Take A Break
By Molly Rapozo, Lifestyle Editor
Being an adult human with feelings and emotions takes a lot of work. We must daily keep our feelings under wraps, but not fully repressed if we want to feel okay. We are allowed to complain and fixate on an emotion for a certain amount of time, but any longer and it’s too much. What exactly are we to do when it becomes too much?
Timeouts.
The timeout, an age-old way of getting children to calm the f*** down, is tried and true—and not solely for kids. One of my favorite podcasts, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, explores this idea in his episode with Mae Whitman.
This podcast is incredible for those of you who want the warm, fuzzy feeling of sitting in your living room swapping stories with your friends over coffee. The show is fun, light-hearted, casual and ever-so-sweet, but still explores a dizzying variety of bigger questions on humanity and life. It’s amazing.
Excited rave aside, Shepard and Whitman bring up a funny story about Shepard’s daughter who had a bit of a meltdown one day. He asks her to take a timeout, not to punish her but to simply guide her through the process of “feeling your feelings.” Whitman and Shepard then agreed that we all need a timeout every once and a while, and thus began my fascination with the practice of timeouts and taking a break.
Pulled from parents.com, “A timeout is meant to give a child a break from a situation that has overwhelmed him into unacceptable behavior,” according to child psychologist Penelope Leach, Ph.D. Without going into how the practice timeouts have become, generally, more harmful than helpful, there is definitely a lesson to be taken from this.
I first heard the podcast episode this summer when I went to summer school in Norway. I was stressed constantly—being in a new environment rattled my being. My precious routine was lost and therefore I was constantly on edge. Meaning: say the wrong thing and you would get a terrible side of me.
It was ugly and I did not like how I was acting. I snapped, quite a few times, at people that I was frustrated with. That is not to say that they were right and I was completely wrong, but I can recognize that I did not handle every situation perfectly, every time. I digress, but the process of pulling myself out of a situation that was testing my limits became a routine and saved from a full-on meltdown several times.
Two things come out of taking a break: one, you experience your feelings fully without interference from the world around you. Whatever emotions you have at the moment can, and most likely will be, amplified by the situation. Removing yourself allows you to take those feelings, separate from the circumstances, and to truly explore them. Think of it as a form of meditation.
Second, bomb diffusion. Most days, my emotions feel like someone launched a nuclear bomb strong enough to wipe out my heart, brain and all senses. It’s overwhelming and harsh—but taking that moment to just breathe and think logically on which wires to cut not only keeps you together but allows you to find what serves you and what doesn’t.
It can be hard to navigate all the stimuli in the world and how they affect your sweet little brain, who is working so hard to keep you going, or your cute and well-meaning heart, who is doing just the same in its own way. Not to claim that kids—or parents, or humans—have it all figured out, but timeouts follow the general formula for feeling good: one that involves breathing, thinking logically and being forgiving to yourself and your feelings.