It’s Monday and your long Holi weekend has come to an end. It’s taken superhuman strength to drag yourself out of bed and make your way to work. Uber’s surge pricing is driving you mad, you’re likely late, and there’s a 10 am call you couldn’t care less about.
We’ve been there: the crash after the high of a fulfilling vacation or a long weekend staycation. Sure, you could put it down to jet lag, or just the prospect of giving up something you’ve enjoyed doing for the last 4-5 days but post-vacation blues. Numerous studies have shown the virtue of taking a break from work but the steep crash that follows is just as real.
Jeroen Nawijn is a behavioural scientist whose work on vacations and their relationship to the quality of life is well known. Nawijn is what you would call a tourism scholar. In 2008, he interviewed hundreds of international tourists in the Netherlands over a 19-day period. Almost everyone reported feeling good about the vacation.
No matter your age (unless you’re a kid being dragged to a boring family vacation) or socio-economic status, enjoying a holiday is a universal feeling, he concluded. This is a common-sense observation, one would argue. However, Nawijn measured this feeling on what he calls a happiness curve, one that drops towards the last 10 per cent of the vacation duration.
So, by the time you have arrived at your home airport, you really just want to crawl into bed and hope that the sun never rises again.
Yet another research reveals that just two to four weeks after returning from a vacation, respondents lapsed back into their pre-holiday well-being levels. Scholars call it the fade out effect.
So, is taking a break even worthwhile?
Giving up on vacations is obviously not the answer. Vacations help you switch out of the drudgery of your everyday tasks. A literal change of scene does make a difference to one’s mood and productivity. Importantly, they give you memories, hopefully, for a lifetime. You don’t need me to tell you just why you need to take a break. But here’s what you can do to snap out of those post-vacation blues:
- Find ways to relax
A 2011 survey that studied a group of German teachers before and after their two-week Easter break revealed that the benefits of holidays lasted longer among those respondents who found ways to relax in the evenings. Relaxing can mean different things to different people. For some it could just mean going for a walk in their neighbourhood park, for others it could mean playing a guitar, for even others it could mean a gaming night. Basically, find ways to relax.
- Return home mid-week
This is a personal favourite: Instead of returning home on a weekend or, worse, Sunday evening, I’ve tried to schedule my vacation in a manner that I return home on a Wednesday or a Thursday and get to work immediately. Sure, it means I lose out on a few extra days of holiday, but it also means that I only have to work for a day or two before the week ends and I get to enjoy my weekend again.
- Find something to do over the weekends
The first weekend after your vacation can go either way: you spend your time completing your personal tasks you’d kept for another day – bank work, call with your CA, etc. – or you can go out and do the things you like in your city. I try to do the latter. The first weekend after a vacation is always reserved for a night out or a heritage walk: things I like doing. Use your weekends immediately after the vacation doing things you would have done on a vacation anyway.
- Plan your next vacation
Without doubt, this is the best way to get over your post-holiday blues. Planning for your next trip gives you something to look forward to and gets you back on the saddle. It also helps you plan ahead financially. If you’re reeling from a very expensive vacation, you can consider taking a short two-day break. If not, plan for another break few months down the line. The opportunities for taking a break are many; it just depends on how serious you are about actually exploring it.
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