Yes, Post-Vacation Burnout Is a Thing
By: Emily Underwood
Tags: Vacation, Mental Health, Productivity, Live, Burnout

Yes, Post-Vacation Burnout Is a Thing

If a holiday is supposed to leave you refreshed and restored, why are you often more tired than when you left?

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Have you ever come back from vacation feeling like you badly needed, well, a vacation?

Complaining about how exhausted you are after a week in Cancun isn’t going to win you any sympathy from co-workers, but it isn’t unusual to experience a crash, even after a lovely holiday.

It’s increasingly clear that skipping vacation — as more than half of Americans do — is bad for health and productivity, increasing your risk of both depression and heart attacks. It can also contribute to burnout, a syndrome recently defined by the World Health Organization as exhaustion, negativity, and loss of professional efficacy. Multiple studies suggest that detaching from work on vacation makes us more productive and creative.

But time away isn’t always relaxing — particularly if you spend it flying with kids, appeasing in-laws, or checking email — and reentry can be brutal. An overflowing inbox and multiple fires to put out can leave you feeling more drained and frazzled when you return to your desk than when you left.

With post-vacation burnout, as with most things, prevention is better than cure. Here are some tips to help avoid it.

Choose the right vacation

First of all, be sure you’ve planned a vacation that actually allows for recuperation. Occupational psychologist Sabine Sonnentag at the University of Konstanz in Germany has identified four ingredients that make a vacation restorative, but this is also about personal taste: A week-long mountain-climbing trip might be ideal for some as an escape from work, and simply exhausting for others.

Ideally, schedule your vacation with at least a day’s buffer before you have to go back to work, to give yourself time to settle back in, do laundry, get a good night’s sleep.

Set your out-of-office mindset

At work before you leave, take some time to complete your most unpleasant tasks, so you don’t spend your whole vacation thinking about them.

In addition to setting your email vacation response and Slack status, make sure your colleagues know everything they need to do, and designate someone to address any pressing issues that come up while you’re gone to reduce the chance of getting a panicked message that you need to respond to from your beach blanket.

Next, write a detailed, not-too-ambitious to-do list for your first day or two back, so that you can stumble through the first few days of reentry without straining your jet-lagged brain.

Don’t announce that you’re home for a day or two, and wait to update your status and out-of-office message.

On vacation, truly relax

Plan activities you find both relaxing and pleasurable, like idly browsing a bookstore, doing a jigsaw puzzle, or going for an easy hike. The key is to give yourself a break from trying to achieve anything.

Try to maintain some control over how you spend your time and energy. This can be tough on family vacations — especially when traveling with small children — but it’s important to carve out some time to do what you want, even if it means taking turns watching the kids or hiring childcare.

If your needs align perfectly with what your partner and family want to do, great. If not, arrange to strike out on your own at least once, whether for an early morning run or a solo museum visit.

And relaxation doesn’t have to mean downtime, but it should mean abandoning the need to perform. Consider developing a new skill or building on one, such as kayaking or taking a cooking class in the local cuisine. The activity doesn’t have to be physically risky, or even all that hard, just mentally absorbing enough to keep you focused and in a state of “flow.”

Activities that help you develop a new mastery help combat the discouragement and inadequacy that signal burnout on the job. Another upside? It’s hard to check your phone if your device is sealed in a drybag or your hands are covered in focaccia dough.

As for your work-work, do your best to unplug from it: Nearly 30% of Americans work more than they thought they would on vacation, according to a 2018 study by the American Psychological Association. Constantly checking your email undermines the potential benefits of vacation, and may even negatively affect health and well-being afterward. It also disrupts the potential for creative inspiration that can arise from allowing yourself to be a bit bored, or simply letting your mind wander.

Ease your reentry

If you’ve managed to schedule a buffer day or two, use it to decompress, catch up on sleep, and savor the experience. Print out photos, record memories in a journal, or download recipes that will remind you of your trip. Write thank-you notes to your hosts and travel companions. Plan your next adventure.

Once you return to work, be sure to go to bed and get up at your normal times, and don’t try to make up for being gone by resuming work in double time.

And here’s a useful trick to ease yourself back into the pace of office communication: Don’t announce that you’re back at your desk for a day or two, and wait to update your status and out-of-office message.

Recognize that a vacation isn’t a cure-all

Even if your vacation was blissfully relaxing, don’t be surprised if the mood-boosting effects fade soon after your return — that’s normal. If you don’t feel any better after vacation, or you can’t enjoy it because of work stress, however, you might be suffering from work-related burnout.

If you’re struggling with burnout, chances are your vacation was only a temporary fix. The chronic stress associated with burnout syndrome isn’t resolved by a week or two of time off, no matter how perfectly you plan it, notes Irvin Schonfeld, an occupational health researcher at the City University of New York. Schonfeld’s research suggests that people who score high on the Maslach Burnout Inventory may actually have a form of job-stress-induced depression. Emotional exhaustion, which Schonfeld describes as “the core of burnout,“ is also highly correlated with depression, “so it’s tricky to say that burnout is a separate phenomenon from depression,” he says.

Finally, remember that vacation isn’t the only time you’re allowed to relax. Find ways to build “deliberate rest” into your day; take opportunities to let your mind wander or be entertained — even at work, or during your commute.

And pretend you’re on vacation over the weekends. Research suggests that when people adopt a “vacation mindset” on weekends, they do less housework, and spend more time eating and having sex. They’re also happier on Mondays. Go figure.