Happiness expert reveals how the happiest people spend their weekends: 'Breaking from...'

People should treat their weekends like vacations, believes happiness researcher and TEDx speaker Cassie Holmes. After all, that's what happiest people do, she said on the Everyday Better with Leah Smart podcast.  The author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most said that it was important to break out of a routine during the weekends.

“People associate vacations with a break … Whereas our weekends tend to be a routine where we are moving through our activities,” she said. Treating your weekend like a vacation helps break you out of the “routine of doing, and it allows you to just be.”

In 2017, the California-based happiness expert had carried out an experiment on over 400 working Americans. On a Friday, she told some of the group to treat the time like a vacation and told the others to spend it like they would any other weekend. When comparing their happiness afterwards, Holmes found that those with a vacation mindset showed more satisfaction and positivity when they returned to work.

They were “doing less housework and work for their jobs, staying in bed a little longer with their partner, and eating a bit more,” Holmes wrote for Harvard Business Review in 2019. The real differentiator, however, was that they were “more mindful of and attentive to the present moment throughout their weekend’s activities.”