Your brain not only needs frequent breaks during the day, but it also needs time away from work, school, and the stress of your life periodically to revitalize and renew. By depriving your brain of such downtime, you diminish your ability to think creatively and strategically handle complex problems. Our brain thinks more clearly when we step out of the hectic routines of our lives, stop rushing from one obligation to the next, and make time to switch gears and relax.

Research shows that the frontal lobe brain networks, responsible for reasoning, planning, decision-making, and judgment, work in creative ways when your brain is quiet, not while actively thinking or problem-solving. A-ha moments happen when your brain is offline because that’s when it connects various random ideas and makes associations with prior knowledge to form new thoughts, ideas, direction, and insight.

Giving your brain a vacation is important because it potentially allows you to lower cortisol, the stress hormone. Studies have determined that high levels of cortisol damage the brain’s hippocampus, the learning and memory center.

Reducing stress is essential to maximizing your brain’s performance. While it’s best to build stress-reducing activities into your life regularly, such as exercising, getting more sleep, and spending time with others, a vacation can include more of all those as well as novel experiences – which are great for your brain.