Why a holiday doesn’t always feel like a rest

On overwhelm, the skills we already have for managing it and why changing location doesn’t always change the pattern.

Is it us or have you noticed that holidays have a way of never quite living up to the long-awaited break you needed?  You’ve done all the right things like make sure that the out-of-office is on, the diary is genuinely clear and yet, your tiredness hasn’t lifted the way it was supposed to. We have seriously looked forward to this period of switching off!  But what actually happened is that the same restlessness that followed us out of the office followed us onto the plane as well. 

It’s tempting to read this as bad luck, a badly timed holiday or needing a few more days to properly unwind. On the classic scales used to measure the stress of life events, going on holiday is itself counted as a stressful event, not because anything has gone wrong but because it disrupts routine, and disrupted routine is what these scales are actually measuring. 

Which suggests the useful question isn’t why this particular holiday didn’t work. It’s whether we’ve actually built the skills that make rest possible, or whether we’ve simply built the skills that let us keep going and assumed the two were the same thing. 

A holiday and a change programme are more alike than you’d expect

The Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale, first developed in the 1960s, gave a numerical weighting to dozens of significant life events, from bereavement and divorce through to smaller disruptions like a change of job or a house move. Holiday sits well down the list, but it sits on the list, close to Christmas and other major celebrations, precisely because the scale isn’t measuring whether an event is welcome so much as how much it asks us to adjust. 

A 2023 update of the scale, based on a large UK sample, kept this same basic finding intact even after modernising the language and re-weighting some items. The broad pattern held. What counts as stressful has surprisingly little to do with whether something is good or bad news, and much more to do with how much it interrupts the routines we normally rely on to regulate ourselves. 

We think this is genuinely useful for how leaders think about change more broadly. A restructure, a merger, a new system and, yes, a holiday can all register in the body as the same basic category of event, because all of them ask us to adjust, all at once, to something unfamiliar. None of that means holidays are bad for us. It means the discomfort some people feel on a break isn’t a sign the holiday is wrong. It’s a sign that adjustment of any kind takes something out of us and that we tend to notice it more when we’ve stopped moving long enough to feel it. 

The arrangements nobody has written down

Family holidays give us something else to consider. Most households run on an informal set of arrangements that nobody has ever sat down and written out. Roles have settled over time, routines hold the week together and everybody has some corner of their own to retreat into. It isn’t a system anybody designed but it tends to work, largely because it tells people what is expected of them and gives them a quiet sense of control over their own day.

A holiday removes a good deal of that in one go. Whoever does the organising becomes responsible for a fortnight they can’t actually control, from the weather to the queue at the airport. Whoever does the caring carries on caring, only now without the usual props of home. Children lose their routine and much of their independence at the same time and there is often an unspoken expectation that everyone will spend considerably more time together than usual and visibly enjoy it. Backer and Schänzel’s research into family holidays found much the same thing and a break intended to relieve strain can quietly add to it.

When that tips into tension, it is easy to read it as a sign that something is wrong with the family. More often it looks like a group of people feeling their way towards a temporary new arrangement without any of the usual signals to guide them, which is uncomfortable rather than broken.

Change at work asks something remarkably similar of people. The roles, routines and small everyday sources of competence that help people feel capable are unsettled all at once. Leaders find they can no longer shape outcomes the way they once did, managers are asked to support their teams without the structures they would normally lean on, and people elsewhere in the organisation become less certain who decides what, or what good work looks like now, or where they stand with colleagues they thought they knew well. What can look from the outside like resistance is often something far more ordinary, people trying to recover a little certainty and capability while the organisation works out its own new equilibrium.

The skills that already work, if we let them

Most people who are managing significant pressure at work already have a functioning set of skills for coping with overwhelm. They protect certain hours and say no to some things so they can properly say yes to others. They know, at some level, that they perform better on enough sleep and worse when they’re running on empty. 

The trouble is that many of us stop applying those same skills the moment we’re meant to be resting. We treat a demanding project at work as something that requires boundaries and pacing and then treat our own time off as something that should happen to us, without needing any of the same deliberate attention. Taking a proper break, protecting some time alone, actually getting enough sleep, these aren’t separate holiday skills. They are the same skills we already use to manage overwhelm at work, just as easily forgotten when we finally have the chance to use them for ourselves. 

What we bring with us

Alain de Botton’s writing on travel makes a related point well. He noted that we tend to imagine a change of place will change us, while forgetting that we pack our stresses, habits and patterns along with everything else. In other words, whatever our relationship with rest and overwhelm looks like at home tends to travel with us. A different view from the window rarely changes what we do with our own tiredness once we’re looking at it. 

For leaders in the middle of a demanding period of change, this is worth considering honestly. Rest is sometimes treated as something to be earned once the current crisis has passed, a reward waiting at the far end of the busyness rather than one of the working parts that makes the busyness sustainable. But overwhelm that isn’t genuinely tended to at work doesn’t stay behind when the laptop closes. It simply changes location, and it’s often still there on day three of the holiday that was supposed to fix it. 

Think about the skills you already use to manage overwhelm at work. Which of them do you actually bring with you when you’re supposed to be resting, and which do you set aside the moment you’re officially off?

If overwhelm and pace are showing up as a pattern in your own leadership or your team, the Sticky Change Sense Check is a useful next step. Ten questions, ten minutes and a clearer picture of where change is landing and where it isn’t. 

Download the Sticky Change Sense Check

Editorial note: This post uses established stress-scale research and travel writing as an entry point into a familiar leadership pattern, namely the gap between the coping skills we apply at work and the ones we allow ourselves on a break. It is intended as an illustration rather than clinical guidance. 

References

Backer, E. and Schänzel, H.A. (2013). Family Holidays, Vacation or Obli-cation? Tourism Recreation Research, 38(2), 159-173.

Holmes, T.H., & Rahe, R.H. (1967). The Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2), 213-218.

Wallace, D., Cooper, N.R., Sel, A., & Russo, R. (2023). The Social Readjustment Rating Scale: Updated and modernised. PLOS ONE, 18(12), e0295943.

De Botton, A. (2002). The Art of Travel. Hamish Hamilton.