8 Low-Effort Break Ideas for the Final Stretch of the Semester!

Hi all!

As the semester is wrapping up, I wanted to share some break ideas during this final exam grind AND for the upcoming winter break! This has been a challenging semester and a challenging year. I hope you are doing well and I hope these break ideas will help you! So here are some ideas for breaks that don’t use technology or screens!

Breaks that take however long you want (but I normally do 10-30 min of!):

1. Listen/dance to music y’all

It’s weird, it’s freeing, it’s fun (legit just vibing to one song will let your mind be free from school) 

• Journal/drawing/general art time (10-20 min)

A time to self-reflect or express any feelings, or just to use a different part of your brain with creative art

• Reading (30 min)

Poems, short stories, and books outside of class are really lovely to immerse yourself in! If you are interested in this, there is a blog post that features short story recommendations by Olive!

• Cleaning up study space

Having an aesthetically organized space will definitely help to make you feel more proactive to study and clean.

• Making a snack/drink

Getting up to make a little snack is perfect. It gets you out of the headspace of studying. I’m thinking small stuff like hot chocolate or smoothies, plus having different drinks might help a distracting mind during studying (it will change up what you are used to and might let you stay focused for a bit longer).

• Walk around the house, walk around the neighbourhood (had to put this one in)
  • Bonus: if you live with others and they are not busy, go and talk to them about some hot takes to let your mind take a break from school content! I’ll walk over to my dad, talk about the news or politics or how the sun goes down too fast – and being able to talk about totally unrelated to school will clear my head up!

Longer breaks that might take 30 min to 1 hour:

• Voice call a friend (ok this uses your phone, but I specify a voice call so you actually just talk to them and don’t have to look at your phone)

Talking about not school just for a bit of time is really refreshing, especially when the time I’m spending with my friends has lately just been for studying.

• Baking (30 min to 1 hour)

Some festive cookies anyone? Maybe some cupcakes? If this is too much of your time, chocolate truffles are so easy!!! Just melt chocolate with cream, pop it in the fridge, and then roll them into lil balls (with cocoa powder if you’re feeling fancy) and then enjoy.

Fun fact: if you’re starting to feel burnt out during exams and/or don’t know how to break during our upcoming winter break, remember HALT (this is from a podcast with Whitney Cummings) - HALT stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. This means do not take on anything or get yourself in a situation that requires a lot of mental effort if you are any of these things. Admittedly, Cummings noted that lonely is not a quick fix, but hungry, angry, and tired are! Grab a snack, channel anger into a different focus, take a nap, and then deal with what you need to do!

I don’t always love podcasts that I’m not used to but this one was great, the vibe of this podcast was great and I can’t do really long YouTube videos (I’ll lose attention/attraction to it) but I stayed for this one! If you’re interested:  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj8IJ7zfHiM

Good luck for the end of semester (I believe in you!! You got this!) and take care of yourself folks.

Hope you have a wonderful holiday break and I’ll connect with you all in the new year!