Time Off Isn't About Productivity – It Restores Your Humanity

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As humans, we instinctively understand that time has profound worth, regardless of any workplace benefits. This is what sabbatical alumni mean when they ascribe a feeling of humanity to their time off. Unfortunately, the burden of proof for many is to somehow provide an equation of increased productivity.

While this misses the point of what taking time off is all about, there is a lens from psychology that can help us understand the benefits in more tangible terms: conservation of resources theory. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to evaluate whether a break from work is beneficial. The first asks: Were you better off during your time away? The second asks: How long did that positive effect persist upon your return?

Most of us focus entirely on the second question when justifying time off. We expect the break itself to feel good. That’s a given. What we really want to know is whether we’ll return as better, more effective employees. Will we be more creative? More focused? Less likely to burn out again? This is viewing time off through a productivity lens. The break is only worthwhile if it makes us better workers.

But there’s another way to think about sabbaticals, and that’s through an inherent value lens. This approach says that feeling fully human, someone whose existence revolves around more than productivity, even temporarily, has worth in itself. The question isn’t whether the experience will make you a better employee but whether it will make you a more complete person.

Consider vacations. Most people don’t need convincing that a vacation has inherent value. Taking a vacation is fun, it makes you feel better, and most of us would prefer to take more of them. But we also don’t expect the vacation to produce a lasting improvement in our work or life. Research supports the short-term nature of vacation benefits: Taking time off increases happiness, satisfaction, and general positive affect. These are most pronounced when we relax, detach from work, and have control over our activities. Unfortunately, these impacts are short-lived; we return to our baseline shortly after returning to work.

Underlying these studies is the conservation of resources theory, which was developed to help us understand how individuals manage stress, burnout, and recovery. We’re all intrinsically motivated to acquire, retain, and protect our psychological resources. Stress happens when we fall behind on replenishing them. It’s that feeling of being “run down” that sleep and relaxation help restore. Professor Oranit Davidson and her colleagues put this theory to the test in their study of more than 250 faculty members at universities in Israel, New Zealand, and the United States. They tracked professors before, during, and after their sabbatical leaves, comparing them to a control group of similar faculty who didn’t go on leave.

Unsurprisingly, those on sabbatical gained psychological resources during their time off. Compared to the control group, sabbatical takers were much happier, experienced reduced stress during their leave, and had an average stress level upon return that was significantly lower than before their sabbatical. Crucially, those who went abroad were even better off than their peers who stayed at home for their leave. This finding has reinforced my belief that some degree of geographical separation is a critical ingredient for at least the initial breaking-free stage of your sabbatical.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Once they were back in the swing of their job, the researchers found that sabbatical takers’ levels of energy, stress management, and other resources mostly returned to baseline. Did nothing change? As the authors dug deeper, they discovered that the energy it required to reacclimate to routine life sapped much of the additional resources they’d gained during their time away. This was especially hard on those returning from abroad, who faced stressful logistical challenges with housing and reintegrating into normal life.

These results echo the famous concept of the “hedonic treadmill.” Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell found that we all have a happiness “set point.” While we can work to increase our happiness, we’re ultimately likely to revert to the same general level we’re wired for. If that wasn’t cruel enough, Brickman and Campbell found that we end up becoming accustomed to any increases in happiness we achieve. As these gains become normalized, we don’t end up feeling happier. And the pursuit of more continues.

We must not ignore the inherent value of time off. Pursuing self-actualization, or at least a more authentic version of ourselves, should be a birthright, not a privilege.

A cynical observer might ask: Is all this effort worth it?

If your sabbatical is six months long, that’s a substantial portion of life spent feeling significantly better. How do you quantify the value of six months of restored health, energy, sleep, and memories? After all, in the words of writer Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

A lot can happen in six months. On sabbatical, many people go through periods of self-examination, performing demanding tasks like caregiving, and doing the hard work of getting better. But these periods of intense feelings and experiences are important. And they stick with us and inform the rest of our lives. Sabbatical alum Jeanette Mellinger reflected on the impact of this: “My sabbatical gave me the chance to question my path and to give myself permission to really think about what I can do to reprioritize things in my life. I can’t imagine living thirty more years without those lessons.”

Even if Jeanettes’s day-to-day happiness returned to exactly where it started, she had uncovered something during her time off that she couldn’t access previously. Her sabbatical gave her a new perspective that altered the way she lived going forward.

We must not ignore the inherent value of time off. Pursuing self-actualization, or at least a more authentic version of ourselves, should be a birthright, not a privilege. It seems to me that the real question isn’t whether time away has value, but how we can build the conviction that it’s as worthwhile as time on the job.

This article The value of time off isn’t better productivity — it’s your humanity is featured on Big Think .