This can sound a bit obvious, but yes, Digital Nomads need to take real vacations.
After 3 years of living the so called digital nomad life, we realized something important: working and living in beautiful places does not mean being in vacations (holidays). Even though we were taking a few days off here and there to allow ourselves to relax and explore the places we were living in, we still felt more and more tired. At some point we understood we needed true vacations, not just workations.
We needed to actually pull the plug, to go somewhere without our laptops and take some digital time off. Some "us" time. Yes, we could have done it during one of our regular stays somewhere. But for us, it wasn't enough: we needed to break from our routine. As we explained in how to start your digital nomad journey, we create a new routine very easily. As soon as we setup our workplace somewhere, we feel at home. And this was our problem, we needed to not feel at home to escape. And we never were able to recreate this sufficiently to feel truly refreshed when coming back to work.
So don't be lured by this belief that working away, being a digital nomad, is like vacations. It is not. Sometimes you need to really get off and be disconnected from all that digital world and do something for you for more than just a few days. You need to recharge your personal batteries.