I’m currently in the grip of a post-holiday motivational deficit. Three weeks was sufficient that I’m not resentful about returning home. But getting back into the routines that get me through my non-holiday existence has inevitably been a bit of a shock.
Of course, I don’t necessarily want to fall back into all of those habits, just the good ones.
There has also been some shock at what we’ve returned to. “I can’t believe how much groceries have gone up and we were only away for three weeks!” exclaimed my wife after our first post-return shop.
It’s common for people to feel some post-holiday blues. This “post-vacation syndrome” includes tiredness, feeling blue and irritable, and difficulty focusing on those annoying real-life tasks you’ve returned to. While it’s common to feel this way, post-vacation syndrome is not a formal condition and nor does it need to be – it goes away pretty quickly.
On the Deakin University website, Dr Melissa Weinberg suggests post-holiday blues aren’t necessarily because you had a great holiday and now you’re back to reality, but because your brain is kidding you that your holiday was peak fun.
Either way, you’re returning to our baseline level of happiness, which has briefly been pumped up by an actually good holiday or your happiness-deluded holiday. Basically, you’re contrasting what things are like now with how great they were (or felt) when you were away. Weinberg says this is a good thing; a sign you’re psychologically healthy.
But I was a little worried when I hit Google Scholar to find research on post-vacation syndrome. The first two articles speculated about post-vacation divorce syndrome. The authors argue divorce is disproportionately common after a holiday (I’d better not tell my wife).
I carried on looking to make sure holidays aren’t actually bad for you and your relationships and, phew, there’s a lot of evidence to back my personal experience. Holidays improve wellbeing, make us feel more positive emotions (and fewer negative emotions), reduce our stress and make us feel revitalised. But … these effects have a short half-life, and we return to where we were pre-holiday after only a few weeks.
It’s not as bad as that, though. On average, people continue to say they feel better after returning from holiday, just not statistically significantly better. Because there’s variation around what people say, there’s reason to think some of us either naturally maintain our post-vacay buzz (maybe something about our personalities) or some of us are doing things that help us maintain the benefits.
My personal recommendation is to relive and reflect upon your holiday. All those photos you took? Go back and enjoy them, remembering how you felt when they were taken. Hopefully not frustrated because that darn tourist wouldn’t get out of the way. My wife has a friend who deliberately uses Facebook to save her holiday story: every day she posts photos of her favourite experiences and narrates them, not just for her friends and family but as a means to remember her holiday.
I always mean to curate my photos down to a selection of the best ones but I’m, ahem, not particularly good at following through. Maybe this holiday.
I have additional motivation to go through my photos this time, because I took an actual camera with me, rather than just relying on the rubbish camera on my phone. Which is also a little rubbish. My discontinued Nikon J5, however, is pretty good. Apart from being discontinued – I should have known the price reduction was too good to be true.
And because I’ve now told you of my commitment to organise my memories, research says it’s more likely to happen. By telling you, I’ve entered into an implicit social contract. I’ve got a year before the next holiday; there’s time …
