Within the family: Finding balance key to a happy holiday

By SUZANNE INNES-KENT

Did your holidays work out as well as you had hoped? There is an art to being on holiday, as much as there's an art to being at work.

It is tempting to assume that being on holiday means release from responsibility for decision-making, intellectual demands, routine activities, even self-monitoring.

Yet holidays can be stressful and even depressing if we do not know how to do them well. Very often our fantasies of what they will offer us cannot survive the reality of tired people easily made irritable by uncooperative weather and the unrelenting demands of family life.

Making holidays work for everyone does not mean planning them like a construction project, though that works for some people. The secret is in understanding the fundamental purpose of time away from the treadmill of the working life; that is, the value of restoring balance, including rest, leisure activity, time to reflect on all those things that restore a sense of wellbeing, both physically and emotionally.

Restoring balance requires different actions for different people, depending on what has been out of balance previously. If you are a parent devoted to fulltime family duties, then going on holiday in circumstances where you continue to do all the same things as at home but without the systems you've developed to make them run smoothly can be exhausting.

But if part of the holiday is that everyone chips in, and activities which would normally be a drudge are part of the fun, then tasks are not a burden. But everyone, including mum, needs a break from normal activity.

There are also differences in personal style which need to be accommodated. Some people restore themselves through social contact, others through withdrawing from interaction. Some find physical activity provides relaxation; for others it is complete inactivity, perhaps with a book, perhaps just seeking silence and doing nothing.

Working out what counts as restorative for you is the first step. Next is working out how to create that, if you are with people (family members, friends or children) whose needs seem guaranteed to ambush and overwhelm your own. We can take our relationships on holiday but our relationships are never on holiday. It takes negotiation to ensure that everyone gets the kind of restorative experience they need.

While on holiday it may be unwise to make a goal of restoring a relationship which is going wrong. Ensuring that everyone has the space to unwind personally, and showing care and thought for their need to do that, while at the same time ensuring that you do not sacrifice your own needs, is going to be the best tonic for the relationship. It reaps the benefits of relaxed individuals.

You could think of relationships as needing a balance of their own, that of side-by-side time versus face-to face time. We need both, but if face-to-face conversations are painful, can you agree to make a time when back from holiday to face the issues? What you probably need right now, more than anything, is freedom from stress.