I have to confess…I am a total workaholic.

I love my work and could keep skipping appointments with friends, parties and trips to be creating around it all day and night long.

So it has been a big deal for me to walk the talk when we talk about making pauses during the day to break the cycle of chronic stress.

To not overwork myself is always a minute to minute decision. It’s a state of awareness that I have been training on for years now. Is not a decision that I took once and that now I’m done with it. It’s an hour to hour decision.

The tricky thing is that there is always that moment where we say “just 10 more minutes to finish this” and those minutes become 2 hours, or 3, and we skip eating or drinking water or stretching in the name of “10 little minutes”. And then again, and again another ten extra minutes here and there…at the end of the week we are exhausted or sick without understanding how.

Well, is quite simple: Your body can’t be in alert mode all day long, nonstop.

In alert, we are basically under stress hormones. The blood tends to go to the extremities to help us run faster or freeze, and the blood in the brain goes from the frontal lobe to the reptilian brain at the back. So we are ready to hunt and solve frenetically any problem. Our brain waves are in Beta and so we spend huge amounts of energy thinking things through. A bit of this is so good. Can propel us far. But constantly being in this rhythm is unsustainable for the body, mind, and emotions.

The body needs breaks to enter into a restorative mode.

I have a set of things I do to get the best of those breaks. In this video, I share some of them. You can create your own sequence. And if you do something that is not in this sequence please share it in the comments. I would love to add it to the set.