the workflow background jobs are maintenance jobs, they retry running workflows with errors, deal with workflows which deadlines have passed etc. stopping them will not do any good.
now you can resubmit all the active workflow processes (using SWIA - or using a program to do so) to a week from now. and then after a week the job responsible for the deadlines will automatically reactivate them.
If you want to stop new workflows from being created, simply deactivate their event linkage. however you should pay attention to want will happen with the process well no workflow is active to complete them. in this case you can't reactivate them since no workflow was started. this option is good for a massive data change is run by a program during the night (when no user is active) and you don't want users to start receiving workflows tasks, but the program will have to approve the changes as part of the run directly.