5 Reasons to Purposefully Make Time for Yourself

It's getting close to the end of the school year. Summer lay just around the corner, and in a few more weeks, people will be taking vacations, or starting work full time, or perhaps just preparing for highschool or college the next year. Your life feels crowded and cluttered as you plan out the next few months or perhaps just the next few weeks. Just thinking about it burns you out.

You think you won't have time for yourself, and that it isn't important to purposefully set aside time for you. Except it is important. 

Something I hear so often is: "I just don't have time for me and there is no reason to make time." And then no one ever does. We're a world that runs off triple espresso shots and pure adrenaline just to keep moving so that we can get everything done.

What happens when you don't set aside time for yourself to unwind? Is it really important?
I've gone and made five things that happen when you don't slow down and take time for yourself. Five reasons to stop and breathe.



(Look I even numbered them for you. See? Tiny numbers...)

1. Too Much Stress and Not Enough "Bless"

When you're running off non-existent energy just to finish the day's work and you haven't even taken the time to "refuel" yourself, you miss out. You miss out on a lot. Wake up, get dressed, quickly eat a breakfast and down that cup of coffee before your day begins. Jobs and school and errands. Your body fills with stress and you miss the blessings of life. Slowing down to take even half an hour to yourself to just see the blessings of life. A short walk around the block to give yourself a moment's breather will help you see the cloudless blue skies, or the birds. You see life. 

"Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out" -Twenty One Pilots

2. Empty Eyes, Empty soul, Empty life.

Weeks of busy have made me exhausted to the point where I feel no emotions other than tiredness. It gets to the point where everyone is just an empty life to me. Nothing means anything. And at that point in time, taking an hour to unwind from life helps the thinking process reboot. Even taking thirty minutes to drive and get a coffee and then going to work or coming back home to finish stuff helps. Turn the radio on loud when you get into the car and ignore the world for just a few minutes. Everyone matters, but it starts inside you.

3. Loss of Creative Energy
This one you hear a lot in the world of creativity. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but if you try too hard, you will burn out. There's the daily tasks of life that already swallow you whole and cause so much stress you feel sick. But then, as creatives, you almost live a double life. Trying to balance writing/acting/drawing/photography with regular life gets sticky. The creativeness becomes something that you have to force yourself to do at the end of the day instead of something that you love. Something I try to do every couple months is set aside a couple hours and take my laptop to the local coffee shop. I order a huge latte and don't leave until I feel until I have fallen back in love with creating. Life sucks the living creativeness out of you. Set aside time for you and your art.

4. Spiritual Desire Gone
Jesus is the reason any of us live from day to day. God creating us to live for him and to live a PURPOSEFUL life full of aesthetics and color and beauty. Burnt out souls from too much busy makes you lose focus of why you live. When you make time for yourself, make time to look around and see all that Jesus has given you and done for you. Because, none of us would be able to create if he hadn't created. And losing focus of your soul makes you lose focus of the upward vision.

5. Loss of Joy
Classes, work, people that you have to see and talk to, church activities, extra-curricular and your own art. All of it builds up and you feel discouraged, right? Like none of it will ever get done. Life. Lost. Joy. Suddenly nothing means anything. Look around you. Is the sun shining? Can you breathe in the air? Are you sipping coffee? Those are all the small things that bring joy.
"To learn how to be grateful and happy, whether hands full or hands empty. That is a secret worth spending a life on learning." -Ann Voskamp, One-Thousand Gifts.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

~J.R.R. Tolkien