How to Take a Break from Yourself

I DON’T ALWAYS find myself to be good company. Like a friend who only talks about his own hang-ups, my inner monologue can get pretty tiresome. Honestly, that again? Can’t we give it a rest?

I think most of us feel this from time to time—this desire to get away from ourselves. But all the usual remedies—entertainment or exercise, alcohol or drugs—tend to work only in small doses, if they work at all. Rely on any of them too regularly and they become habits, which is often just a gentle synonym for compulsions.

The novelist Rachel Cusk has written that “habits kill what is essential in ourselves.” When you’re feeling worn out by the stuff going on in your head, I think that’s a sure sign you need to change your mind’s inputs. Give your brain something new to chew on so that it stops chewing on itself.

The Escape with Markham Heid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here, the research on vacations can be instructive.

A vacation, by definition, is a respite from the humdrum monotony of daily life. A 2019 study from Australia found that the more vacationers were able to be “mentally away” from their usual habits — especially habits related to work and technology (email, social media, etc.) — the more restorative their vacation tended to be. Avoiding these activities during your leisure hours may pay similar dividends.

Less intuitively, another study (this one from 2021) found that the more time vacationers spent watching TV, movies, and other screen-based entertainments, the less rejuvenated they felt following their time off. These forms of media may require too much focused attention, which could interfere with a vacation’s restorative qualities, the study’s authors wrote.

I think it’s also true that, for most people, these entertainments are too much a feature of everyday life. They’re a continuation of our daily lives, not a break, and so they’re likely to guide your thoughts back onto they’re well-worn tracks.

Finally, some researchers have compared “staycations” (holidays at home) to traditional vacations. That work has found that traveling to new places leads to a greater drop in “ruminative” thinking, which is a term psychologists use to describe the repetitive worries or negative thought loops that fuel anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems. Physical distance, one study team observed, seems to provide mental distance from both everyday stressors and problematic ruminations.

There’s a lot more peer-reviewed research I could mention here — studies on habits and their ties to environmental cues, or research on the well-being benefits of novel experiences. The lesson I take from all this work is that if you want a break from yourself, you need a break from your routine contexts and behaviors.

If you’re getting tired of yourself, try doing new things in new places. Shake up your life, if only for an hour or two at a time. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If there’s any truth to that, it follows that doing the same thing over and over and expecting to think or feel differently is a form of insanity. You can’t change your mind unless you change your behavior.

On a recent Tuesday evening—a time when I’d normally be at home watching TV or doing laundry—I decided to bag all that and ride my bike. After an hour, I stopped beside a river and took a dip to cool off. I air dried as I peddled home at a slow pace, watching the sun go down.

That night, back at home in bed, I felt like I’d stolen a bit of life that I wasn’t entitled to on a weekday evening. Things seemed different, including me. I was happy for the change in company.

*Note: This piece was adapted from a story I wrote for Medium in 2022.