Do any of your vacation (or holiday) days go unused?
According to the U.S. Travel Association, in the US in 2018, there were a total of 768 million days of unused vacation time.
Do you ever hesitate to take time of work because you’re too busy. Or perhaps you take time off and find yourself checking emails or joining meetings online even during your time off?
However, data suggests that over 50% of managers feel burned out, meaning that taking time off from work has never been more important.
To create sustainable working environments, where employees and managers are able to recuperate and recharge, it’s important to not only regularly take available vacation time, but also to fully understand its benefits and encourage your team members to plan time off. This Harvard Business Review article by Rebecca Zucker details how taking time off benefits the mind, body, and soul.
Mind
The cognitive impact when you’re overwhelmed with work can include cognitive fatigue, difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, and impaired problem-solving ability. Taking time off provides greater opportunity for rest and can support better sleep (both quantity and quality), which can help unclutter your mind to create more mental space. Improved rest and sleep during vacation also helps you return to work able to think more clearly as well as be more focused and productive, which has shown benefits to both the individual and the employer. For example, an Ernst & Young study showed that for every additional 10 hours of vacation time that employees took, their year-end performance improved 8%.
Body
Everyday work pressures can result in elevated levels of the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine, similar to if you felt you were in physical danger. An increase in stress hormones has the effect of suppressing your immune system so your body can channel its energy to flee from (or fight). Relaxing on vacation can reduce the levels of these stress hormones and allow your immune system to recover, making you less prone to getting sick. Conversely, if stress hormones stay chronically elevated due to lack of rest and recovery time that comes as a result of putting off or forgoing vacation, you will be more susceptible to not only colds or the flu, but also vulnerable longer term to more serious illnesses like heart disease or cancer.
Soul
While the mental and physical benefits of vacation have been frequently touted, what is less commonly discussed is how vacation can impact us more profoundly on a deeper, more spiritual level. When you take time away from work to go on vacation, assuming you can mostly unplug, this break can allow you to tune out much of this external noise and tune back into your true self. This reconnecting with our true self, can have benefits when we return to work as we may be better able to focus on the work that has the most meaning to us, which can lead to further career development opportunities.
You can read the full article here.
