I'm Sam Wood, and this is your motivational moment for this week why you should take a break. That's right, Sam Wood here telling you to put the dumbbells down and just take a break. Now, I'm kind of being a bit tang in cheek, but I'm also being really serious. I've taken a break for the last fortnite. Mine's been a bit of a force break with everything that's been going on, and I haven't been to work for the last two weeks, which for me that's really strange, but
it's been wonderful. It's been absolutely necessary, and possibly for the first time in a long time, I've been able to do it guilt free. It's almost like the forced nature of it, with Sneeze having to be in the hospital and me having to be home with the girls all day every day, which I've absolutely adored every moment, has allowed me to do it guilt free and kind
of changed my perspective. But that's why I wanted to talk to you about it today, because I think think it's a really important message for all of us, irrespective of what's going on in your family or personal life, and whether it's forced, I think taking a break can be a bloody great thing. There's obviously the practical physical benefits. You might recover better, you might be injured less, you might perform better because you were always performing under some
kind of muscular or neural fatigue. And once you have a little rest, you come back fresher, bigger, stronger, whatever it might be. But for so many of us, I think it's more of the mental break that is so important. So from a mental perspective, whether it's work or wellness or fitness or whatever it might be, mental health, don't be afraid or don't feel guilty about giving yourself a break. You can be refreshed, you can come back better than you were before. You can use that time to get
your thoughts, your emotions, your plan together. And perhaps that wouldn't have happened if you were trying to do that while pushing through with all of these different balls in the air. And I heard an analogy the other day that you need to think of your mental health. And this is a strange analogy that hopefully resonates with most of our listeners, but as an eighties baby, it resonated with me. You need to think about you as a
fighter in a computer game. That perhaps you played in your youth, you know, street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or one of these games, And he said, you've got a health bar at the top, and every time something happens to you, that health bar gets lower and lower and lower and lower, until your health bar gets to zero and bang, you're on the ground. Your character in that game is on the ground. That is how we need
to approach our mental health. We all have that health bar and different things impact us and take a little bit of color or a little bit of power out of that health bar as things happen. You know, you might have a stressful situation, you might have a bad day at work, you might have a bad night's sleep, someone might say something to you that emotionally you don't react well to, and eventually that bar gets so low that you hit the ground and then it's much much
harder to take care of ourselves. So we need to start identifying when that bar is getting low and how we can do things proactively to get the full energy back in that bar. And taking a break is absolutely one of those things. And I think we tell ourselves that things can't wait. We tell ourselves that if we're not there tragedy or disaster is going to occur, and it's just not true. The world will wait, work will wait,
people will understand. But we all like to portray the strong, invincible persona when the reality is what's going on underneath or behind the scenes is often far from that, And whether it's a mental or a physical perspective, we need to proactively take care of ourselves. So my message to anyone that is listening to this on a Monday and thinking, oh my god, this is so may I'm a bit broken, or I'm far more depleted than perhaps I'm letting others know. Give yourself a break,