The holiday where you can’t switch off: why rest is not a switch

Day three of the holiday. You are sitting on the terrace of the apartment, the sea is exactly the colour it was in the photos, and the children are already in the water. You have a coffee in one hand and your phone in the other, and you tell yourself: “I’ll just check whether there’s anything urgent.” There is nothing urgent. But when you put the phone down, you are already composing a reply to a message nobody has sent you, and working out who will put together the report on Friday instead of you.

Then a second thought arrives, one that is almost worse than the first: “What is wrong with me that I can’t even manage a holiday?”

This piece is for everyone who has ever come back from a holiday as tired as when they left — and quietly blamed themselves for it. I would like to show that switching off is not a matter of willpower, and that a holiday is not an automatic rest button. It is, however, something you can learn, and something that often has more to do with the role you play at work and at home than with how “disciplined” you are.

Switching off is not a switch

When we say “you need to switch off”, it sounds like flicking a switch: work off, holiday on. But body and mind do not work like that. In the late 1990s, the Dutch psychologists Theo Meijman and Gijsbertus Mulder described the effort–recovery model: every effort at work leaves a trace in the body — fatigue, heightened arousal, tension — which is only wiped away once the systems that were under load are, for a while, no longer under load. The key words are no longer. If you are physically on the beach but mentally still in a meeting, they remain under load. The body is not very good at telling the difference between doing something and thinking about it intensely.

That is why a holiday in itself does not guarantee recovery. It only offers the opportunity. In one of her studies of holidays, the researcher Jessica de Bloom and her colleagues followed how people’s well-being changed from day to day. Well-being improved quickly during the holiday and peaked at around the eighth day. That figure matters to me not because anyone should take exactly eight days off, but because it says something else: rest needs a few days just to get going. If you spend the first three days with one foot still at work, you keep sending that start back to the beginning.

The four ingredients of recovery

The most useful framework for understanding what actually works when we rest comes from the German psychologists Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz. In 2007 they published a questionnaire on recovery experiences and distinguished four ingredients which keep appearing in research as the ones that genuinely restore people in their free time.

• Psychological detachment. Not just not working, but not thinking about work either. In research, this is the ingredient most closely linked to lower exhaustion — and the one people most often fail at.
• Relaxation. A state of low arousal: the body calms down, breathing slows, the muscles let go. A walk, a swim, reading, music.
• Mastery. Something new and slightly challenging that has nothing to do with work: a diving course, a new hiking goal, cooking a dish you have never tried. Paradoxically, effort can be restful too, as long as it is a different kind of effort.
• Control. The sense that you decide about your own time. Not someone else’s schedule, not a list of obligations, but your own choice of what to do and when.

When people say “I can’t switch off on holiday”, they almost always mean the first ingredient. But the others are often missing too. A holiday can be packed with a programme someone else put together, or full of obligations to the family that are simply another kind of job. Then detaching from work still does not add up to rest.

Why it is the holiday that shows you can’t

During the working week, restlessness is often hidden. It has tasks, deadlines and people to hang on to. When all of that disappears, it is left on its own — and suddenly you can hear it. Many people describe to me how they feel worse in the first days of a holiday than at work: irritable, empty, anxious for no real reason. Some even fall ill, as if the body had been waiting for the first moment it was allowed to let go.

Part of the explanation is physiological. In 2006, Jos Brosschot and colleagues described what they called perseverative cognition — repetitive thinking about worries and obligations — which prolongs the body’s stress response long after the stressor itself has gone. The same phenomenon, seen from a more everyday angle, is described in the knowledge base entry on rumination. The thought of an unanswered message is not neutral: your heart, breathing and muscles respond to it as if the task were right in front of you.

The other part of the explanation is more personal. For many people, work is not just work but the way they know they are all right. If your worth is tightly bound to how much you get done, an empty day is a threat — not something restful. I have written more about this in Worth only as much as you get done. And when this pattern becomes more pronounced, the professional literature describes it as work addiction: the one addiction people reward.

The role that comes with you to the seaside

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we look at the workplace much as we look at a family: as a system with roles, unwritten rules, alliances and triangles. In every team there is someone who “holds things together”, someone who puts out fires, someone who knows where everything is, and someone everyone turns to when something goes wrong. These roles are not written into any employment contract, but they are very real.

When a person with such a role goes on holiday, the system feels the gap. Someone sends you “just a quick question”. Someone else writes nothing, but you know the project will stall until you are back. Like any system, it tries to keep the balance it is used to — and the easiest way is to pull you back. Not out of malice, but because nobody else has taken on what you carry.

Often, though, we know this role from much earlier. A child who made sure there was peace at home, that mum did not get upset and that a younger brother got his dinner, readily ends up as an adult in a place where they again make sure everything keeps running. A short explanation of these patterns is in the knowledge base under roles in the family. Someone who has always been the reliable one finds it hard to allow themselves to be unreachable — because being unreachable does not feel like rest to them, but like letting someone down. It is no coincidence that it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out.

This is why the advice “just don’t look at your phone” so rarely works. The phone is not the cause; it is the door. And behind the door is a role for which you have not yet found a stand-in — neither in the team nor in yourself.

What happens at home when you are only half on holiday

A holiday is not only a break from work. It is also one of the few longer stretches of time when a family or a couple is really together. And that is exactly why a “half switched-off” person does not spend it alone. Your partner notices that your mind is elsewhere. The children notice the phone. Work becomes the third party in the relationship — what systemic therapy calls a triangle; you will find a short explanation under triangulation. Tension between two people is not talked through but redirected onto something third: “you’re on your phone again” is easier to say than “I miss you”.

The conversation on the terrace often goes something like this (composed, not a real person):

“Are you in your emails again?”
“Just a quick look. If I reply now, I’ll have peace afterwards.”
“You said that yesterday too.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like. If I don’t do it, nobody will.”
“I know. Not here either.”

There are two truths in this short exchange. The first is his: he really believes one glance will buy him peace. The second is hers: she is not talking about emails, but about him not being there with her. When a couple gets caught up in an argument about the phone, both are left alone with what really mattered. What constant connection to work does during the working day is the subject of Always reachable: what a phone that never switches off does to you; here I am interested mainly in what this pattern does to those few weeks a year when you could return to the people you work for in the first place.

A body that hasn’t got the message yet

Even when you consciously decide to switch off, the body does not follow straight away. After months of constant readiness, the nervous system is set to alertness: you jump at the sound of a notification, you find it hard to sit still, your sleep is shallow. This is not a flaw of character, but an adaptation to the environment you have been living in for a long time. A short explanation of what this state means for the body is under chronic stress.

So it makes sense not to set your expectations too high for the first days of a holiday. The restlessness that shows up when you stop is not proof that you “can’t rest”. It is a sign that your body has finally been given room to show how much it has been carrying. If you give it a few days, it often settles by itself — provided you don’t send it back to the office every morning.

Exercise: a holiday that starts at home

This exercise has three parts — before you leave, during the holiday and on the last day. You can try it as early as your next long weekend. The rest plan template can help you prepare in more detail.

1. Write down what you carry in your head. The day before you leave, take twenty minutes and list every open item — including the ones nobody expects of you but you carry anyway. Next to each, note who will take it over or how long it can wait.
2. Hand over the role, not just the tasks. Don’t only say who will send the report, but also who people should turn to when “something goes wrong”. If there is no such person, that tells you something about the system, not about you.
3. Agree on one window, if you really need it. If switching off completely is not realistic for you, set one short, pre-agreed time for checking — say, ten minutes every other day — and tell the people you are with. Outside that window, the work phone does not exist.
4. Check the four ingredients every day. In the evening ask yourself: did I forget about work for at least a few hours today? Did I relax? Did I try something new? Did I decide something for myself? Don’t judge yourself; just notice what is missing and add exactly that tomorrow.
5. On the last day, take an hour for the transition. Don’t read all your emails; instead write down three things you noticed about yourself on holiday — and one you want to keep when you go back.

If any of these steps stirs up strong unease, that is the most valuable part of the exercise. It shows you where your role is most firmly anchored.

When switching off completely is not the right goal

I want to be honest here: it is not the same for everyone. The researcher Glen Kreiner showed that people differ in how much they want to keep work and private life apart. Some like a sharp line, others a more blurred one — and people feel best when their environment matches their preference. For someone who is more unsettled by uncertainty than by a quick look at the inbox, ten minutes of agreed checking can be more calming than a week of enforced silence spent building catastrophes in their head.

Circumstances are not the same for everyone either. A self-employed person with no stand-in, or someone just starting a new job, cannot always switch off in the way an employee with proper cover can. So please don’t read this as yet another list of things you are doing wrong. The goal is not total disconnection at any cost, but a holiday after which you feel that, at least for a while, you were truly where you were.

And sometimes the problem is not the holiday at all. If your job is such that two weeks a year can do nothing for it, the question is whether it is reasonable to expect the whole repair from a holiday. The answer then lies elsewhere — in a conversation about workload, in thinking about boundaries, sometimes in a decision about the job itself. That burnout is not only an individual matter is also the subject of Burnout is not laziness.

When there is more to it than habit

Restlessness on holiday is common and is not in itself a sign of illness. But if you notice that it does not settle even after several days, that you can’t sleep, that you are flooded by strong anxiety or apathy, that nothing brings you joy any more, or that your body is warning you with symptoms you can’t explain, it is worth talking to your GP. Difficulties like these can be a sign of burnout, depression or an anxiety disorder and deserve a professional assessment, not just better holiday planning.

A conversation that takes a wider view can help too. In therapy we often don’t stop at the question of how to switch off, but look at who taught you that you must always be available, and what would happen if, for a while, you were not. Once these questions find an answer, holidays often become easier by themselves. And if what worries you more than the holiday is coming back from it, you may find Why after a holiday anxiety arrives before the rest does more useful.

What to remember

• A holiday is an opportunity for recovery, not automatic rest — rest needs a few days to get going.
• Recovery is made up of four experiences: detachment, relaxation, mastery and control. Detaching from work is only one of them.
• The restlessness that comes when you stop is not proof that you “can’t rest”, but often a sign of how much your body has been carrying.
• The phone is not the cause but the door: behind it is a role in the system for which you have not yet found a stand-in.
• If the restlessness does not settle after several days, or comes with sleeplessness and apathy, talk to your doctor.