I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello.

How are you?

Something I find myself talking to people about a lot is how to respond to themselves when they experience great change, a shift from their routine.

And this is something that I've with people about a lot before there was any

a Corona carry-on. And so what would happen is these people would take time out.

So it might be for redundancy, bereavement, an illness, career break, maternity leave, breakup, whatever it might be. So in some of those

instances it is planned. So for, the maternity leave or the career break or yes, if we have decided to take redundancy.

And sometimes what we do is that because we're in these situations

we say, you know what, I'm going to take X amount of weeks or months out and during this time I'm going to do this this and this and I'm not going to do that until this particular time.

But then in other instances this is time that I guess we could maybe say feels imposed upon us.

So a bereavement, you know a sudden redundancy, illness, a breakup and whatnot.

What's quite interesting is that in every single case where I chatted with people about these times there was a discomfort with the time off.

Whether it was planned or imposed upon them within days for some for others within weeks and for the

rest typically within a couple of months or so there became this great discomfort. It's as if a lot of us have a time-off

firmestat in our system that becomes activated and sort of throws out

discomfort and panic once it hits a certain amount of time.

And so as soon as we have holiday days,

we feel bored, we feel as if we haven't got something to fill up our time and our thoughts.

We haven't got something to distract ourselves from our feelings.

As soon as maybe we are out of a routine and it's a very very sharp change, the panic and discomfort kicks in because we don't have the familiarity of what we typically do

and because we are in this unfamiliar place,

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