The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why You Should Take a Few Months Off Work (Live from SXSW)

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Sometimes a two-week vacation just isn't enough - we all might need to leave our jobs for three months, six months or even a year. Taking an extended break can be great for our wellbeing - allowing us to recharge our batteries and reassess our priorities.  But for most of us taking a sabbatical feels impossible - so live at SXSW Dr Laurie asked the advice of sabbaticals expert DJ DiDonna. DJ teaches at Harvard Business School and founded The Sabbatical Project - but in a past life he established a hectic start-up and eventually found he was badly in need of an extended career break. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Work.

It consumes a lot of our time and a lot of our mental bandwidth. I bet you've had moments where you've longed for a vacation, or even fantasized about hitting retirement age. But there's another option for taking a break from the grind, a decision that can help you recharge and reassess. It's called a sabbatical. As a professor, I've had the opportunity to take an academic sabbatical every few years, and I've been very open on the show about just how rejuvenating and important those breaks were. But what if you aren't a professor? Can you still take a month's long break from your job? It may sound like a pipe dream, but more and more workplaces are coming

around to the idea that extended employee leaves are a good thing. So to discuss the rise of the sabbatical and its many benefits, I recorded a live edition of the Happiness Lab at the 2025 South by Southwest Festival in Austin. And I got to talk with one of the leading advocates of the modern sabbatical. Hello and welcome to the Happiness Lab Live

here at South by Southwest. I am here in front of a fabulous live audience and we're gonna be talking today about the importance of sabbaticals and taking some rest. And I'm excited to introduce my guest today, DJ D'Donna. DJ is senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. In his former career, he was co-founder of EF Global. These days, DJ spends his time thinking about sabbaticals

and their transformative effects. He's most recently become the founder of the Sabbatical Project, a nonprofit aimed at creating a world where extended leave is the norm rather than exception. Sounds like a world I wanna live in for sure. DJ's work on the transformative benefits of sabbaticals has been labeled Harvard-Brisnifervue's new idea for 2025. So I think we're gonna be seeing a lot benefits of sabbaticals has been labeled Harvard-Brisnifreview's

new idea for 2025. So I think we're gonna be seeing a lot more of sabbaticals this year than before. DJ's work has appeared in the Atlantic, Time Magazine, Fast Company, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and lots more. And today we're gonna be talking about the research behind why an extended break can be so important

and what you can do to convince yourself and your employer that you might need one. Please join me in welcoming DJ Dodonna. So DJ, I'm curious how you became such a fan of sabbaticals. As I understand it, this started with a time when you yourself made a sabbatical, a moment that you call your ice cream sandwich moment. What was that?

So I entered sabbatical land, as I call it, as most people do, which is unintentionally. So if you don't take a sabbatical, a sabbatical will take you, likely. I'd run my company for seven years and I was feeling lower and lower energy, tough to get out of bed, and I was growing even worse facial hair than I have now, and my co-founders were like, are you okay? And I think at some point, you know, when it was your dream job and you can't get out of bed to do your job,

there's a problem. It brings up all sorts of types of emotions around, like if this won't make me happy, what will? The ice cream sandwich moment was on a particularly sad kind of weekend. It was Friday, had no plans. I was watching a very depressing Netflix series and I was like, I just really want an ice cream sandwich. I lived in Cambridge and so there's plenty of late night mistakes you can make. But I didn't want to walk into the cookie place

late at night on a Friday by myself. So I was like, I'll just place an order for this. And I didn't want the delivery driver to think that I was a loser, so I was like, I'll place two orders for ice cream sandwiches. And so I went down and got the sandwiches, hey, I'll be right down. And I come back, I eat one of them thankfully, not two. And then I go to put the kind of pizza box size thing

into the fridge. And I woke up the next morning and my fridge had defrosted and ruined my floors. And I was like, okay, this is the sign that I needed to take a sabbatical. So that's how I entered into sabbatical land. So you made this decision to take the sabbatical, but you are the head of this company that you were loving.

Was that scary? What went through your head as you made that decision? One of the reasons why folks call it a sabbatical is because it's this tidy term for something that like feels like your life is ending, right? And so I think for me, you know, I talked to my co-founder and he was feeling a little bit burnt out as well, especially from the perspective of entrepreneurship. I think if you can't build up an organization that can survive without you after seven or

ten years, you haven't done an awesome job. And so we were both acknowledging, hey, let's give some time to step away. But honestly, I had no idea what was on the other side. I started it with the pretense that I was gonna come back to the company, but I couldn't really continue anymore as it was going. So decided to step away, said four months,

feels like the longest time I've ever taken off by a factor of eight. But yeah, so that's what I decided to do. And so what happened? So when I think about how I describe my sabbatical, because everyone's sabbatical is different and I don't want to intimidate folks that might not be able to do or want to do the thing that I did, there's like the marquee events. So I did this 800 800 mile pilgrimage in Japan.

I really wanted to investigate on the spiritual side something that I felt was important but rarely urgent, right? So that was kind of like the marquee event. But really some of the more impactful moments on the sabbatical were things that I don't put up on the billboard. So I was nursing one of my parents back to health. So I moved back home, you know, at age 32, cooked a lot of meals. I helped a cousin of mine move and another cousin of mine build a deck. So I hung cabinets myself and got to have that experience. And I wrote

my first song. I bought a ukulele on Amazon, which is super embarrassing, and I brought it along on the trip. And so I wrote and performed my first song in a place where definitely no one would know me. So that was helpful. And so I think we're going to talk about what you learned from this and some of the benefits soon. But I want to start with some definitions because I'm a nerdy professor and that's where I go. And so how do you define a sabbatical? So the definition that I think about is an intentional extended leave from your routine

job. So intentional not that you have to have made the decision to take it because most sabbaticals kind of happen to you, but that once you're on sabbatical, you stay there. Right, and so as soon as we leave a job, our new job is to find another job, right? It's like very hard to be in that kind of liminal state between careers, between jobs.

So in order for it to be a sabbatical, you gotta like create space, not look for another job. Extended, so it has to be measured in months, not weeks. I think we like to say at least three months, I took four, I wish it would have been six. Most people I think would like to take between six and 12. Nine is very symbolic, because you're kind of like creating something anew.

And then from your routine job, so most folks, especially type A achievers, probably some in this room, will say like, all right, I'm gonna go off work, and then I'm gonna learn how to be fluent in a foreign language, or I'm gonna like write a book or something like that. And what we found in the research is actually

that active rest, so doing a job that is not your job can actually be fulfilling and healing as long as it's not similar to your routine job at all. Right, so don't do like consulting projects to make a little bit more money. Really switch out of your routine job or teamwork into something that feels fulfilling. So write that book, become a yoga teacher certified, but it has to be very different from what you're doing. It's kind of a funny word. You've used this term, extended leave. It's not a vacation. It's a sabbatical.

It kind of sounds almost like old school, like the Bible, like a sabbatical, right? I mean, is that intentional? Where did this concept come from? Yeah. So the root of the word is ancient, comes from Hebrew scripture, Shabbat, right? And so this concept that you work for six days and on the seventh day you devote that to worship, that also expands it out into you're supposed to till the fields for six years and then let them lie fallow for one year.

And so that's the notion of the rest, right? That you have to have rest in some sort of period of time. Then it was kind of taken on by academia. So late 19th century, the president of Harvard, I went through and looked up the notes, like the minutes, the meeting minutes, which is fun. They had done research on like how much breaks do faculty need in order to replenish themselves and also to do research. So they would have to go over to Europe to figure out what's actually going on in the academy.

And the funny thing about that was that in the definition there, it talked about rest and recovery and also pursuit of science and knowledge. And if you look now, the rest and recovery piece is totally dubiously absent from all these kind of academic sabbatical leave policies. But that's the basic history of the terminology. Yeah, I mean, as a professor, many people in academia get something like a sabbatical thing that's going away. But this is really rare in other fields, right?

Totally rare. And it's increasingly rare in academia, right? Folks that are not getting paid for it or shrinking down into a semester. Maybe we can talk about your sabbatical later. But it's, you know, about 5% of companies offer this policy. It's much more prevalent, you know, in kind of like tech and companies where they're really trying to recruit talent and retained talent. It's increasing, so it's doubled since 2019, and it seems to be increasing over time, but still definitely the minority, especially a paid sabbatical with some sort of benefits and that sort of thing. And so you've done this cool project

where you've been studying sabbaticals scientifically. You've done hundreds of interviews, dozens of different academic studies. From your research, I'm curious, who is taking sabbaticals and why are they taking them? So when I first started out, I thought I was the customer. So people who are in their mid-30s and 40s who burn out take sabbaticals. And then what I started to realize is that folks are starting as early as kind of gap years.

They're tagging along with their parents' sabbaticals. So when I thought about the research and the book, it's kind of going from gap years to twilight careers. So kind of like pre-retirement type age. So it's really anyone that either has something forced upon them or takes this opportunity to take time off. I think gap years are a great example of that. And so why are they taking them? Like what happens?

Yeah. You know, two thirds of sabbaticals are catalyzed by a very negative event. So either a personal health crisis or you get fired or you know let's say like a global calamity or pandemic forces you to think about work totally differently and then there's also positive catalysts, right? So you sell your company, you know you get like a kind of employment leave things like that and then I like to say this neutral catalyst of if you you have a company, if you work for a company

with a sabbatical policy, then you get to take that time off and you don't even have to think about it. And there are a lot of companies that offer that, and then also countries that enable people to do it. Like in Sweden, you can take six months off to try to start a business. In Australia, if you're a civil servant, you get six months off every seven years.

Man, I didn't realize there are countries that were doing this. That is exciting. And that also reminds me that your research has shown that there's lots of misconceptions when it comes to sabbaticals. So let's go through some of these. I think when I think of sabbaticals, I first think maybe we're just dealing with like a longish vacation. How is a sabbatical different than that?

So everyone who has taken a sabbatical has also taken a vacation. And they're saying that something profoundly different is going on. When you're on vacation, all the things you're on vacation from are piling up in the back, right? Your inbox is piling up. You know that you have to come back to work and get things

done. When you're on sabbatical, you're gone long enough so that those things are off of your plate so you can actually kind of deepen into what's going on. and you don't have to worry about what's happening at work. So different misconception is this idea that sabbaticals are basically a midlife crisis. It's your freak out, you don't know what you're doing, you're burning out. Like, I guess that's maybe part of some sabbaticals, but that doesn't define it. Yeah.

So we talked about the times when people take the sabbaticals over the course of their life. and we talked about whether or not you take a sabbatical or a sabbatical takes you. So that can certainly be the case where you're living a life that doesn't feel authentic to you long enough that you feel like you have to kind of burn the boats and like cast off lines. I think I was a little precocious in my midlife crisis, like a little bit earlier than midlife, hopefully. You think about it like a dental cleaning appointment. Like you want to take these like cleaning appointments, right?

We don't love them, but you try to take them every six months so that you don't have like a root canal emergency. So the whole goal of this is can you identify inflection points in your life to take them off as opposed to waiting for some big crisis to pull you into sabbatical land? All right, here's another misconception

that I think comes on the employer side. The idea that a sabbatical is basically just a golden parachute. You take a break from a job that you're thinking about basically getting the heck out of anyway. Is this the case? So what we found in the research is that the super majority of people that take a sabbatical that's enabled by their company come back. So over 80% come back to their job. So it's not really a golden parachute.

Now people do leave, but the difference, and we can get more into this around kind of what's in it for companies, the difference is you are spending a bunch of time preparing the company to do all the tasks that you're doing before you leave on sabbatical. And so you're kind of like preparing the company for you to be gone, and you're also like allowing

the company to see like what are all the things that you do, who else could be be doing it who could be stepping up in your midst things like that so not really a golden parachute but people do leave I think the argument is if someone's gonna leave as soon as you let them out of the door and off the leash like were they doing great work yeah and but do we have data on it like how many people actually take off after a sabbatical about 20% yeah so it is it's-zero, but it's not like 80% or 100%. And you know, 100% of the people who don't have a sabbatical policy at work

are taking off to take a sabbatical. Yeah. Right? That's fair. That's fair. And that gets to a different misconception, which is this idea that sabbaticals are sort of costly for businesses. But you've argued a better way to think about them as an investment.

What do you mean? Yeah, I think, listen, as I was saying about an entrepreneurial company, if it can't survive without you leaving it as a leader, that's a problem. Similarly, turnover is just something that happens. Like, how many people here have left a job, right? That was a lot of hands for the listeners at home.

Some of you haven't left a job. So people are gonna leave anyway, and as a company you have to be prepared. You have to be resilient to survive turnover. People are going to quit. They're going to go on parental leave. And so it is practice. It's like building a muscle of figuring out what tasks you have,

offloading them onto other people, and really kind of investing in that muscle as a company. So when we get back from the break, we're going to see why a sabbatical could be such a helpful investment, not just for the person taking it, but even more for the company that allows it. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.

I just knew him as a kid. Long silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.

He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley, season two. Jeremy. Jeremy, I wanna tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, season two, starting April 9th on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for

Good Plus on Apple podcasts. You're listening to a live edition of the Happiness Lab recorded at South by Southwest 2025 with my friend, the sabbatical expert, DJ Didona. 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. 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, in 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. 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 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 run little experiments,

figure out what you wanna 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 weeks off work since middle school. 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 in the ability to do it. And it seems like from your research when you talk to people, these benefits are really

common. Like this is just what you hear everybody who takes sabbaticals saying. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I came back from my sabbatical and I said that was, I really changed who I was as a person. So this kind of identity was enmeshed with my company and if 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. It 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? 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. And I wanna just step out of that for a little bit. I might wanna 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 wanna do that more. And like the way that I was kind of returning back to my family or even how I was working was not really great. So you needed some perspective and a long enough break from the norm to understand that. It also seems connected to this idea you've talked about called regret insurance, right? Maybe a benefit that comes later in life, what's that?

Imagine 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, like 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. Like it takes a little bit of time. And. Can that happen in the life that you're living now? Maybe, but probably not. It takes a little bit of time. Taking six months off in the scheme of working for 40 years is just not that much time. It's less than 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 in your company now, would you join that company again tomorrow? And it was very clear. I was like, absolutely not. And so I think like the tough part about

our lives is that 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 gonna 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. 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. So 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 just 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 wanna do a deeper dive. Like what are companies really getting out of this when they set up sabbatical policies? 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 like 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. And 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 some of the things ran really well in his absence, maybe even a little bit better, right, the operations side. And then other stuff like fundraising fell off an bit better, right? The operations 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, okay, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, like this thing is gonna fail and that's not great. And so like really developing like the resilience to say,

okay, if I do want to transition out, what kind of skills do I need to 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, most companies cannot provide a ton of 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 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. One of our interviewees was from the US Treasury, but 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 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. You've also argued that it can help employees, like, increase their innovation over time. And it's not necessarily that they're skills building, although that happens in some cases with sabbaticals. It's more just that like time off builds this innovation. Yeah, so one of the interviewees was the CTO of a tech company, stepped away and was engaging this kind of identity play I talked about. So, you know, was a developer in college, but had really not played around with like mobile app development. And so it was like futzing around and created this app to help text to speech folks, right? And so that turned into being a company that he started.

Started from just wanting to learn and play. I think this like play muscle is really underutilized. And I think it's really important to have folks like 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. 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 the sabbaticals are a good idea for workers, they're a good idea for companies, probably a good idea for like society and us as people, right? Right? Right? 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. And 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. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me.

And they had secrets of their own to share. Um, Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley, Season Two. Jeremy. Jeremy, I wanna tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season Two, starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season, ad free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts.

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 gonna look like. Is that something that you experienced? 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 gonna 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 was studying calligraphy for a year and you have the CEO of Impossible Foods figured out his company on sabbatical. 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. And it also shows that you had the courage and self-confidence to take time off and do something for yourself, You traveled for six months. What did you do? What was your favorite? That makes you an interesting person. And it also shows that you had the courage and self-confidence to take time off and do something for yourself, which I think the majority of people are going to be like, that's awesome. 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.

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 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. 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 stretch of time whatsoever. 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, it must be amazing,

and you're actually like beating yourself up about leaving, not knowing what you're gonna do next. And so it is like an identity transformation. And in order to transform yourself, you gotta really do some thinking and some breaking apart transform yourself you got to really do some you know like some thinking and some breaking apart of who you are. Okay 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? 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, 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 gonna be awesome for the folks in this room because everybody started nodding when you said that at 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, 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, they have, like, how am I gonna 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? 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. 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 that kids could absorb as many images about the world as possible. So I think about that, 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. Like 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.

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. Okay, 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? 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. And so they're 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 and he came back and he was like, I actually want to start a Land Rover business. So now he like 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. 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 that 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've 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. Like at that point, you're going to leave. 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? OK, cool.

How about, like, we're not going to 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.

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. 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 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? 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. So give folks enough time, ideally months. What we found in the research is that it takes about six to eight weeks for you to really become yourself again.

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 email me 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. What are some ways that companies can do that? 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. 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 taking a sabbatical at the beginning. 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 got trained up. 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, Sheryl Johnson, of this organization in Detroit, so the Coalition to End Homelessness. 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. Right? And so the point of that, again, to prevent this key person risk at a nonprofit where the leader is super important and charismatic. And so they're like convincing these boards to let these nonprofit employees leave because like burnout started in the care sector, right? I mean, like nurses, healthcare workers, nonprofit leaders,

if you really care about your job, you don't wanna leave it because you feel like you're letting people down. And so I think in the nonprofit industry, actually you see that a lot as well. You also see some of these creative solutions that some jobs have come up with. You talked about this idea of a pre-batical,

which I think is actually kind of clever one. What's that? Yeah. So this came from the of a pre-batical, 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 gonna start this other job. And I think it's kind of foolish to think that your burnout from a job is gonna like end just because you joined another job. Yes, you take your box and by the time you get to the car, the burnout's over, right? You're running on adrenaline, right? So you're bringing 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. All 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? 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. And 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. 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, like 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. 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 was like, this is actually not for me. And so 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 happy to science. The science just shows that social connection is so critical for happiness. But why can this be so important and transformative in a sabbatical specifically?

A, I think you can go too far inwards. And so I think about sabbaticals as having three archetypes. There's the achievers that really wanna get something done, kinda type A folks. B, the explorers. So people that just wanna see the world and explore outwards.

And also more seekers that wanna 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 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 and 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 of like spur and catalyze and refresh these relationships that might've like run a little dry.

That'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.

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 what are important relationships that you haven't given a lot of love to, what are important things that you want to do in your life, and take stock. Be like, how old am I? 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 pretty rarely. And so figure out, okay, you have to make the time to

do it. 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, 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, 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 spend your entire time trying to find someone to apprentice with. That can be devastating when it turns out you're not good at pottery.

As opposed to saying, what is it like to travel in this part? Or for me, what would it be like to hang cabinets, even though I have no idea what I'm doing? And it was OK. It seems like it's kind of getting back to that play mindset. Like, you don't you don't have to do your sabbatical perfectly to get some huge benefit out of it. Yeah. I think actually this is going to sound tripe, but the mistakes are part of the thing.

There was a person from our study who was like, I really want to learn backcountry skiing. They moved to British Columbia for a couple of months, 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, 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? 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 literally on fire? What's the advice for that?

I think this goes back to the burnout and caretaker piece. So put your oxygen mask on before your kids. You need perspective as to what's actually going on, what's important for you, and to get the resources to take a different tack. 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 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. 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 gonna actually be able to do them?

I think often we live in this inertia, oh, this is the life, I'm looking two weeks ahead, right? But really trying to take a step back and say, 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, 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. Whew. I'm great at dinner parties.

Yeah. And so like this, we're gonna 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 and then also, oh my gosh, like I might not be able to do them. Hopefully we'll like spur you all into action. 2031. 2031. Who's putting in their Google Calendar today, right? Thank you for joining us for Happy to Slap Live at South by Southwest.

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed my chat with sabbatical expert DJ Dodonna, but that's not the end of the live show fun because I had a chance to record several other podcasts at South by Southwest. And next, I'll be sharing a show I did with a new voice in podcasting, but a voice you might already know pretty well. Well, hey, professor. Hey, Michelle.

That's all next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lorie Santos. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.