Taking Breaks (and Doing it the Right Way.)

Taking breaks can be tricky with rideshare – because your mind is in this “time is money” mindset, and you literally see every single dollar that you earn slowly trickle into your bank account.

To which there is probably some significant, long term, negative effect of diminishing return, psychological, hamster on a wheel, dopamine triggering type bullshit for this occurrence going on too when you visually see this happening for so long and you do this for a while…

Enter Denzel in Equalizer 2:

(Notice: his face lighting up after getting paid :D)

(Actually, I still have yet to see this film… is it any good?)

You may have up to an eleven-hour-or-so session where you haven’t even gotten out of the driver seat just because you have found a flow.

And sometimes you might find yourself in an unfamiliar place and it may even be after dark. These are a couple of examples and even common scenarios from my experiences on the road.

It’s difficult, and counter-intuitive, but you have to force yourself to stop and get out of your car and take at least a 5 minute walk sometimes.

You might also even plan a break, and then the break doesn’t go your way.. for instance if you decide to go to Subway and there is a long line or something like that…

Take extra time or decide to minimize the break. Maybe you had a 15 minute break planned in your head but only 5 minutes of the break felt good to you. Fortunately, at least with Lyft, you can break the break off and get back to driving even if you are in the middle of a streak now.

This feeling can go the other way too.

Maybe you plan a 5 minute quick break in your head and it ends up needing to be a 20 minute nap/meditation/rest period. I do this often. I find myself in a parking lot that I may be far from a main highway or something and I’ll just turn my classical music up or put a YouTube video on the Bluetooth and just close my eyes for a couple of minutes. Even after doing something like this though, I highly recommend even forcing yourself to get out of the physical car and driver seat and stretch your legs, ankles, and wrists and rest your eyes.

There is probably a lot of literature and science on “The Psychology of Taking Breaks.” …Sounds like a pretty normcore science magazine (maga?) article title to me! Anyways, I have attached a few of these articles below in case you are curious of this importance. I also need the SEO.

The Importance of Taking Breaks

10 Reasons Why Taking Breaks Is Important

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I also just found a couple videos from Lyft on taking breaks:

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Raquel’s video here is better:

I also strongly agree/condone doing planks/moderate exercise/jumping jacks, and maybe even carrying a jump rope in your car.

Lastly, here is the actual in app literature for taking breaks… The Lyft Driver App will force you to take a break every 12 hours.

So Yeah, Take Breaks.