The Seaside Is Good For My Soul

For the past few days I have been spending some time away from Manchester and city life in south Devon, somewhere I have been visiting for my whole life. Unfortunately I have this nasty habit in life where I will just work, work, work and completely burn myself out to the point where I have to stop entirely and do nothing for a while. On Monday I reached that point. I was just so stressed out and overwhelmed with everything despite the fact that I'm supposed to be on a three week break from uni for Easter. I basically decided that enough was enough and it was about time I stopped, even for just a couple of days, and visited the seaside.

There really is nowhere in the world that I feel happier than by the sea, I'm a proper 'water baby' I suppose. There's just something about fresh sea air, sand between my toes and the few degrees temperature increase that Devon always seems to have on rainy Manchester that clears my head and puts everything into perspective. Everything is done just that bit slower in Devon and so it's the perfect place for me to recharge my batteries. Being on the hilly south coast also meant that I had very little, if any, mobile signal for my whole trip. This only allowed me to have short stints on social media this week if a small pub happened to have wifi. I didn't even take my DSLR with me so all the photos on this post are taken from my Instagram feed. Removing yourself from the online world, having something of a 'digital detox', and realising that it's not all going to disappear if you switch off for a few days is defiantly important once in a while.

Often I really have to force myself to take these breaks because I worry about all of the work that's not getting done while I'm away. Honestly, in the end it's a much better use of my time because now I'm back I'm feeling refreshed and ready to get things done in a productive way. When I'm stressed it can take me a whole day to complete something that will now only take me an hour or two. Another bonus of visiting the seaside is that the change of scenery has got my creative juices flowing again and I now have a tonne of new inspiration and ideas! So even if you can't completely remove yourself for a few days like I was lucky enough to be able to, maybe just put aside a day where you go somewhere completely new and unknown. Just being in a new surrounding can do wonders for your creativity as well as your wellbeing.

What do you do to recharge your batteries when you've completely burnt yourself out? Or how do you organise your working time so that you avoid that happening in the first place? I'd love to hear your methods because I could defiantly do with a few tips myself!