Why after a holiday anxiety arrives before the rest does

The last evening by the sea. The children are already asleep, your partner is folding towels on the balcony, and you are sitting on the edge of the bed with your phone in your hand. You didn’t mean to open it. But you did. A hundred and forty-seven unread messages. One of them has nothing in the subject line but “When you’re back …” and three dots. The room still smells of salt and sun cream, yet something in you has already moved back into the office.

If anxiety has ever caught up with you before you had properly rested — in the last days of a holiday, on the motorway home, on the Sunday evening before your first day back — you are not strange and you are not ungrateful. This piece isn’t about why you can’t switch off on holiday; I wrote about that in The holiday where you can’t switch off: why rest is not a switch. Here I’m interested in something else: the return. Why the way back is often harder than the way there, why the effect of a holiday disappears so quickly, and what is happening in the meantime in the system we call a workplace.

When the holiday ends before it ends

Many people notice that the last days of a holiday no longer feel like a holiday. The body is still on the beach, but the mind is already counting: three more days, two more, packing tomorrow. You could call it the eve of return. The anxiety isn’t responding to something happening now, but to something that is coming. Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety — the same mechanism many people know from Sunday evenings, which I describe in more detail in Sunday anxiety: why the week grabs you before it has even begun.

After a holiday this anxiety is often stronger than at the end of an ordinary weekend, for two reasons. The first is contrast: the longer you have been away, the more the world you are in differs from the world you are returning to. The second is uncertainty: after two or three weeks you genuinely don’t know what is waiting for you. What happened to the project? Who was annoyed that you weren’t there? The brain fills uncertainty with the worst possibilities — not because it is pessimistic, but because it would rather be prepared for too much than too little.

Interestingly, anticipation can also be pleasant. In a large study of adults, Dutch researchers found that people who were still looking forward to a holiday were happier than those who had none planned — precisely because of the joy of anticipation. After they came back, however, the difference had mostly disappeared. So anticipation works in both directions: before we leave it carries us, before we return it pulls us down.

What research knows about how long rest lasts

The Dutch psychologist Jessica de Bloom and her colleagues devoted much of their research to exactly this question. In a 2009 review of studies they found that holidays do improve health and well-being, but the effect is moderate and fades quickly. In a later study they followed people before, during and after a holiday — and the title of the article says almost everything: lots of fun, quickly gone. The improvement in well-being they measured during the holiday had faded within the first week back at work.

Back in the late 1990s, the Israeli researchers Mina Westman and Dov Eden showed something similar. Employees’ burnout fell during their holiday, and within a few weeks of returning it had gone back to its pre-holiday level. Charlotte Fritz and Sabine Sonnentag added an important piece: how fast the effect disappears is linked to the workload waiting for you when you return. The more work that greets you, the sooner the holiday is only a memory.

That doesn’t mean holidays are pointless. It means a holiday isn’t a battery you charge once a year and then draw on until next summer. It’s more like a deep breath: necessary, good for you, but you also need to breathe in between. If your everyday working life takes more from you each day than it gives back, no holiday will balance it out. Ongoing strain that never lets up has its own entry in the knowledge base: chronic stress.

Why coming back is harder than leaving

When you go on holiday, you move from something familiar to something you chose. When you come back, you move from something you chose to something that has been piling up without you. That is a big difference. Leaving is a decision; returning is an obligation.

Something else happens on holiday that we rarely notice: after a few days the nervous system genuinely settles. People often say that only in the second week did they “switch off”, stop waking at six, feel a tension leave their shoulders that they hadn’t even noticed any more. Which means the tension had been so constant that it had become background. And when the background returns, you feel it. Anxiety after a holiday isn’t always a sign that something is badly wrong at work. Sometimes it is a sign that you have finally felt how much tension you carry every day.

In therapy we sometimes use the image of the window of tolerance: the zone in which a person is alert enough to function and calm enough to think. A holiday widens the window. The first day at work, with an overflowing inbox and three meetings, can narrow it fast. If the window narrows too quickly, the body switches to alarm — hence the pounding heart on Monday morning, sleeplessness on Sunday night, sudden irritability.

The workplace has shifted in the meantime

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see the family as a system: each member has their place in it, their role and their relationships, and the system tends towards balance. When someone leaves for a while — for hospital, for studies, to work abroad — the system rearranges itself. Someone takes over their tasks, someone else fills their role, relationships shift slightly. And when they come back, there is no space waiting for them completely untouched.

A workplace works in much the same way. While you were on holiday, someone covered for you. Perhaps they took over your client and now have a good relationship with them. Perhaps they decided something you would have decided differently. Perhaps they were overloaded and feel a slight resentment they will never say out loud. Perhaps your manager noticed during this time that things work without you — or exactly the opposite, that they don’t. These are all small shifts in the system that you pick up on your return before you can put them into words.

Part of post-holiday anxiety is therefore re-entry anxiety: where is my place now? Is it the same? Does anyone resent me? Have I missed something I should know? For people who are used to being the one who holds everything together at work, this anxiety is often even stronger — because their worth is closely tied to being irreplaceable. I wrote about why it is precisely these people who burn out in Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out.

The week comes back at home too

A holiday isn’t only a break from work. It is also a different way of living as a family: more time together, fewer schedules, a different division of roles. Perhaps Dad cooked at the seaside, perhaps Mum read a book for the first time in ages, perhaps the children went to bed later and nobody argued with them about slippers in the morning. When the holiday ends, it isn’t only work that comes back — the old rhythm at home returns too, with its tensions.

That is why post-holiday anxiety rarely happens inside just one person. A couple may argue more often in the last days without knowing why. Children become more demanding because they sense something is changing. Someone in the family starts withdrawing in advance — into their phone, into tidying, into silence. In systemic language we would say that the tension one member carries spills over onto the others. I wrote about how work stress crosses the threshold at home in A crisis at work and at home: the stress you carry through the door.

It helps to name it. Not as a complaint, but as a shared observation: “I’ve noticed I’ve been tense for the last two days. It isn’t because of you. It’s hard for me because we’re going back.” A sentence like this doesn’t remove the anxiety, but it puts it where it belongs — not between you, but beside you.

What a conversation about it can sound like

This is how part of a conversation in a session after the summer might go (composed, not a real person):

“I was on holiday for three weeks. It’s my first week back and I feel as if it never happened.”
“When did that feeling start?”
“If I’m honest — while I was still at the seaside. Last Thursday I looked at my emails. From then on I wasn’t really there any more.”
“What did you see in your emails?”
“Nothing special. That’s the thing. Nothing urgent. But a colleague took over a meeting with a client I look after. And it went well.”
“And what did you feel when you read that?”
A long silence. “That they don’t need me. Stupid, I know.”
“It isn’t stupid. It might be important. What would it mean if they didn’t need you?”

Shifts like this are common. When, beneath a general “I find it hard to come back”, you find a specific moment and a specific feeling, the anxiety takes on a shape. And with a shape you can do something: talk to your colleague, check how your manager sees your role, or look at why your worth is so tightly bound to things not working without you.

An exercise for a soft landing

You don’t need to wait until next summer for this exercise. You can use it after any longer absence — after the holidays, after sick leave, after a long weekend. It starts while you are still away and ends at the end of your first week back.

1. Two days before the end, write down what was most precious to you. Not the place, but the state: slow mornings, walking without a destination, conversations without phones, sleep without an alarm. Choose one thing you will try to keep for at least ten minutes a day.
2. Come home a day before work starts. If at all possible, don’t land at ten on Sunday night. One day at home — for laundry, shopping, a walk — gives your nervous system a halfway station that is neither beach nor office.
3. Plan the first day as a landing day, not a catching-up day. If you can, don’t accept meetings in the morning. Go through your emails by importance, not in order. Set yourself a limit: today I deal with what is urgent; I’ll catch up over the week, not in a day.
4. Talk to the person who covered for you. Thank them and ask what has changed, what you don’t know yet, and where they might need your help. A conversation like this closes the loop: your colleague gets recognition, and you get a picture of the system you are returning to.
5. At the end of your first week, stop for five minutes. How do you feel compared with the day before your holiday? Is there anything you can no longer put up with, now that you have seen how things could be? Write the answer down — not as a conclusion, but as information.

If anxiety grips your body when you return — a pounding heart, a knotted stomach, shallow breathing — a simple technique from the knowledge base can help: breathing with a longer out-breath. A few minutes of slower exhaling tells the body it isn’t in danger, even if the inbox is full.

What anxiety after coming back can tell you

A holiday has one quality we rarely mention: it is a mirror. When you are away for a few weeks, you see your job from the outside. You see how much space it has taken up in your life. You see which people you weren’t afraid of seeing and which you were. You see what you missed and what you didn’t miss at all.

So it makes sense not only to calm post-holiday anxiety, but also to listen to it. If it is a general unease about the transition that eases within a few days, it mainly tells you that the transition is demanding for your nervous system — which is entirely human. But if, when you think about going back, the same person, the same kind of task or the same feeling that you are returning to something that diminishes you keeps appearing, then the anxiety is telling you something about the job itself. You’ll find a short explanation of what anxiety is and how it works in the knowledge base under anxiety.

Sometimes it turns out that, during the weeks away, something decided itself. A person comes back and knows they can’t go on like this. That doesn’t necessarily mean they must hand in their notice straight away. But it is a sign that it is worth taking time to think — and not smothering the thought in the first week of catching up, until the old background returns and with it the old habit of not asking yourself.

When the answer isn’t a better return

Everything I have written so far assumes that the holiday is pleasant and the job basically bearable. That isn’t always true. It is only fair to say where this way of thinking falls short.

When the holiday is harder than work. For some people a holiday is anything but rest: looking after small children with no nursery, caring for an ill parent, long days with a partner with whom the relationship has been crumbling for a while. Then going back to work brings relief, not anxiety — and with the relief comes guilt, because you “should have enjoyed it”. That too is information worth attention. It may not be about work at all, but about what is happening at home.

When a holiday only patches up burnout. If after every holiday you slide back into the same exhaustion within days, and the very thought of work brings you to tears, then the holiday isn’t a solution but a plaster. Burnout needs a change in conditions, not just a break. I describe the signs in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break, and how to go back so that it doesn’t happen again in Returning to work after burnout: how to stop it happening again.

When there is emptiness beneath the anxiety. If rather than unease you feel hopelessness — that nothing makes sense, that nothing brings you joy, neither on holiday nor at home — it may be a sign of depression. In that case talk to your GP. There is more on this in Depression and work: how to work when you can’t — and when not to. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

When the environment is harmful. If you aren’t only returning to work, but to humiliation, intimidation or constant threats, then no soft-landing exercise is the right answer. You need support outside yourself — a trade union, legal advice, people who believe you. In that case your anxiety isn’t an overreaction, but a healthy response to an unhealthy environment.

Where therapy can help

People rarely come to therapy because of post-holiday anxiety. But they often mention it in passing when we are talking about something else: that they don’t know how to rest, that they can’t say no to anyone, that they only feel worthwhile when they are useful. In these stories, coming back from holiday is often just the most visible moment of a pattern that lasts all year. I wrote about how closely self-image can be tied to productivity in Worth only as much as you get done: self-image and productivity.

In sessions we can look together at what exactly grips you when you return, which part of the system — at work or at home — shifts at that moment, and where you know this feeling from. Sometimes it turns out that in your family rest counted as laziness, that you had to be good to be loved. If you are interested in the wider picture of how work, rest and care have flowed through your family across generations, a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, can be useful. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• Anxiety in the last days of a holiday is anticipatory anxiety — a response to a return that hasn’t happened yet, not to what is happening now.
• Research shows that the effect of a holiday often fades within the first week, and the more work is waiting, the faster it goes.
• A workplace is a system that rearranged itself while you were away; talking to the person who covered for you helps you find your place again.
• The first week back is part of the holiday: plan a landing, not a catch-up.
• If burnout, hopelessness or a harmful environment lies behind the anxiety, the answer isn’t a better return, but help and change; in a crisis in Slovenia, call 01 520 99 00 or 116 123.