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 for their next steps. Former Middlebury College Dean Robert Clagett found gap year students were more likely to graduate on time and to occupy leadership positions on campus.
My research echoes these findings. Sabbatical takers return with more creativity and enhanced perspective on what matters. As we exit our teens and 20s, few obvious inflection points exist to catalyze taking stock, which usually means we stay on the same path, choosing inertia over evolution.
And these extended breaks from routine life are incredibly fun, fulfilling, and self-affirming. Brochures for gap year programs extol the “lifelong impact” had on alums, and sabbatical takers use similar language. We found that people describe their time off as a “peak life experience”—as important as the birth of a child or one’s wedding day. People describe “feeling human again,” and not being able to imagine living the rest of their lives without the lessons gleaned on sabbatical.
Of course, taking a mid-life gap year or sabbatical can be difficult to pull off. Here are some concrete steps to make it feasible:
First, find someone in your orbit who has taken an extended leave. Knowing someone who has already set out from routine life and successfully returned gives much-needed permission.
Second, use a longer-term lens for planning and motivation. Almost no one can afford to take a sabbatical immediately, but make a plan for five to seven years from now and begin to budget and strategize to make the logistics work. Think about the next decade of your life from a “eulogy” lens—what would you regret not doing with your life—instead of letting the inevitable short term inconveniences and excuses win the day.
Finally, allow yourself to dream about your ideal sabbatical. Write that dream down in specific detail. This helps make it real in your mind, like a life you could actually live, instead of an abstract concept.
If completely abandoning your career path feels too intimidating, look for a socially-acceptable gap year hidden-in-plain-sight. One year mid-career graduate degrees offer a chance to open the aperture on what’s possible in your life, and many universities are beginning to offer people in their “twilight career” a chance to audit classes alongside a cadre of pre-retirement seekers, such as the Inspired Leadership Initiative at Notre Dame. Or sign up for an age-agnostic volunteering or research opportunity like the Peace Corps or the Fulbright program. If you require neither permission or external motivation, perhaps a self-directed learning project, like how to upskill with AI, is more your speed.
In some ways, before college is the perfect time to take a gap year. It’s an unprecedented time in the life of most teenagers to quiet the noise about who they should be and look inwards to begin to map out an authentic path forward.
But later in life you have much more material to work with, and (hopefully) more resources to fund the expedition. Jungian psychologist and author James Hollis talks about the transition to mid-life as going from a “magical thinking” mindset where anything is possible to a more realistic perspective which takes into account your realized talents, interests, and constraints.
A gap year—at any age—gives you the chance to reflect, explore, and even wind back the clock to remind you that how you live your life is a choice. Stepping away from that life, even for a relatively small chunk in the grand scheme of things, isn’t an abdication of adulthood, but an investment in a life worth living.
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