How to stop work anxiety from sabotaging your vacation

Last year, Madison Winey, 29, wanted to use her vacation days to drive from San Francisco, California, where she lives, to Bend, Oregon, to visit her family. But taking time off from her job as a lawyer at Goodwin Procter has always felt “more stressful than it’s worth, especially if you’re only away for a few days,” she said. Winey would have to start planning her absence weeks before she left, and she was expected to set the times when she would check e-mail.

She had booked to visit her parents when she thought there was going to be a lull at work, but a project schedule got pushed back two weeks, forcing her to postpone the trip. “All I needed was nine hours on a Saturday to drive to Bend, and even that wasn’t possible,” she said. When she finally arrived in Oregon, Winey worked around the clock.

While decades of research have found that taking time off is good for workers’ mental and physical health, Winey’s experience is not unique. For those lucky enough to have paid time off work, most of whom are full-time office workers, using up those precious days can also trigger anxiety about returning.

In a November survey, careers website Monster found that 87% of more than 1,000 US workers across all industries experience post-vacation stress and anxiety, which the company called “paid leave issues”, and that 72% of workers preferred not to take vacations to avoid this stress. Psychologists and therapists classify post-vacation distress as anticipatory anxiety, an umbrella term to describe fear and worry about bad things that might happen in the future.

Dr. Rebecca Brendal, president of the American Psychiatric Association, compared the experience to Sunday dreads, a term popularized on social media for the dread you feel at the end of the week about going back to work. It’s a cause for concern during this holiday season as it dovetails with a sharp rise in burnout among workers in recent months, she said.

“We know that mental health concerns and anxiety are on the rise. The stress that Americans face every day has reached a point where taking time off becomes stressful,” said Dr. Brendal.

In a widely cited study published in 2000, researchers found that taking a vacation every year reduced the overall risk of death. Brooks Gump, professor of public health at Syracuse University and co-author of this paper, conducted a similar study last year. He and his team found that while workers in low-stress jobs felt calmer and less anxious before, during, and after vacation, these feelings were not apparent in people in high-stress jobs.

“Some jobs allow you to relax and get back to work, but high-stress jobs don’t really provide context for a real break,” said Dr. Gump.

Die Aarons-Mele, author of “The Anxious Achiever” [O realizador ansioso], said she hears about this phenomenon frequently as a consultant to corporate teams. “Few work cultures really encourage people to disconnect, and most view continuous work as a badge of honor,” she said.

Some time later, Winey left the law firm and took on a less client-focused, more flexible role. But not everyone can just leave. And the ability of many workers to take time off, let alone enjoy it, depends on the industry or company culture.

Still, if you can manage to take a vacation, there are small steps you can take to minimize stress and reap its many benefits.

Create a “Launch Pad”

More than half of Monster’s survey respondents reported having to work extra hours to catch up when they return from paid time off. One way to reduce stress upon returning is to make time for it before you leave, creating a “launch pad” for yourself, said Simone Stolzoff, author of the still-unpublished book “The Good Enough Job” [O emprego quase bom].

“The ramp is basically the time you spend, while you’re still working, preparing for what you can do when you get back to work,” he said. You can make a list of priorities to tackle when you get back, find co-workers willing to take on urgent tasks while you’re away, or set up a time to talk to them when you get back.

Prepare everyone around you before you leave, Dr. Brendal said. “Effective managers and leaders that I appreciate start sending the out-of-office message a week before they actually leave,” she noted. “When I first saw this, I thought, ‘Why are they announcing the holidays a week in advance?’ So I realized it’s about setting reasonable expectations.”

If you set up your away message before or at the start of your trip, Dr. Brendal said, make it clear who can be contacted in your absence in the event of an actual crisis. Also, include a realistic time when you’ll respond, which could be a few days after you go back and check the pile of emails.

Use technology to your advantage

If your workplace uses additional communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, set detailed messaging for those as well. You can even delete work apps from your phone, or at least turn off their notifications. Making it clear in your away messages that you will be out of reach allows you to truly disconnect.

Entrepreneur Khemaridh Hy, 43, still remembers returning from his honeymoon 10 years ago to find a mountain of emails from work at financial firm BlackRock. Any prolonged relaxation disappeared. “I swear, I probably got my first gray hairs on that flight back, because there were about 1,700 unread messages,” he said.

“It’s almost like you’re condemned for doing it and condemned for not doing it: if you check your e-mail and stay on top of things, your wife will say, ‘You’re always thinking about work.’ But if you don’t, you know the minute you turn that thing back on your life will suck,” he said. Although the honeymoon was ten years ago, it still looms large in his memory as a vacation that, while enjoyable, also caused him a great deal of anxiety — a feeling that has continued nearly every time he’s taken a vacation since.

Now Hy uses email filters to keep your inbox from becoming overloaded. “I always skip messages where I’m not on the ‘To’ line. Doesn’t mean I won’t read it, but I’m not going to prioritize reading it,” he said.

Allow yourself some check-ins (limited)

As counterintuitive as it sounds, if emails back from vacation are keeping you up at night, you can schedule periods during vacation to just clear your inbox, said Aarons-Mele, who almost always takes time off during the holidays. to read the messages. She also shares this plan with her husband, for them to hold each other accountable.

“He says, ‘I have a call at 2 pm, but I won’t be online after that.’ And I say, ‘I’m checking email today, but not tomorrow,'” she explained. These specific, narrow goals, she said, can keep work from taking up the entire day.

Alternatively, you could enlist a coworker to send you an update every now and then, ensuring things are going well, said Laura Vanderkam, author of “Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters ” [Tranquilidade na terça-feira: 9 maneiras de acalmar o caos e ganhar tempo para o que interessa]. She said it was “the equivalent of reading 300 emails, but much more efficient”.

Be intentional about doing activities outside of work

You may need to make a plan of what you’ll do with your free time so you’re not tempted to check email or think about work.

Many American workers “have internalized this belief that if we’re not moving forward, we’re somehow falling behind,” Stolzoff said. “Our idea of ​​self-worth and identity has become so entangled with productivity that when we’re not being productive, we think we’re somehow inefficient.”

As a result, “people get stuck in a kind of chicken-and-egg problem, where they work all the time and don’t know what to do when they’re not working, and because they don’t know what to do when they’re not working, they end up working all the time. all,” he said.

This is often an issue for Aarons-Mele when she takes time off. “I’m the worst – I’ll wake up at a beach resort and think, ‘What now?'”

To avoid falling into that trap, she said, you can schedule activities over the holidays that require focus: sign up for a class, volunteer with an organization or visit a museum, whatever feels rewarding and distracts you from your screens.

Plan a fun day for when you get back

If you can get a break between going home and going back to the office, put something you enjoy in your calendar for that time, Vanderkam said.

“Say you’re going on a trip and you come back the day before you start work. You can make a date with friends that afternoon or watch a movie that night,” she said. “This will ensure that you’re not obsessed with the idea of ​​starting work the next day. You’ll probably be thinking about the fun you’ll still have instead of the anxiety of starting work.”

Remember: the worst results probably won’t happen

Often, the scenes you envision about all the things that could go wrong at work while you’re away or the challenging situations you’ll have to come back to are just your brain making up catastrophes, said Bisma Anwar, a licensed therapist for the telehealth platform. Talkspace: “We tend to blow things up in our mind, and they’re usually not as bad as we thought.”

To escape this mindset, suggested Anwar, lock yourself in the moment by meditating or working out so bad thoughts don’t spoil your free time. By doing this, you can look back on everything you accomplished before the holidays, Aarons-Mele said, “and tell yourself, I worked hard, I did a lot, I accomplished a lot, I deserve a break.”

And if you’re going to be away for a longer period, remember that most issues that crop up at work in the first few days are likely to be irrelevant when you get back, Vanderkam said, so there’s not much point in worrying about them from a distance. If something is important enough to demand your attention, it will pop up again when you get back to work and are ready to address it.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves