Challenge 20 - Planning Your Holidays
My main purpose for a vacation is to change pace and environment to refresh perspectives and energies. Getting things done. David Allen.
Today’s challenge is to plan a vacation.
Our lifespans are elongating, and so too our working careers, with recent predictions that 80,000-hour careers will not be uncommon. Our work is becoming more like a marathon with breaks and refueling needed for high performance over the long term.
Taking a vacations is good for your physical and mental health can boost productivity, allowing us to recharge and psychologically detach from work. However, the pandemic has prevented many of us from taking our usual breaks, and annual leave balances have increased more than 30 percent over last year. So maybe in 2022, we should revisit the upside of vacations (or time away from work), and here are some reasons why:
Boost wellbeing. Even the simple act of planning a trip and its anticipation can positively impact people's well-being.
Increase happiness by making the vacation into an experience. Experiential purchases, money spent on doing, tend to provide more enduring happiness than material purchases, money spent on having.
Increase sleep quality. Air New Zealand study showed three times increase in regenerative sleep after a 10-day vacation.
Live longer. Not taking any vacations increased the risk of dying early by 21% and reduced heart disease.
Improve productivity. Detachment from work buffers us from stress, makes us more engaged at work. Burnout is associated with not being able to detach from work.
Enhance creativity. A change of pace and exposure to new and different experiences can boost creativity.
Many of us delay holidays due to being busy or having an important deadline, but a new study shows that you have fun holidays no matter what, and we enjoy them just as much whether they come before or after hard work.
I have always felt refreshed after time out on long-distance walking trails. However, supported by new research, hiking in nature disconnected from all devices for four days led to a 50 percent spike in creativity. I've known this intuitively and yet have not been walking recently, so maybe it's time to lace up the boots and enjoy a dose of creativity and inspiration.
So what might you do on your next break? Tell us here
Reference
1. David Alllen. Author of getting things done
2. Annual leave balances built up during the pandemic, 2021/12/17
3. A study of the impact of the expectation of a holiday on an individual's sense of well-being. 2002. D.Gilbert & J.Abdullah
4. Take a vacation, for your health's sake. 2008. New York Times
5. Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases.2014. Kumar, Killingsworth & Gilovich
6. Sabine Sonnentag, Professor of organizational psychology at the University of Mannheim in Germany,
7. Dr Mark Rosekind. Chief scientist at alertness solutions
Further reading
· Read: Lockdown leave why you should still take a holiday even if you cant go anywhere
Listen: Why we need to take more breaks than ever. hbr.org/podcast/2021
Watch: Why we all need to become vacation superheros https://www.ted.com
** Disclaimer – Fresh start effect & 30 Day challenge by Duncan Young. All content and media on the Build Your Ideal Day Website is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.
