5 Reasons to Vacate Your Life this Summer ...(and the science that proves it’s the best decision you’ll make)

Last Thursday I drove upstate to spend the weekend with friends.

I closed my laptop when I got there. I did not open it again until Monday morning.

There was no cell service where we were.

Only internet.

So for four days, I checked my phone once in the morning and once at dinner.

That was the deal I made with myself. The phone charged in the next room while I slept, not on the nightstand where it has lived for the past decade.

The first night that felt genuinely strange. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But here is the thing about me and my phone: I am on it almost every waking hour. Marketing and coaching are always on. Clients, content, notifications, someone always needs something. Even asleep, the phone is right there. That has just been the job. Those of you running your own business or coaching practices know exactly what I mean.

So those four days felt odd. Disconnected. A little disorienting.

And also the most rested I have felt in months.

I came back Monday morning with more clarity than I had manufactured sitting at my desk for the previous four weeks. Not because anything dramatic happened upstate. Because I finally stopped long enough to let my brain catch up to everything I had been throwing at it.

That is what I want to talk about.

Because the science behind what happened to me is not soft. It is specific, and it applies directly to the way coaches and entrepreneurs run their businesses into the ground by never stopping.

1. Your brain cannot think creatively when it never gets quiet

When you are in execution mode, you are processing what is in front of you. That is the only thing your brain is doing. It is useful for getting things done. It is not where your best thinking comes from.

Your best thinking comes from something called the Default Mode Network. It is the part of your brain that turns on when you stop. When you are walking somewhere without a purpose, staring out a car window, or sitting on a porch doing nothing particular.

A 2025 review published in Biology (MDPI) found that the Default Mode Network is critical for self-reflection, creative ideation, and connecting ideas that do not seem related on the surface. A separate 2025 study in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences confirmed that this same network, when active during rest, supports the kind of loose, non-linear thinking that produces genuine insight.

Read that again: your brain does its most creative work when you are not trying.

You cannot force your way to a good idea for your next offer, your positioning, or what is actually wrong with your content strategy. You can only create the conditions for those things to surface. A real vacation, not a slow afternoon, is one of the few things that actually does it.

2. Burnout is not a mood. It is a measurable state that is making you worse at your job.

I am going to say the thing out loud that most business content dances around: burnout does not just make you tired. It makes you bad at your job. Your judgment deteriorates. Your decisions get worse. You do not see it happening, which is the part that costs you.

A 2025 study in Small Business Economics (Springer Nature) looked specifically at entrepreneurs and found that the recovery experience most connected to lower burnout and higher well-being was detachment. Not rest. Detachment. The actual mental and physical distance from the work.

That word is doing real work. Logging off at 6pm is not detachment. Having your phone charge in another room while you eat dinner with people you actually like is closer to it.

Those four days upstate, I was more detached from my business than I have been in years. I did not spiral. I did not miss anything that mattered. And I came back able to think again in a way I had not noticed I had lost.

The burnout numbers on entrepreneurs are not subtle. A 2024 Foundr survey found 51% of solopreneurs report chronic burnout weekly. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor put the annual number closer to 89%.

Cleveland Clinic psychologist Susan Albers, PsyD, names the symptoms: indecisiveness, pessimism, emotional dysregulation, difficulty concentrating. Those are not discomforts. Those are the signs of a brain that cannot do what you are asking it to do. And yet most coaches and entrepreneurs push through them like they are minor inconveniences.

Vacation is not a reward for doing enough work. It is what makes the work possible.

3. Cortisol is running in the background and you do not notice until it stops

Cortisol is your stress hormone. Useful in small doses. When it is chronically elevated, it works against you in ways you cannot fully feel until you step away from the thing causing it.

Research cited by Hope Brain and Body Recovery Center (2025) found that vacations measurably reduce inflammatory proteins and improve immune response markers. And sleep quality improvements from vacation can persist for up to two weeks after you get home.

Two weeks.

You take a break and the physical benefit follows you back to your desk.

For coaches and entrepreneurs who run mostly on adrenaline and self-imposed pressure, cortisol reduction is not a wellness talking point. It is what allows you to actually listen to a client. To read what is happening in a sales conversation. To trust what your gut is telling you about a business decision.

Your gut is data. I say this all the time. But a nervous system that is flooded with cortisol reads everything as a threat. You cannot access pattern recognition from that state. You can only react.

Four days without the constant notification loop and I could feel the difference in my own body. That is not me being precious about wellness. That is just what happens when the system gets a break.

4. A new environment is not a luxury. It is a different kind of input for your brain.

This one I have now experienced and the research explains why.

When you remove yourself from the environment you work in every day, your brain gets activated in ways it simply cannot from your home office or your usual coffee shop. Research from Pacific Neuroscience Institute (2026), from senior neurologist Karen Miller, PhD, explains that travel simultaneously engages spatial navigation skills, executive planning, memory, and language across multiple regions of the brain at once. You are not resting those systems. You are running them on new material.

A 2025 piece from TecScience referenced studies showing that environmental novelty stimulates the brain in sensory, cognitive, motor, and social ways all at once. New place, new input, new connections.

There is a reason the answer to a problem you have been staring at for three weeks sometimes appears on the second day of a trip. Your brain is not working harder. It is working differently, because it has something different to work with.

The business problem that felt stuck in your office often looks completely different from a porch in a place where your phone has no service. I am not speculating. I just lived it.

5. Distance from your business is when you finally see it clearly

This is the one most coaches and entrepreneurs refuse to believe until they experience it.

The fear is: if I stop, I will fall behind. The reality is: you cannot see what is actually happening in your business when you are nose-deep in the daily execution of it.

A 2025 study in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities (Nurja et al.) found that people who vacation more frequently report higher life satisfaction, lower negative affect, and greater cognitive well-being than those who rarely take time off. Frequency mattered more than duration.

And TecScience noted something worth sitting with: people mentally disengage from work more on a trip away from home than on a weekend at home. The physical distance is doing something the mental intention to “take a break” cannot do on its own.

You need to actually leave.

When you come back, you do not just feel better. You see differently. Decisions that felt complicated look obvious. The thing you have been trying to force often just appears, on the drive home, in the shower, somewhere that is not your desk.

That is not inspiration. That is your brain finally having room.

The permission you did not ask for

I woke up Monday morning ready to get back to work. As I poured my coffee, I thought of three things I wanted to do differently. They were not things I had been trying to figure out.

They just came up. That is what four days of actual rest did.

You did not become a coach to run yourself into the ground. You did not start a business to be the person who never takes time off. You built your own thing because you wanted your life to work differently than it did when someone else owned your calendar.

Taking time off is part of that. Not a bonus you earn. Part of it.

The coaches and entrepreneurs who build something sustainable are not the hardest workers in the room. They are the ones who figured out how to protect their own capacity. Rest is part of that equation. So is leaving. So is putting the phone in another room even when it feels strange.

It will feel odd the first night. You will get over it by the third morning.

Go somewhere.

Close the computer.

Come back to your business as someone who can actually see it.