Yes, you can take a sabbatical from work. In fact, you should. Here’s why and how.

We’re willing to bet you’ve thought about taking a break from your everyday. Maybe it hit you while you were jammed in a subway car during the morning rush. (We feel you.) Or maybe you’ve daydreamed about finally taking up a certain hobby while sitting in (yet another) super-boring meeting.

For Toronto-based Kathryn Mills, it was upholstery. After being a civil servant strapped to her desk for about a decade, Kathryn was ready to get away from her office walls. “I felt like I hadn’t had a real break from work, ever. I’d started right after finishing university and never stopped,” she says. “I’d never had a maternity or educational leave, never taken a temporary assignment at another branch. I wanted to spend more time with my husband while we were both young and healthy enough to enjoy it.” She was wiped from her daily routine: hurrying to the office, then spending evenings and weekends trying to fit in all her errands, shopping and appointments. Plus, she yearned to learn to upholster furniture but had never found the time.

A sabbatical seemed like the right choice. This period of leave is basically a time-out, a way to hit the reset button without having to quit your job and start from scratch. Intended to rejuvenate and replenish your motivation and satisfaction with your 9 to 5, a sabbatical definitely has the potential to help a career, says London, Ont.–based Alison Konrad, a professor of organizational behaviour at Western University’s Ivey

“had

I felt like I hadn’t a real break from work, ever.

I’D STARTED RIGHT AFTER FINISHING UNIVERSITY AND STOPPED.” NEVER

Business School. “If you use it to learn something new that you can leverage at work, if it reinvigorates your engagement and if you come back with a new vision of your path for your career that inspires you, you’ll avoid becoming plateaued and indifferent about work,” says Konrad. Plus, there’s something to be said for checking out of the daily grind for your mental health— it’s like taking months worth of personal days in one shot.

But folks are often deterred from a sabbatical because of the misconceptions—“they’re just for academia” and “I’ll seem less committed to my job” are the biggest misguided assumptions. The truth is that many bosses would support taking a leave, as long as you plan in advance. And if you do it right, the break can be exactly what you need to get you through to retirement. Here’s what you should know before you go.