A few summers ago, I sat in a salon chair with an ocean behind me.
Not at home. On vacation.
I was getting a haircut and a manicure — in a resort I had flown thousands of miles to reach — because I had not made the time to do either one at home in months.
Let that sink in for a second, because it took me years to.
I was so busy being a dentist, a CEO, a mom, a wife, a person who checks in — that the only window I could find for a haircut was the one week I had supposedly set aside to stop.
I didn’t go to the beach that afternoon. I went to the salon.
So please — don’t be like me.
July has a way of arriving all at once.
The kids are home. The camps and the carpools and the “I’m bored” and the wet towels on the bathroom floor. The house is louder and somehow always sticky.
And the business doesn’t stop. It never does.
The phones still ring. The schedule still fills. The emails still come, whether you are at your desk or buried under a beach umbrella pretending not to look.
And that’s the thing about owning your own office, isn’t it? We don’t get to clock out. The phone lives in our pocket. It comes to dinner. It comes on vacation. It sits on the nightstand of the hotel room like it has a reservation too.
Even when we’ve built the practice to run without us — especially then — we still want to check in. Just one peek. Just to make sure.
I know that feeling in my bones. I have spent the first three days of more than one vacation just trying to come down — to unclench, to stop reaching for my phone every time it buzzed, to remember that the world would keep spinning if I didn’t answer that message until Monday.
Three days. To do nothing. That’s how long it takes me to remember how.
Here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and stubbornly.
We are dentists. We are practice owners. We are the kind of people who built something out of nothing and feel personally responsible for keeping it standing. We don’t take time off. We take time away from the desk while still working in our heads.
And we feel guilty. We feel guilty resting. We feel guilty leaving. We feel guilty for wanting to feel guilty a little less.
But burnout is real. It is not a buzzword. It is a slow leak, and most of us don’t notice the tire is flat until we’re stranded.
Taking your mind off of work is a luxury.
It is also a necessity.
Your central nervous system — the one running quietly underneath all of it, absorbing every ping and every “did you see this” — that system needs you to put the phone down. Not to be more productive afterward. Just because you are a human being and not a practice management system.
So leave the phone in the hotel room.
I mean it. Leave it on the dresser and walk out the door and let it sit there like the houseguest who has overstayed.
Summers fly by so fast. They always have.
You blink and the kids are taller and the season is over and you spent it answering emails on a lounge chair.
So this July, I want to give you permission you shouldn’t need but probably do.
Eat the food. Take the cake. Drink the sugary drink with the little umbrella in it.
Sit in the sand and bury your toes all the way down until you can’t see them.
Buy the expensive purse. Wear the good jewelry on a regular Tuesday.
Find a hobby — a real one, the kind with no metrics and no outcome, the kind you do badly and love anyway.
And get the haircut at home, before you leave, so that when you finally get to the ocean, all you have to do is look at it.
You deserve the rest. Not because you earned it by being productive enough. Just because you’re you, and you’re tired, and the summer is short.
Take the time off. Breathe. Bury your toes.
Your nervous system will thank you. So will the people who love you — the ones who would rather have you present for one real week than reachable for fifty-two.
I’m writing this having just come home from nineteen days in Europe — Spain, Italy, England.
Nineteen days. There was a version of me, the one who owned her own office, who would have told you that was impossible. I could never leave for that long. And the truth, in hindsight, is that I could have. I always could have. I just never gave myself permission. I didn’t have the bravery in my heart to walk away that long — and if I’m being honest, part of me simply didn’t want to.
So let me confess it plainly: I am a workaholic. Even on this trip, I checked in with the MDIB team a few times. Old habits don’t disappear at passport control.
But something shifted. I looked at my kids through a different lens this time.
Not the running-late, did-you-brush-your-teeth lens. A grateful one. They are healthy. They are strong. They are old enough now that they will actually remember this — and they were absorbing everything, soaking up the world as we moved through it.
Because education looks different now. It isn’t only the classroom. It’s the world. It’s how we treat people. It’s what it means to live in a community, and how that looks in a tiny town in Italy versus a big city in Spain versus a corner of England. It’s watching other families, other kids — and realizing that even when we couldn’t share a single word of language, the same things were there. Family. Love. Food. Sport.
We were all in on the World Cup, the whole continent humming with it — and there is something about that, isn’t there. The way it brings the world together. We can cheer for another team and still cheer for our own. We can belong to one place and still feel at home everywhere.
Those are the lessons that are so much harder to teach at the kitchen table.
That is what the time off gave me. Not just rest — though I needed that too. It gave me my kids, and the world, and a version of myself brave enough to be fully there for both.
So go. Give yourself the permission I waited far too long to give myself.
The summer is short. The world is wide. And it will still be standing when you get back.
Dr. Grace Yum
Founder, Mommy Dentists in Business
