Grind. In slang, it means working hard. The work that it refers to is often dull, tedious, or repetitive. One’s effort in such work is consistently hard. You know it from past or present experience as a verb or as a noun: beings are not machines. If you continue to grind too long, too hard, or too much, then you will burn out.
This concept needs no definition, but if you push yourself too hard, overworking can put you at risk of harming your health or leaving you completely exhausted, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, leaving you unable to do the job that caused your burnout in the first place. Furthermore, experts who studied the “burnout phenomenon” categorize it as “occupational”, not medical. That means if you are working in your high-intensity work ethic best self to keep work stress under control due to overworking, it’s too late for work-life balance; this is a call for self-care in the form of taking a (well-deserved) break. And that’s okay.
The five- to 10-minute micro-break might be the ideal first step if control and perfection are your love languages on the job, which led to who you are and where you are now (a casualty of burnout). Nothing fancy or expensive is required: stretch at your desk, get up and move to get water, or breathe mindfully.
Are you too busy to fit five minutes into your work schedule? Try this before they use you up and discard you once you are no longer useful, like a flat tire, only to be replaced. Are you in danger of losing the job that you gave up everything to embrace, and risking the compromise of your physical, mental, and emotional health? Build for breaks. Make stretching every hour a priority, if you can.
Sedentary/desk job? No problem. The Healthline“ultimate desk exercise routine” focuses on simple, no-equipment and no-sweat moves to reduce pain, improve posture, and relieve stress.
It meets you where you are in terms of tension and flexibility. The key is to get moving regularly. Get up and walk to ease stiffness and clear your head. Visit the water cooler. Hydrate. Walk back to your desk. Take some deep breaths, then sit down and resume work with more energy and better results. You might think that more movement will wear you out. Quite the contrary. You were meant to move.
If Healthline’s simple stretches intrigue you, try examples like them and others that best fit your needs, comfort, and organizational culture (read the room before you get into stretching in it). If these aren’t your cup of tea, try other stretches at your desk from printable, postable resources online, ranging from My Yoga Teacher to Chiropractic Life or Tanunda Physio; there is something for everyone who sits at a desk to earn a living.
Stretching to relieve stiffness and take a short break is not a sweaty gym workout or a marathon. This is five to 10 minutes every hour or so. Five minutes of stretching, walking, water, and deep breathing will pay dividends in your productivity. Don’t think of it as difficult to do or hard to fit into an already busy schedule. Think of it as cultivating a healthy habit. Standing up while on the phone, getting a flexible standing desk, walking laps after lunch or during quick meetings, or walking around the office every hour are also ways to fit in more movement at work.
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Make breaks in your schedule, repeat appointments. Here’s how to make healthy breaks stick: schedule time for yourself. Just like any meeting, business appointment, or doctor’s visit, respect yourself enough to pencil yourself in and make breaks for you and with you a top priority.
Change your environment. Get away from your usual workspace and go outside. You don’t have to eat the same tuna or turkey sandwich every day, and you don’t have to eat it in the same place every day, either. Some workplaces offer outdoor tables and seating areas for lunch and breaks.
And there’s always your vehicle if you drive to work. If you want to take a nap with the seat fully reclined and set your phone’s alarm to wake you in 20 minutes, then you do you. This would definitely refresh you for the afternoon and help you beat the afternoon blahs without reaching for soda, coffee, chips, or a candy bar.
Turn. The. Devices. Off! Give yourself some tech-free time as the break you may not even have realized you needed. Put a pause on scrolling, connecting, posting, or searching and shopping. Let your break be a time for you to recharge yourself, not recharge your devices, so that you can remain easily accessible 24/7/365 at the sound of a ping or the shake of a phone in your purse or pocket, strengthening your Pavlovian response by staying locked, loaded, and ready to read, respond, and click, click, click. Unless there’s an emergency that demands your green dot to stay on, meaning you’re available, then don’t be present for others before showing up for yourself first. Experience a few moments from work where you are taking a break from tech.
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method for focused work sessions with frequent structured breaks. Tasks are done in 25-minute intervals, and each one is called a “pomodoro”, Italian for tomato. It enables and empowers people to work without distractions, with a 5-minute break at the end of the 25 minutes. This is the workflow. Four 25-minute sessions merit a 15- to 20-minute break in the system, which makes up a cycle.
The core principle? Fighting procrastination. People are less distracted, more consistent, and are looking forward to their earned rest. Time becomes “tangible and manageable,” and some, like Todoists, love this method because it supposedly “improves focus, minimizes distractions, and prevents burnout.”
The time management technique takes its name from its creator, Francesco Cirillo, who used a tomato-shaped timer in his sessions. Developed in the 1980’s, it’s not for everybody, but it’s supposed to boost productivity for those who use it.
The what and why of planning for regular breaks are just as important as the when and how. Determine the latter two before it’s too late, and the situation becomes detrimental. If you’re fatigued, irritable, and making errors more frequently, these signs should alert you that it’s definitely time for a break.
Although reactive planning is better than nothing, after the fact breaks are not ideal; life doesn’t grade on a curve or recognize how much potential or more and better effort you could’ve had if you stepped away for five minutes before acting, saying, or sending something work-related that is less than your best while at rock bottom of a burnout, continuously still trying to stay relevant and irreplaceable and grind.
It’s important to make a long-term plan to protect your time away from work, reduce your workload by sharing tasks with others, and schedule time off. These are all worthy of practice, but these suggestions are geared toward white-collar workers who have desk jobs in offices and typically work first shifts or who are working at jobs that fewer of us Black folks have, to an equal or greater extent than those in the majority culture have.
Cut out from being among “the cubicle and computer working class”, another plan is necessary for those who are also often called “essential workers.” That category seems important, but for those of us who are not paid as much to be “essential” or scheduled the same, and with work-life balance in mind, it is just empty wordplay.
The ability to have the same soft perks with the agency to choose when to take a break, let alone schedule a larger one (if there is no paid time off offered, for example), no matter where you are on the ladder of success, breaks make everybody’s work experience a better one, if you can advocate for permission to take regular breaks at your job.
For Black folks working, we either work without micro-breaks to prove we can handle and excel at the job, or push harder and longer until it is too late and stress has already played out in our break-free (except lunch as a “safe” guarantee) workday world.
We tend to job-hug our work to show our tireless commitment to, skill for, and worthiness of the position. We are willing to work ourselves into the ground before we ask for what would make us better employees for those we work for: regular micro-breaks. Regular breaks can lead to greater output and a better work product from us over the long term.
We stay silent but do not remain content; we keep working, grinding, grateful for the job, even though it may not be easy. The reasons for this employment tragedy are various, but maybe a tangible, steady income that regularly keeps a check in our pocket is a major reason we are reluctant to rock the boat. Financial peace of mind is, otherwise, hard enough to come by, despite living on a paycheck- to-paycheck budget.
It does not matter how deserving we are; we are also aware that we do not get the same breaks and soft perks as others in the majority-dominated work culture, a force unto itself. Without such breaks, when we choose the path of seemingly less resistance and remain silent, doing without them, our health speaks volumes that we eventually cannot ignore. We suffer mentally, physically, and financially as our bodies and families pay the ultimate price, seeing us less and less, until we are gone too soon. We are aware, but remain without things others see as important and necessary, often acceptable to our counterparts but not to us. We keep pushing through, all the same, still essential, yet unshakable in our certain contribution, nevertheless, but that’s not okay.
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