Workouts for the Mind
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July 3 - Turn Your Mind Off

July 3 - Turn Your Mind Off

Vacation Brain 🏄‍♂️

July 03, 2024

Workouts for the MYND

If we’re doing life correctly, do we need vacation?

What a killer question! I often wonder about this myself and given it's July 4th, let's chat vacation and mental fitness. This time of year, the out-of-office notes are hitting us in the face faster than we can angrily delete them.

Why angry?! Well, according to a study, *only* 53% of Americans are taking vacation this summer, so that means 47% of us are left in our home or company office, getting a fluorescent-light tan, eating stale Fritos out of boredom, and scrolling our favorite technology trap watching the world take pictures of themselves eating pizza in Italy. In a study done in 2018, 30% of vacation days were not used (aka flushed down the toilet). This is crazy!

So why does this matter? Let’s talk about how vacation is something we should all do, but isn’t a bikini-clad, pina-colada-drenched, 1-week solve-all for stress, exhaustion or a replacement for a regular mental fitness practice.

Vacation does a lot for us!

Take it from one of the greats, Lin-Manuel Miranda: “It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life — perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life — came to me on vacation… The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it.”

Before Vacation:
- Anticipation: The mere act of looking forward to it increases positive affect, or emotion as it’s been shown that “the anticipation of future reward, such as an upcoming vacation, can often be more gratifying than the experience itself.” Wild, huh? So get planning people!
During Vacation: We often experience a -
- Decrease in stress
- Increase in physical activity
- Improvement in sleep
- Improvement in mood
Returning from Vacation: It has been shown that we experience the following -
- Increase in cognitive flexibility: the ability to see things in new ways
- Increase in creativity: Increase the flow and volume of new ideas
- Decrease in (the bad kind of) stress
- Increase in motivation
- Increase in job performance
- Improvement in our relationships
What happens when you work on vacation? When folks worked on vacation, it seemed to negatively affect their self-reported health and wellness upon returning. So yeah, vacations are lit. Doing work on them is not.

Vacations do a lot for us, but not everything….

In studies conducted with real-live human employees, the effect of shorter vacations have been shown to fade quite quickly, within 1-2 weeks, and is known as “the fade out effect”.

So this Fourth of July, go enjoy a hotdog, tri-color popsicle, some fantastical fireworks, friends, family and remember that your brain needs this break. But it needs more than that to function well…

That’s why we’re here at MYNDY – to help you build the right mindset to win every day (not just when you’re toasty — stressed, exhausted, lacking focus, and/or burned out). You *still* have to practice mental fitness regularly to feel good.

With Heart,

Lissy and The MYNDY Team

PS: Before you send out that OOO note for tomorrow, put your name on the waitlist for MYNDY’s Routine Builder (if you haven’t already!) and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.

Join The Waitlist!

INSPIRATION

(Why we share this: This is a spark of info + research that gets you excited to practice Mental Fitness)

“Every person needs to take one day away.

A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”

― Maya Angelou

PERSPIRATION (Why we share this: These are fun + small exercises to work out your MYND for impact)

Question: What would you say if everyone in the country sneezed at the same time?

CELEBRATION

(Why we share this: This is a way to celebrate your MYND and the MYNDY community)

Doing new things is hard … but we're excited to announce that we're now on social media - think topics on productivity, energy and tech use (IG, TikTok, LI)! Some of our content is already helpful to folks, while some of it might be a bit cringe-worthy (we’ll let you decide)! We can’t get better without your feedback (we’re doing it for you!) so take a look and let us know your thoughts HERE.

OH….and Happy Birthday America!!!!!

Today’s Quiz Answer:

God Bless America! 🇺🇸

https://www.imom.com/15-fun-4th-of-july-riddles/

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