If we’re doing life correctly, do we need vacation?
What a killer question! I often wonder about this myself and given July 4th just blew by, let's chat vacation and Mental Fitness. This time of year, the out-of-office notes are hitting us in the face faster than we can angrily delete them.
Why angry?! Well, according to a study, *only* 53% of Americans are taking vacation this summer, so that means 47% of us are left in our home or company office, getting a fluorescent-light tan, eating stale Fritos out of boredom, and scrolling our favorite technology trap watching the world take pictures of themselves eating pizza in Italy, Portugal, or Greece.
In a study done in 2018, 30% of vacation days were not used (aka flushed down the toilet). This is crazy!
So why does this matter? Let’s talk about how vacation is something we should all do, but isn’t a bikini-clad, pina-colada-drenched, 1-week solve-all for stress, exhaustion or a replacement for a regular mental fitness practice.
Vacation does a lot for us!
Take it from one of the greats, Lin-Manuel Miranda: “It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life — perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life — came to me on vacation… The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it.”
That's a pretty strong endorsement, isn't it? His experience aligns perfectly with what research shows happens during different phases of a vacation:
Before Vacation:
The mere act of looking forward to a trip is incredibly beneficial. This pre-vacation glow increases what psychologists call "positive affect," or positive emotion. In fact, some research suggests that the anticipation of future reward, such as an upcoming vacation, can often be more gratifying than the experience itself. Wild, huh? So, consider this your official permission slip: get planning, people! Even just having something on the calendar can boost your mood right now. For more on the joy of anticipation, check out this interesting article from the New York Times about how planning a trip can be almost as good as taking it.
During Vacation: We often experience a -
Decrease in stress
Increase in physical activity
Improvement in sleep
Improvement in mood
Returning from Vacation: It has been shown that we experience the following -
Increase in cognitive flexibility: the ability to see things in new ways
Increase in creativity: Increase the flow and volume of new ideas
Decrease in (the bad kind of) stress
Increase in motivation
Increase in job performance
Improvement in our relationships
However, there's a crucial caveat here: What happens when you work on vacation? When folks try to "do it all" and work while on vacation, it seems to negatively affect their self-reported health and wellness upon returning. You're defeating the purpose if your laptop is open by the pool. So yeah, actual, unplugged vacations are fantastic. Doing work on them is emphatically not.
Vacations do a lot for us, but not everything….
In studies conducted with real-live human employees, the effect of shorter vacations have been shown to fade quite quickly, within 1-2 weeks, and is known as “the fade out effect”.
So this next holiday upcoming, go enjoy a hotdog, friends, family and remember that your brain needs this break. But it needs more than that to function well…
At MYNDY, we’ve become obsessed with short naps or “Mini Vacations.” Go ahead, if a vacation isn’t in your future, take a mini one now.
We’re here to help you build the right mindset to win every day (not just when you’re toasty — stressed, exhausted, lacking focus, and/or burned out). Need a boost?
We got you.
