to think about or daydream about:

“Maybe it is okay for me to want to write a book, or a screenplay, or some comedy.”

Creativity is like a mental muscle, however, which works best when given both rest and an opportunity to be exercised….

Important decisions made on a career break can benefit you in the long-term.

In the past six months I have continued to be creative in a number of spheres in my life because I have more time for it. I have more time, because since starting work in Australia, I only work four days per week.

Having lots of time to think on my career break gave me the opportunity to question the norm.

Why do we work five days per week?

Why has this system from the industrial revolution bled into the 21st century when we know so much about well-being, productivity and life satisfaction?

My career break allowed me to challenge the default option of working five days per week.

Here I was, with no job, which was scary, but I realised that having time where I wasn’t working was highly productive. I had a realisation that I didn’t want to work in this way anymore.

This decision at first seemed indulgent and perhaps lazy, until I realised that health is infinitely more important than money, and that I believed I had a pretty good chance of using that day “off” wisely.

Working four days per week has been one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. It is up there along with the decision to go to university; the decisions to do a PhD, and then a clinical psychology doctorate; the decision to ask my wife to marry me; the decision to move to Australia.

These are the kinds of decisions that you look back on and they form the distinct signposts charting the tangents taken on the map of your life. When you eventually look back, do you want to see an empty journey of lost opportunity, or do you want to see a meandering and colourful criss-crossing path of excitement?

Whilst it has meant that things have been harder financially than we might have planned for, it has taught me that having 20% extra time to spend on yourself produces disproportionately higher benefits on your well-being.

The reduced income has also taught me an enormous sense of gratitude for what I have, for when you start your life again from scratch and do not have the means to just acquire stuff, you become more thoughtful and thankful of the individual items and experiences that you are fortunate to have.

Whilst I would in no way suggest that the goal of everyone’s career break should be to return to your employer with a proposal for a shortened working week, I am certainly recommending that people use it as an opportunity to explore what is important to you and evaluate whether there are some big changes that you could make in your life.

A career break will give you that space to do this.

Summing it all up.

We all have an intuitive understanding that when we take a break away from work it allows us to regain resources, relax and return with a fresh pair of eyes, ears, and nose. As I’ve discussed, and as demonstrated by research, it is the process of active recuperation and engaging in a variety of mastery experiences that leads to the best outcomes in terms of life satisfaction.

My lesson to anyone considering a break from work would be this: Use this opportunity to work out who you are, what you want, and make some changes that will help define the person that you want to be.

In other words, don’t just sharpen your saw for the duration of your career break, organise yourself in a way that allows you to sharpen the saw and chop the tree at the same time.

You won’t regret it.