Fresh off the heels of graduation from high school, many rising freshmen are choosing to step off of the treadmill for a year before matriculating in college. Gap years have become a viable option in the United States, where taking a leave of absence is as easy as clicking a button. At colleges like Harvard, between 3 and 4% of the student body step away for a leave of absence in any given year.
That leaves those of us who missed our chance to take a gap year sometimes jealous, or even indignant. The best time to plant a tree, they say, is 20 years ago. But the second best time is today. So it is with gap years.
In the process of writing my book on sabbatical-takers, people who intentionally take extended leave from their routine jobs, I found many parallels between the experience of taking a gap year and embarking on a midlife break from work. My conclusion: gap years are wasted on the young.
Here’s why a gap year, at any age, should be in your concrete plans instead of your bucket list.
First and foremost, breaks from the stress and toil of work are essential components of healing from burnout. Professionals who have taken sabbaticals from their careers describe it taking as long as eight weeks to feel healthy and like themselves again. Restoring our energy and disengaging from our work identities takes time, and cannot be magically found over a weekend.
Second, extended breaks from work—ideally more than two months, with four to six months as the ideal—are necessary to undergo a deeper journey of self-exploration. In this process, we can examine who we’ve become and actively choose how we’d like to live going forward.
For those who worry whether leaving your career could negatively impact your next steps, there is ample evidence for both the young and old that the opposite is true. Academic administrator Joe O’Shea studied gap years and found that gap year alumni return with greater confidence, self-awareness and readiness
