When life gets tough, we often takes breaks from reality until we feel more ready to go back into battle. But do those breaks really help?

Think about your day and how many times you took a few minutes to scroll through social media, flick past a few channels or send silly messages to a few thousand strangers.

That is wasted time. You can’t get it back.

That attempt at giving yourself a break is simply a pause button on whatever road you are on. It doesn’t change anything. That same road which made you need that break is still there. You are not moving forward rather you are repeating the same stretch of road each time. It becomes exhausting, lonely and  just plain frustrating not to see you life getting any better.

Instead of taking breaks and slowing everything down for 5 minutes, I encourage you do the opposite. Choose something which will help you to make your life better. Turn something up 😉

Those same 5 minutes wasted on social media could be transformed into reading a page in a special book, learning a few vocabulary words in another language, sending a deeply felt thank you message to a single individual, planning a healthy meal, creating an outline for your next training session, throwing a load of laundry into the machine… or just doing something that makes your life better rather than trying to run away from the one you’ve got. Set a stop watch for 5 minutes minutes and go!

There is a false idea that in order to make your life better, you must commit a huge amount of time and energy to do so. Well you don’t.