What is your ideal vacation spot? The place that you'd like to go to get away from it all? For nearly everyone, it is a place where they are away from all their daily duties and responsibilities and commitments. It is a place where they are either alone or are with a handful of loved ones. It is a place in the countryside or on a hill or on a beach or on a foreign land. It is a place of utter relaxation. It is a place of silence. It is a place of tranquility.

Why is this an experience that so many of us seek? Because our daily lives is full of constant chatter. On an average day, we are pulled in a total of hundred different directions by clients asking for updates on their projects, by colleagues asking for meetings, by friends asking for favours, by advertisers asking us to buy things. We are constantly doing something or the other. And yet we end up with the feeling that we don't have enough time for many other things.

Our minds, our brains, are a lot like that. There is always chatter in our head. At times, we are guilty of not doing something while we are doing something else. At times, we are not sure if we ought to be doing what we are doing. At times, we are comparing ourselves to others that appear to be doing better than us. At times, we are asking ourselves if we are behaving the way that the people around us would approve of. At times, we are wondering when everything will fall in place to make our lives better.

We don't do any of this when we are on vacation, do we? We are not sitting on a beach and wondering if the other people sitting on the beach are having more fun than we are. We are not thinking if there was a better beach that we could have gone to instead. We are simply being there, having a good time.

We don't have to be that way only when we are on vacation. We should be able to send our brains on vacation a lot more often. At least a few hours a day. Or at least a few hours a week if we are terribly entangled in commitments.

A few hours of time for the brain where it isn't questioning our decisions, isn't stack ranking our status against others, isn't feeling guilty about time not well spent, isn't feeling anxious about the future. A few hours a day of absolute silence in the head.

Because this silence is the sign of something that we are all after. Something called happiness.

Life isn't a happy vacation. But finding those tiny vacations for a few hours a day goes a long way in making it one.