Marina Kausar wasn’t sure what to call the three-month break she took after quitting her job.

After working in a series of jobs in finance and technology, Kausar, 30, was feeling stressed and overworked. In December 2023, with a bit of savings built up, she quit without another position lined up to focus on things that had fallen to the wayside while she was focused on work.

“I had more time to work out. I was eating better, sleeping better. It was just like a full reset,” said Kausar, who lives in Houston. “For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have this looming cloud of ‘work.’ ”

Eventually, she came across a term for her hiatus that resonated with her: “micro-retirement.”

For most people in the United States, being able to save enough money to not have to work is a faraway ideal. That anxiety, especially for people closer to retirement, has only risen as stock markets have grown more volatile in response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs.

Discontented employees who do not have the means to leave the workforce have turned to “quiet-quitting,” “acting your wage” or simply using their vacation days.

Now, many younger workers are opting not to wait until retirement, and are leaving an extended gap between jobs to invest in other parts of their life.

A “micro-retirement” can take on many forms: taking extra time after being laid off to consider other paths, asking for unpaid leave (and not necessarily with a guarantee of a return) or building in a long stretch after voluntarily leaving a job.

Of course, many people cannot afford to take time out of the workforce, and Kira Schabram, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who is researching such breaks, said that those who do tend to be much more financially stable.

But for those who can manage it, she believes “micro-retirement” is on the rise.

Sandra De La Cruz was 25 when she took about four months off work in 2015. As an assistant project manager in the construction industry she had saved about $12,000 while living with her parents.

Her parents thought she could put that money toward buying a home, but De La Cruz, who was born in Peru and now lives in Hartford County, Connecticut, wanted to travel. “This might be the only period in my life that I could just pick up and go without really hurting anyone,” she thought to herself at the time.

After paying about six months’ worth of her student loans in advance, she went to Peru to see relatives for a month and then hopped around hostels in South America.

“There’s been a few times in my life that I felt that happy,” De La Cruz, now 35, said. “You don’t dread waking up and having to go to work. You just wake up and see where the day takes you.”

She was careful not to burn any professional bridges and said her parents were willing to cover her student loans as a last resort if she ended up using all her savings. She found a job back in construction a month after she returned.

These days, De La Cruz is working as a contract analyst. She credited her break in 2015 with giving her the confidence to navigate uncertainty in the workplace.

“I have less fear of change because I know that there are just so many other possibilities,” she said. “That was life-defining.”