The Life-Changing Power of a Sabbatical

20:12Now McCormick's new line of signature seasonings make bringing fresh inspiration and endless versatility to everyday dishes easier than ever. There's the everyday essential, garlic and olive oil, the savory sweetness of caramelized onion, and globally inspired flavors like the herby with a touch of heat, chimichurri, and chili garlic that elevates everything from ramen to stir fry to even grilled meats. Try the chimichurri blend to make your steaks delicious. Each signature seasoning is crafted by flavor experts to make every dish more delicious. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick.

20:54Find your favorite at mccormick.com. Before you jump back in, you know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT Work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready-to-review work. With your permission, ChatGPT Work can gather context from apps and files, summarize incoming messages, rebuild decks, and help finalize high-quality documents for your team or clients. Stay in control as you move from a goal to polished work faster with ChatGPT Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app today and take on your most ambitious work. Okay, let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare.

21:37Everyone can agree that something this important should work better than it does. Turns out, patients aren't the only ones who think that. Optum does too, and it's why they're working day in and day out to improve it. Never heard of Optum? Think of them as the engine of healthcare. They bring together clinicians, care teams, and the way you get and manage your medications. And they use data and technology to help the health systems we all use work better as a whole, not as disconnected pieces. Because they connect all these pieces, Optum can take a more whole-person approach to healthcare, like helping patients connect to mental health support quickly and bringing primary care and prescription deliveries straight to their home so people can stay on top of their health.

22:20Those things make a big difference. And they show that Optum really is trying to make healthcare better, that their clinicians, pharmacists, data scientists, engineers, everyone is putting in the work to improve it every day. See what Optum's up to at Optum.com.

22:41You're listening to a live edition of the Happiness Lab, recorded at South by Southwest 2025 with my friend, the sabbatical expert, DJ Dedana. I started this next section of the show by asking DJ to give us a breakdown of the average sabbatical and to explain how the benefits of taking a break tend to unfold.

22:59DJ DiDonna:Yeah, so from a personal perspective, I think you can expect a lot of things. And if you're coming into the sabbatical super burnt out, then you probably need to heal. And that's going to be the first thing that you get. So in the research and my interviews, I talked to a ton of people that had some sort of physical ailment, whether it's ulcers, stomach, gastro stuff. and they've been told by doctors, this is stress related, but until they actually stepped away from work long enough for that to heal, they couldn't kind of grok that, right? So I think healing is one of the first things. Creativity is one of the next things.

23:31DJ DiDonna:So you're taking time off and you're doing whatever you want to do. And that ends up like kind of reigniting a lot of creativity. For me, it was writing silly songs on a ukulele, but like whatever you would like to do. We think about like working on ourselves as work as opposed to play. So there's this concept of identity play as helping you kind of like run little experiments, figure out what you want to do next. And then I think confidence is a huge one. No matter if you have a sabbatical policy at your company or not, it's pretty scary to launch off for an extended period of time. Like I'd never taken more than a couple of weeks off work since, I don't know, middle school.

24:06DJ DiDonna:And so to take four months off, that's scary, especially if you're leaving your job. What are you going to do on the other side of it? That sort of thing. And so being able to do something that seems scary and then come back and say, actually, I'm fine, really builds up people's confidence to take big steps and big leaps. It's also hopefully running experiments on your sabbatical to say like, oh, I thought that I wanted to write and I actually like writing. And so that builds up confidence and the ability to do it. And it seems like from your research, when you talk to people, these benefits are really common.

24:37Like this is just what you hear everybody who takes sabbaticals saying.

24:40DJ DiDonna:Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I came back from my sabbatical and I said, that was, it really changed who I was as a person. So this kind of identity was enmeshed with my company and the company was successful. I was successful. If it wasn't, I wasn't. And so I was able to kind of break free from that, but I wanted to check to make sure it wasn't just my experience. And so the more folks that I talked to, the more you just kept hearing these terms, like peak life experience. It's up there with like having a child, like getting married. So you're creating an event for yourself that will be one of the most important events of your entire life.

25:13It also seems like you take time to notice the things that you're not doing. You've talked a lot in your work about this idea of functional workaholism and how a sabbatical can help you penetrate into that a little bit. What do you mean?

25:24DJ DiDonna:Yeah. So we talk a lot about burnout. I view burnout as a spectrum. So you're kind of like, you're like burning out, right? You're existing on a spectrum where you're not doing your best, not feeling great. That's kind of hard to realize unless you step out from it. And stepping out, I'm assuming you've all had the experience where you go on a vacation for a week and right at the end, you're like, oh man, I was just sinking into it, and then you have to plop back into work. So stepping out long enough to say, wow, the way that I was working and the way that I was living was actually not serving me.

25:51DJ DiDonna:And I want to just step out of that for a little bit. I might want to make a big change, but obviously people's experience of COVID varied widely. But I think a lot of folks saw, oh man, now that I'm back at home with my family, I actually want to do that more. And like the way that I was kind of returning back to my family or, you know, even how I was working was not really great. So you needed like some perspective and like a long enough break from the norm to understand that. And also this seems connected to this idea you've talked about called regret insurance, right? Maybe like a benefit that comes later in life.

26:21DJ DiDonna:What's that? Like imagine you're, you know, the age of your grandparents and you're telling your grandkid a story. Like what do you want to have in that story? Bronnie Ware, who is a palliative care nurse, talks about the five regrets of the dying and this notion that you have not lived a life authentic to yourself. If you close your eyes real quick and think, what would I want to do with my life if I could do anything? Can that happen in the life that you're living now? Maybe, but probably not. It takes a little bit of time. And taking six months off in the scheme of working for 40 years is just not that much time.

26:54DJ DiDonna:It's less than, it's like 2%. I mean, if you knew then what you knew now, would you still choose the sabbatical? Would you do it differently? Yeah. Actually, one of the things that spurred me to taking my sabbatical was advice from a mentor. I went into that mentor's office and I was complaining, you know, hey, like this is hard. This is tough. The company's not working as much as I would like it to be or whatnot. And he said, DJ, if you knew then all the things you know about your life and your company now, would you join that company again tomorrow? And it was very clear. I was like, absolutely not.

27:24DJ DiDonna:And so I think like the tough part about our lives is it's lived kind of with this inertia. You've made a bunch of small decisions and all of a sudden you find yourself in this path. So I guess encouraging you to think about, would you want to return to this exact life? And if not, how are you going to run experiments to figure out what other track you need to be on? So long way to answer your question, but I look back at that time, and it's the most dense period of memories in my entire life. It was eight years ago right now I was walking in Japan. And so that will serve me, I think, for the rest of my life.

27:52So it seems like sabbaticals are serving the people who take them. But now I really want to jump into these benefits that employers can get, Because I think this is one of the reasons that sabbaticals aren't this equal for everyone, that not every company is doing this right, is I think employers are really worried about whether this is going to be incredibly costly for companies. We talked a little bit about some of these benefits, but I want to do a deeper dive. Like, what are companies really getting out of this when they set up sabbatical policies?

28:16DJ DiDonna:Yeah, I think it's a great point in the sense that the best case scenario is that a sabbatical that doesn't require you to like blow your life up, doesn't require you to save up for 10 years, is possible because your company values you enough to do it. And so all of us who work at companies who are managers are also people. So we're taking our people hat off and putting our company hat on. So this resilience is just a huge piece. Like having a company be able to withstand what they call key person risk. One of the interviewees was like the principal and founder of this boarding school in South Africa.

28:48DJ DiDonna:And, you know, he'd been there from day one. It was 10 years in. And he stepped aside for six months because his spouse was doing a degree in Europe. And by stepping away, he was able to see that like some of the things ran really well in his absence, maybe even like a little bit better. Right. The operation side. And then other stuff like fundraising fell off an absolute cliff. Right. And so the organization got to see what it was like when he stepped away. And, you know, junior folks got to step up into roles and have kind of career stretch experiences. But also he got to figure out like, OK, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, like this thing is going to fail and that's not great.

29:24DJ DiDonna:And so like really developing like the resilience to say, OK, if I do want to transition out, what kind of skills do I need to kind of manage inside of the organization? So I think tenure and loyalty to the company. We talk a lot about people finding meaning at work. But at the end of the day, I'm sorry, like most companies cannot provide a ton of like meaning and purpose. And so, yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. That's fine. But I think what the company can do is they can give you time to yourself to do the thing that's meaningful for you. And I think the impact of that is that people have more loyalty to the company.

29:57DJ DiDonna:One of our interviews was from the U.S. Treasury. They had this long service leave policy where you can take six months off. And she got to go and do like mountaineering and trekking in Latin America. And it was long enough to say, I like trekking. I like being on vacation. But I also really like the work, you know, international development work. She was not planning on having a family. She's like, I appreciate the ability to step outside of my work for a stretch and become kind of appreciative of that work again. And I know I can do it every seven to 10 years. So that kind of like loyalty. And I also think that creates authentic company culture because there's a financial advisory firm in Seattle called Brighton Jones that has these sabbaticals every 10 years.

30:36DJ DiDonna:And people come back and they're doing like a slideshow of their sabbatical. And everyone's excited for those folks because they know they get it as well. And so the company values you as a whole human being. And also like they get to celebrate your experience because they know they get to take it, which is different than someone being like, I had a great honeymoon. You're like, oh man, I didn't, you know. You've also argued that it can help employees like increase their innovation over time. And it's not necessarily that there's skills building, although that happens in some cases with sabbaticals.

31:05It's more just that time off builds this innovation. Yeah.

31:09DJ DiDonna:So one of the interviewees was a CTO of a tech company, stepped away, and was engaging this kind of identity play I talked about. So was a developer in college, but had really not played around with mobile app development. And so was futzing around and created this app to help text-to-speech folks. And so that turned into being a company that he started. It started from just wanting to learn and play. I think this play muscle is really underutilized. And I think it's really important to have folks step away and regenerate their ability to solve problems creatively. Because you don't know what's coming around the corner as technology kind of accelerates.

31:46DJ DiDonna:So you have to be able to see outside of the box. And that's helpful for companies when people come back, too, I assume. Totally. Yeah. I mean, you have to solve problems inside of companies, right? And so it's starting to seem obvious that sabbaticals are a good idea for workers, they're a good idea for companies, probably a good idea for society and us as people, right? Right? Right? But only 5 % of non-academic companies are doing this. And so, DJ, this is now your life's mission, your dream to make sabbaticals more equitable. But to do that, we have to overcome all the barriers that we and our employers feel when it comes to giving us a sabbatical.

32:23And we're going to get to those barriers when we come back from the break. The Happiness Lab live from South by Southwest. We'll be right back.

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34:41Find your favorite at mccormick.com. Before you jump back in, You know that feeling when feedback, notes, and data are coming in from every direction? ChatGPT Work can make sense of it all, turning scattered inputs into ready-to-review work. With your permission, ChatGPT Work can gather context from apps and files, summarize incoming messages, rebuild decks, and help finalize high-quality documents for your team or clients. Stay in control as you move from a goal to polished work faster with ChatGPT Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app today and take on your most ambitious work. Okay, let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare.

35:24Everyone can agree that something this important should work better than it does. Turns out patients aren't the only ones who think that. Optum does too, and it's why they're working day in and day out to improve it. Never heard of Optum? Think of them as the engine of healthcare. They bring together clinicians, care teams, and the way you get and manage your medications. And they use data and technology to help the health systems we all use work better as a whole, not as disconnected pieces. Because they connect all these pieces, Optum can take a more whole-person approach to healthcare, like helping patients connect in mental health support quickly and bringing primary care and prescription deliveries straight to their home so people can stay on top of their health.

36:07Those things make a big difference. And they show that Optum really is trying to make healthcare better, that their clinicians, pharmacists, data scientists, engineers, everyone is putting in the work to improve it every day. See what Optum's up to at Optum.com. Sabbaticals seem like a good idea, but let's go through some of the worries that people have when considering a sabbatical, or just like the actual barriers that come up when you like detonate your life for six months in some ways. One of these barriers is the optics, right? I think people are really worried about what this is going to look like.

36:43Is that something that you experienced?

36:45DJ DiDonna:When I first thought about what the barriers were, you know, around seven years ago, optics was one of the biggest ones, right? So what are people going to think about the fact you took time off? That has changed significantly since then. I think one of the enabling features is that LinkedIn introduced a career breaks role that you could put in, which is tremendous. So like hundreds of thousands of people now like proudly kind of talk about their career breaks. The other thing is just like this story about a successful business and a successful life is also changing. So people are starting to hear, in addition to the CEOs running multiple companies sleeping under the desk thing, they're starting to realize that folks like Steve Jobs, right, was studying calligraphy for a year.

37:24DJ DiDonna:And you have the CEO of Impossible Foods figured out his company on sabbatical. Like there's actually a lot of roles for you to kind of find that creative energy when you step away. The other thing I think about, if you're interviewing for a job and you tell them that you took a career break and they disqualify you for the position, that's a great sign that maybe you didn't want to work at that company. It's like a kind of a revealed preference. And also, I've also found that in interviews, people want to talk about, oh, you traveled for six months. What did you do? What was your favorite? That makes you an interesting person.

37:55DJ DiDonna:and it also shows that you had the courage and self-confidence like to take time off and do something for yourself which I think the majority of people are going to be like that's awesome like I want I want this person on the team. So it seems like the story is changing but it also seems like we need to change the story in our own heads like part of the problem of optics seems like it's what we think other people are going to judge us about but it also is a lot about what we're judging ourselves about too. Yeah I did a study of my Harvard Business School classmates it's 10 years out, and 90 % of people were concerned about how a career break would look, and less than 5 % of people actually cared whether or not someone took a career break.

38:31DJ DiDonna:So it's this weird dynamic where you assume that people might take you less seriously, but it's just not the case. And the way to kind of solve that in our research, we identified this concept called exemplars, which is fancy for examples. So like find an example in your life, someone that looks like you, someone that has a similar job to you, who has taken this time off so that you can actually see for yourself, like, oh, I'll be fine on the other side. I love that example because it seems like part of the problem with sabbaticals is like, for many people, this is just going to be the first time you're letting yourself do something that's not like work for any, like any stretch of time whatsoever.

39:06DJ DiDonna:It's very uncomfortable. It's not a natural feeling. It kind of creates a vacuum, right? Because you had all these responsibilities. And even though you want to not be checking email, when all of a sudden you're cut off from email and your calendar, like the first part of sabbaticals can be difficult. And that's one part I think folks don't get. Like, you're on sabbatical, must be amazing. And you're actually like beating yourself up about leaving, not knowing what you're going to do next. And so it is like an identity transformation. And in order to transform yourself, you got to really do some, you know, like some thinking and some breaking apart of who you are.

39:39Okay, so that's the optics like internally and externally. Another big one just practically is responsibility. Like we have professional responsibilities, personal responsibilities, We're parents. There's like logistical challenges. How did you navigate this stuff? And what are some suggestions?

39:56DJ DiDonna:So I think that almost no one can throw all of their responsibilities off tomorrow, right? And so if you treat it like an emergency root canal, like that's difficult. If you say, what is everyone here in this room doing in 2031? Like no one has any idea, right? So if you say like in 2031, I'm taking six months off and you work towards that, man, 2031 is coming up actually. Yeah, 2031 is not very far away. But it's going to be awesome for the folks in this room because everybody started nodding when you said that in 2031, right? So if you can set some time in the future and say, like, I'm committing to take six months off, then all of a sudden you can save up for it.

40:31DJ DiDonna:You can signpost it with your employers, and it's not a big deal. This is just part of who I am. I take six months off six years from now. The other thing is you hear a lot about responsibilities. I have kids. Like, how am I going to pull them out of school, put them back in school? Time and time again, it's difficult. but the people who have children who take sabbatical have the most inspiring stories, hands down. Because they'll say stuff like, I just had begun to think about my kids as a set of responsibilities and tasks, like take them here, pick them up from here. When in actuality, what's happening is people are showing their kids, what is astronomy?

41:06DJ DiDonna:Oh, you're seeing the stars from Patagonia, seeing them and getting excited about that. Like, what is zoology? And you're going to the Serengeti and you're seeing like animals up close. What is geology? You're in like the Grand Canyon. And so it enables you to see the world through their eyes and actually give them an experience that will sit with them for their entire life. There's a movie called Blink that we saw. I don't know if you've seen it, but distributed by Nat Geo. And it's this family in Quebec where they have, I think, three or four kids that have this kind of ocular degeneration disease.

41:35DJ DiDonna:And so they only have a certain amount of time that their kids are going to be able to see the world. And so they decided to take a year off so the kids could absorb as many images about the world as possible. So I think about that, like taking it from a responsibility that you have to take care of to a responsibility to allow your kids or you and your spouse or yourself to get to experience the world in a different way than our just routine life. I also think that it's probably really great for parents to show kids and to model, like be that exemplar for taking some time off and also just like not be so burned out around their kids.

42:09Like I do worry with some of like my adult friends with kids that those are kids that have only ever seen their parents super stressed out. And I feel like it must just be rejuvenating for kids to see parents taking time off too.

42:20DJ DiDonna:Absolutely. You have to model this behavior, right? And I actually have two good friends who are on sabbatical in Kenya right now. And just seeing them kind of go from having groceries delivered, meals delivered, like no time to do anything into like teaching their kids how to ride bikes, you know, it's just, it's really inspiring. And life is too short, right? Again, a silver lining of the pandemic for many people is that you realize that life is fragile and it's short and you just can't bet on 2031 even. Who knows? So maybe you should set it to 2029 when you take your sabbatical. Yeah, we got to get it in as soon as possible.

42:54Okay, so we've talked about optics. We've talked about responsibility. I think the elephant in the room when it comes to sabbaticals is cost, right? Just financially. I think if you survey most people, my guess is most people are going to say that sounds awesome, but it's just completely out of reach. How do we solve for this?

43:11DJ DiDonna:So, I mean, the first and obvious answer is that if this is supported by companies, countries, like our culture, then it's not a problem at all. And if you can plan it in advance, right? So a couple people from the study were teachers. They had taken a sabbatical right before they got married and backpacked around the world. So it's like, we want to do this when our kids are a certain age. So they saved up for 10 years because it was important to them. And they did it, and it turned out, actually, they drove a Land Rover across to the tip of South America from Arizona. And it turned out that there was so much maintenance with the Land Rover that the guy got really good at it.

43:47DJ DiDonna:And he came back, and he was like, I actually want to start a Land Rover business. So now he refurbishes Land Rovers and takes people on tours. But yeah, so if you're thinking about it as something that has to happen tomorrow, very few people can afford it. if you're planning it out and saying, this is important to me, I'm going to save 5 % a year, then it's not that big of a deal. The other thing I would say is that I've heard this over and over again, where when you're at a company, your raises are kind of on a schedule. It's like, you get a 5 % raise, or here's what you're eligible for. When you switch jobs, you actually get paid a lot more because you're being valued at the market rate for your skills.

44:23DJ DiDonna:And so lots of folks are saying, I quit my job. They wouldn't give me a sabbatical. I joined another company and I got a raise, so it essentially made the sabbatical free. So your mileage may vary, but that's a dynamic that we kind of get trapped in as we've been at a company for a long time. You also noted that it's also just worth asking, because lots of companies have policies that are like this that might be hidden or not talked about, too. Yeah, there's these secret policies. I think that if you want to do it and you're kind of set on it and you're like, listen, I'm either leaving or they're giving me a sabbatical, at that point you're going to leave.

44:54DJ DiDonna:And so you can talk frankly with your manager about this. And I've seen this many times where someone says, all right, let's work this thing out. Can we wait a year so we can prep the team? Okay, cool. How about like, we're not gonna give you full pay, but how about partial pay? Or how about just retaining benefits? And what we find is that most people, if you just retain benefits, because that's the scary thing, they can save up for it. And so again, like how far in advance are you planning on doing it? But I would talk to people who aren't your manager first and try to find an exemplar. And then you can kind of broach that subject.

45:26DJ DiDonna:And one of the reasons why we have like a kind of a support group on Facebook and LinkedIn where you can ask other people what their best practices were in doing it. And you can find people who maybe worked in your industry or in your company who have taken it. So that's helpful. Okay. So this is how kind of personally we can sort of fight some of the barriers. Let's talk about maybe some of the structural barriers. Hopefully there are folks in the room who are themselves employers, maybe big CEOs of companies who are hearing about these benefits and want to start offering sabbatical policies or want to develop a company policy that can help folks do this, what do employers actually need to make sabbaticals a thing?

45:59DJ DiDonna:So in order to make it equitable for folks, it's got to have to be paid, right? So allow people to be able to take it and not take a huge financial hit. I think in order to make it successful, like the worst thing that can happen is you roll out a sabbatical policy and it's too short or you don't allow your employees to disconnect and then you've had people who are gone from the workplace and then also haven't gotten the benefits. And so give folks enough time, ideally months. You know, what we found in the research is that it takes about six to eight weeks for you to really become yourself again.

46:31DJ DiDonna:Think about that. You take a two-week vacation up to two months to really feel like, oh, I'm me. I'm not just this collection of jobs and responsibilities. So give them enough time and ensure disconnection. So best practice, disable the email. Auto-respond. You'd be surprised if you have an auto-response that says, I'm coming back to the office in September. I'm deleting this entire inbox, like emailing you in September. Folks will just email you in September. It's not the end of the world. So disconnection, I think duration and support. So you've also talked about some ways that companies can make this the norm or make this seen as like not a bad thing to do.

47:05What are some ways that companies can do that?

47:07DJ DiDonna:Yeah, so the norm that exists is this so-called work devotion norm where people are kind of like feel like they have to be devoted to work. They can't be seen as taking time off. This is why things like unlimited vacation, which is a total boondoggle, like doesn't work because you don't see people taking time off. And so then you don't feel like you can take it. So I think the first thing that leaders can do is take the breaks themselves to kind of model this. So Sweden also has, man, Sweden's getting a lot of love this episode. Sweden also has like kind of world leading paternity leave. And what they found is that like, even though you get paid paternity leave, fathers wouldn't take it unless their bosses took it.

47:44DJ DiDonna:You got to model that behavior. You got to celebrate it inside the company in order for folks to take it. What are some examples of positive impacts on organizations for their leaders? Like, is it just the people that top the benefit from this? Or do you also see like frontline workers taking these things and benefiting? Yeah, so it's a lot more rare to have folks across the spectrum of the organization, just because of the financial responsibilities and things like that. So I talked to this startup called Skylight. At the beginning stages of a startup, if you've ever worked for one or started one, no one's taken a sabbatical at the beginning.

48:14DJ DiDonna:But if you can get through the first like four or five years, then you can make some space. And so the CEO, Michael, their first employee was just really burnt out. And so allowed her to take two months off, come back. And then during that time, it's a little bit cheating on the sabbatical, but she had investigated a bunch of AI tools and, and like got trained up. And, and so she was able to bring that back, which was integrated into the product and actually made it quite successful and kind of changed the trajectory of it. The other example that I like to tell is there's a CEO, Cheryl Johnson, of this organization in Detroit, so the Coalition to End Homelessness.

48:49DJ DiDonna:And there's funders that fund nonprofits in places like Detroit, LA, San Francisco, Boston. They convince the boards of nonprofits to allow their leaders and their employees to take time off, and they fund it. And so the point of that, again, to prevent this key person risk at a nonprofit where the leader is super important, charismatic. And so they're convincing these boards to let these non-profit employees leave because burnout started in the care sector, right? Among nurses, healthcare workers, non-profit leaders, if you really care about your job, you don't want to leave it because you feel like you're letting people down.

49:24DJ DiDonna:And so I think in the non-profit industry, I actually see that a lot as well. You've also seen some of these creative solutions that some jobs have come up with. You talked about this idea of a pre-batticle, which I think is actually a kind of clever one. What's that? Yeah. So this came from the great resignation. Everyone was like, I quit my job. It's amazing. And then a lot of people got really nice offers at other companies and other jobs. And so like, actually, I'm just going to start this other job. And I think it's kind of foolish to think that your burnout from a job is going to like end just because you joined another job.

49:55DJ DiDonna:Yes. You take your box and by the time you get to the car, the burnout's over, right? Yeah. You're running on adrenaline, right? So you're bringing like the adrenaline over, But I think companies actually benefit from ensuring that people take time off. And the easiest sabbatical to take is if you have a job. So I teach at a business school. And you get a job at a consulting firm. And you can push your offer. So you know that you have a job coming out of it. And you don't have to worry about money. And so I think allowing folks to make sure they come into your organization, not burned out, excited to hit the ground running, is a great one.

50:27All right. So let's say somebody's listening right now. And they're convinced it's time. they're ready to overcome all these barriers, the extended break is what they want to do. What are some practices for the sabbatical curious who are ready to hit go on actually taking a break?

50:41DJ DiDonna:So I think the first thing is you got to ask around. So try to find an exemplar. I think setting the container for a sabbatical is super important. So I don't really want to give people guidance on their particular sabbatical, but you got to like set enough time. You have to ensure that you are disconnected enough. And partially that means traveling if you can. So getting out of your geographic space. Partially that just means getting out of your routines. Because that's a vacuum at the beginning of your sabbatical, when you subtract all of your responsibilities, it can help to have some structured things.

51:13DJ DiDonna:Especially at the beginning of your sabbatical, you want to do something that gets you out of your head and into your body. Yoga teacher training, pottery, stuff where you're using your hands, hiking. Building cabinets, we heard. Yeah, exactly. Do not suggest going to Ikea. It's not stressful. Getting out of your head and into your body and thinking about the phases of a sabbatical as healing at the beginning and then experimentation in the middle and then integration at the end. So really like finding these, what they call like counterfactual experiments, like what would my life be like if I did this versus what I'm doing now?

51:46DJ DiDonna:One of my favorite stories was a consultant who would take a sabbatical every four years. And he was like, when I retire, I want to run an eco lodge. And so he spent a sabbatical volunteering, like working in the kitchen, working in the back office of eco-lodges. And I was like, this is actually not for me, right? And so like running these experiments so that you don't have regrets later in life. You've also talked about the importance of using your sabbatical to focus on relationships. I know why this is so important from the happiness science, that science just shows that social connection is so critical for happiness.

52:16But why can this be so important and transformative in a sabbatical specifically?

52:20DJ DiDonna:A, I think you can go too far inwards. And so I think about sabbaticals as having three archetypes. There's like the achievers that really want to get something done, kind of type A folks. B, the explorers. So people that just want to like see the world and explore outwards. And also like more seekers that want to find out, like I wanted to do that spiritual journey. So like, and then there's like folks that need kind of healing. And so, you know, one of the tough things is that you spend so much time thinking about yourself and what you want. Because like you're parched. you want to like go out and do all the things that you end up just focusing solely on yourself for happiness like focusing on relationships is important it gets you out of your head and into more like what do we actually care about like what are we doing here and then second i think as you as you get older right like everyone has their own schedules you're trying to like align stuff and so this allows you to take the scheduling hassles of one side of that equation and take it away so you can actually plug into someone else's life in their convenience so it can kind to like spur and catalyze and refresh these relationships that might have like run a little dry.

53:23That's so interesting. As some of the Happiness Lab fans know, I quite famously took this, my own sabbatical when I was feeling really burned out. And I think one of the unexpected benefits was this sort of relationship building, mostly because of that schedule issue that you just mentioned, right? I wanted to see a friend or catch up and they were like, when can you meet? I was like, well, anytime, like I got nothing going on, right? And that was just transformative, right? Because it meant that those meetings and those relationships actually got built and that those connections actually happened.

53:51DJ DiDonna:Yeah. There's all these things that we say are important. We know are important, but we don't make time for. I talked briefly about this urgent versus important kind of dynamic. So I'd urge you to think about like, what are important relationships that you haven't given a lot of love to? Like what are important things that you want to do in your life and take stock? Be like, how old am I? Like, how many years have I been working? How many times have I taken the chance to do some of those things? And I'm guessing the answer is like pretty, pretty rarely. And so figure out like, okay, like you have to make the time to do it.

54:21DJ DiDonna:So relationships are one of those. And so any advice for how to pick what to do? Because I think, especially if you're entering the sabbatical for that period of healing, if you're feeling really burned out and you're thinking like, now is my time to find my passion, that can kind of feel a little bit exhausting. But you've talked about we shouldn't be going for passion. We should focus on tiny curiosities. How does that work? Yeah. So full disclosure, I took this from Elizabeth Gilbert. Like she talked about like chasing your passions is stressful. What if you don't know what your passion is?

54:48DJ DiDonna:What if your passion doesn't fulfill you? And instead just thinking about what you're curious about. And so if you're like, I've always wanted to be a master potter and then you like spend your entire time trying to find someone to like apprentice with, that can be devastating when it turns out you're not good at pottery. As opposed to saying like, you know, what is it like to travel in this part? Or for me, like, what would it be like to hang cabinets, even though I have no idea what I'm doing? And it was okay. It seems like it's kind of getting back to that play mindset. Like, you don't have to do your sabbatical perfectly to kind of get some huge benefit out of it.

55:20DJ DiDonna:Yeah. And I think actually, this is going to sound trite, but the mistakes are part of the thing, right? So there was a person from our study who was like, I really want to learn backcountry skiing. And so they moved to British Columbia for a couple months. I got these lessons, got certified, and then they eventually found themselves tracking, like, how many vertical feet have I skied each day? And they had, like, a spreadsheet, and then they realized, like, oh, like, I'm the problem here. Like, the way I attack things is the problem, not, like, the job. And so even if you sub out of that job, do you want to work on yourself?

55:52DJ DiDonna:Or do you want to just take who you are and say, like, okay, I want to actually attack some other problem I'm passionate about with the same energy and vigor? And so as folks are thinking about sabbatical right now in the middle of 2025 when we're having this conversation, I think there's also an interesting question about not just how do we take sabbatical, but should we be taking sabbatical when the world feels like it's like literally on fire? You know, what's the advice for that? I think this goes back to the burnout and caretaker piece, right? So like put your oxygen mask on before your kids.

56:24DJ DiDonna:Like you need perspective as to like what's actually going on, what's important for you. and to get the resources to kind of like take a different tack, right? And so I think it's an opportunity to step back and I think it's a great opportunity in a time of like where you're feeling not so great to say like who do I want to be in this next phase of my life and what skills or like direction do I need to take in order to get there? Okay, so I'm watching the clock tick down in like an extreme way which means we've got to get to our parting thoughts. So parting thoughts on why we need this life and career investment and why we should take sabbaticals more seriously.

56:59DJ DiDonna:I mean, back to the regret insurance, I would just really think about what are some things that you would like to have as a part of your life story and actually document those, like write them down in a journal and then think about like when are you going to actually be able to do them? I think often we live in this inertia. Oh, well, this is the life. I'm looking two weeks ahead. Right. But really trying to take a step back and say, like, what are things that are important to me that I won't be able to do? A stat that I looked up that was kind of surprising was if you're like a 40-year-old male, which is what I am.

57:28DJ DiDonna:I use male because our stats are worse. Your chances of making it to retirement age are five and six. So your chances of not making it are one and six. If you're a 50-year-old couple, you have less than 50 % chance of both partners reaching retirement age and being able mentally and physically to travel. I'm great at dinner parties. Yeah. And so like this, we're going to wait till retirement thing. This bucket list thing is not guaranteed. And I hope that like the pandemic gave us this like touch of like life is precious, but like waiting until you can retire is just not guaranteed. Both what are the things you wish you could do?

58:07DJ DiDonna:And then also, oh my gosh, like I might not be able to do them. Hopefully we'll like spur y 'all into action. 2031. 2031. Who's putting in their Google calendar today, right? Thank you for joining us for Happiness Lab Live at South by Southwest. Thank you so much. Let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare. We all know it should work better than it does. Optum believes that too, and they're trying to improve it. They're helping healthcare teams and pharmacy services work together, like bringing primary care and prescription drugs straight to your home so you can stay on top of your health.

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