If you’ve forgotten, this is your reminder that it’s okay to take breaks.

Whether you’ve finished one task or a hundred, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to push yourself to the limit at every little task and to pause regularly. Your energy and willpower are two of the most important factors in your mind when doing a task, and so, it’s important to conserve them and play them evenly until you’ve finished a task. In fact, you may not believe it coming from me, a simple high-schooler, so take it from the sciences: studies show that people who take breaks more often create better and more efficient work than those who do not. This is because of the belief that once something is started, it must be finished immediately. No. If you take breaks, you will finish your work better.

Of course, in not all cases is this true. Sometimes breaks could ruin your work, lose your track and rhythm at the task you’re doing. The advice for that is to set your breaks as responsibly as possible. Don’t abuse them, but don’t overwork yourself.

What importance does this have in our lives, and what could be so important about it that there are whole blog articles dedicated to it? Well, you may have heard of a thing called mental health. It differs from physical (both external and internal) health in the way that it does not deal with the regular types of pain such as cuts, bruises, organ failure, blood loss, and other. Instead, mental health is the state or quality that you are in mentally, and can be characterized by whatever state you think in, may it be positive or negative.

Think of it right now. Stop what you’re doing and assess yourself. How are you feeling? How much work have you done today? How much work do you have left to do for the rest of the day? Who set those quotas for you? How many breaks have you taken today? How often have you taken them? When was the last time you were truly able to relax. When was the last time you’ve pushed yourself to the point of overworking?

You could be mentally exhausted or drained right now. If you are, we beg of you to take a break. Your mental health is more important than overall, any work you could be doing right now. To help encourage you to take a break and stop overworking yourself, here are some examples of mental health diseases that are commonly found in today’s society. Some of these you may be familiar with, but not know that they are related to the topic of mental health.

Here are three of the most common mental illnesses found in people all over the world today. Bipolar disorder is a mental illness that affect a person’s ability to think reasonably, create episode of different energies, employ mood swings, and other. Depression is a most common mental illness that negatively affects and downgrades the way you feel, think, and act towards yourself and other people. Anxiety is a minor common mental illness that demonstrates the feeling of unease, fear, worry, horror, and other that have different levels, all which affect the way you think and treat other people in your daily life.

If you recognize any of these and believe you may have one or more, take a break. Of course, it’s important to remember to never self-diagnose; the best thing to do is to see a doctor. However, one possible remedy is to, yes, take a break. Relax yourself. Calm Down. Meditate. Treat yourself to a box of donuts. Go the pet store and adopt a dog. Water your plants. Smile.

Do anything and everything in your power to uphold your mental health. Once it goes down, your physical health may start to get affected. Don’t ever allow yourself to work on extended periods of time. Your unhealthy mind will bring you an unhealthy heart. Avoid this and… take a break.

Jon Zaccary C. Regala, Grade 10 of Far Eastern Private School