May 14, 2015 • 34 mins
Why do some people take vacations and others fret to take off time? We'll find out which nations go on holiday the most and least, the benefits of downtime, and we'll discuss how time off messes with the mind (in a good way).
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie, you're
looking forward to vacation. I am. I love a good vacation.
To good vacation, you know, just really really recharges you. Yeah,
(00:25):
and I've been thinking about I mean, it's only May
right in my My vacation is not until July, and
I like every couple of days, I just sit there
and think, yes, one day I will be going on
you vacation. Now, A lot of people don't know this,
but compulsory vacation in the United States was almost a thing.
(00:47):
Uh William Howard taft In he proposed giving American workers
two to three months of vacation every year. Can you imagine?
I really cannot imagine how that would work, but it
would get speaking from the vantage point of today's modern
vacation adverse culture, Yeah, particularly in the United States. You
(01:08):
hear that, you know, two to three months in nineteen ten,
and you sort of wonder what Americans would be like
if they had that today, how that would change the culture. Um,
of course this brings up this idea of a rather
question when did humans start vacationing in earnest And we
can't say, uh, this exact date, we can't point to it.
(01:29):
But we have a couple of clues because, according to
psychologist Jessica to Bloom, ancient hieroglyphic graffiti found engraved into
the walls of the Pyramid of Jos their state quote
Hand and his brother have been here to make an
excursion and enjoy Memphis. These hieroglyphics date back to two
(01:50):
thousand years ago. I'm picturing Uma with their Rick Steve's
travel backpacks standing in ancient Egypt. I love that they
just put a little graffiti to pyramid, like, you know,
a sort of Julie was here, Robert was here. I
was like, hey, we were here, we were visiting from Memphis.
That was a vacation blogging of the day, indeed, very
short and to the point. Uh. The etymological origin of
(02:13):
the word vacation also dates back to the time of
the Roman Empire and stems from the Latin word of
the kato, which means being free from being at leisure,
having time for and Yet it wasn't until the twentieth
century that some nations began to recognize and institutionalize vacations.
(02:33):
All right, So where are we now in terms of
vacation appreciation and the vacation deprivation. Well, there's a two
thousand thirteen survey that came out that was handled by
Expedient and they looked at different countries, different cultures to see,
all right, who's who's really maxing out on their available vacation,
(02:53):
who's pulling back, who has the most available, etcetera. And
they found that the average Japanese worker gets thirteen days
off each year but only takes five UM on the end. Uh.
In a similar vein South Koreans UH get an average
of nineteen days off but only takes seven. So that's
kind of like the low end of of taking advantage
(03:15):
of your vacation in the modern world. Uh. Here in America,
Americans tend to get twelve days off a year on average.
Uh they'll take tenidate again on average, while Mexicans get
fourteen days of vacation and only take keen. So we
haven't really hit in upon any of the real vacation
levers yet. For that, by and large, you have to
go to Europe because Europeans in general tend to score
(03:38):
twenty five to thirty vacation days a year um, and
among the European nations, the French and Spanish tend to
take the full thirty available to them. Germans tend to
take only twenty eight. And for another high vacation country,
you have to travel across the ocean to Brazil, where
they follow suit and generally take the full three. Wow,
(04:01):
that's very leisurely beautiful. Top of the spectrum Brazil, Spain,
France and Germany, bottom South Korea and Japan. Now I
know we alluded to this, but the US is the
only advanced economy with no national vacation policy, and one
in four workers have no paid vacation at all, which
makes you wonder, are we just really addicted and obsessed
(04:21):
with work or is the structure just not there to
support vacationing well. Americans tend to put more hours in
during so called leisure hours at night and on weekends,
pointing to this idea that we might be sort of
addicted to our work. And economists Don hammer Mesh and
Elena san Connelli published their findings on American work habits
(04:43):
in two thousand and fourteen, and they found that in
a typical weeknight, a quarter of US employees did some
kind of work between ten at night and six in
the morning. Wow. Yeah, it seems very hardcore. And on
the weekends, one in three workers in the u US
we're on the job. Now, you can compare that to
one in five in France, Germany in the Netherlands. So
(05:07):
what happens when you take these hard working Americans and
you strong arm them into something called deliberate periodic rest, Well,
they don't like it. And we know this because there's
a four year study by Leslie Purlow of the Harvard
Business School and her colleagues who tracked the work habits
of employees at the Boston Consulting Group. And in one experiment,
(05:29):
each of five consultants on a team took a break
from work one day a week. That's kind of a
big deal, right, Um, that's that's a significant chunk of
your work week. And then in a second experiment, every
member of a team scheduled one weekly night of uninterrupted
personal time, even though they were accustomed to working from
home in the evening, so not even checking your email, right,
(05:52):
So understandably, people in this experiment they felt a little
bit annoyed by this, right, because their routines had been
disrupted and they felt like they might get behind or
they would be out of the loop. And this is
the thing though, After five months, employees experimenting with deliberate
periodic rest were more satisfied with their jobs, more likely
to envision a long term future of the company, and
(06:15):
more content with their work, left balance and prouder of
their accomplishments. They just had to have it forced upon them,
like essentially tazed in the hallway and their their work
email removed from their phone exactly, and it's like her,
now now you must rest, mandatory rest. But this mandatory
rust really helped them to reset their minds. And in
(06:36):
order to do that, you have to get to something
called the default mode network. Yeah, the default mode network.
And we've talked about this before in previous podcasts. I
think it came up especially during the scientists in the
Shaman episodes. We did uh dealing with the psychedelics, But
essentially it boils down to this the stream of human consciouness. Right,
(06:56):
that's the analogy we tend to to to use. But
if we were to use the more fluid dynamic e term,
it's not a single stream, but it's more like an
elaborate convergence of currents and bodies. Then, even when we're resting,
there's a lot of activity going on. Uh. In fact,
we've known since the early twentieth century that there's actually
a considerable amount of activity in the resting brain. Now, granted,
(07:20):
a lot of that is simply your brain maintaining unconscious
control of the of the body spaceship, but a lot
of stuff is going on under the hood. Um, go
back to that's when a team of neuroscientists led by
Marcus Roushell of Washington University in St. Louis discovered that
the brain constantly demands of all the energy the body produces.
(07:42):
And if you really need to put your thinking cap
on for something, you know, to do your taxes or
you know, try and figure out what the tip is
that at a restaurant, Um anything math for me? I
guess um, you're only gonna add five on top of that.
It's kind of like looking into the process the section
of the window task manager, right, you suddenly see all
(08:03):
these different things going on, and you're wondering, well, what's
using all of the resources of the computer. Well, um.
In this research, they also noted that a certain set
of scattered brain regions quieted down during serious contemplation. So
you're put on the thinking cap and these sections go quiet,
but then they crank back up when the patient's mind
is just idly wandering and daydreaming. Uh. And they were
(08:24):
engaged in coordinated communication with one another, So scientists can
to label this day dreaming chatter as the default mode network,
though we now know that it's just one of at
least five different resting state networks that are involved in vision, hearing, movement, attention,
and memory. So it's in this state that you know,
on a good day, you're you know, you're setting there,
(08:47):
you're just thinking idly. Your thoughts are kind of doing
their own thing, and you're you know, thinking about something
you're excited about in the future. You're thinking about, you know,
some pleasant memory in the past or something you saw
on TV. Right general, you know, mundane or ales and stuff.
But then also on a bad day, this is where
the brain is gnawing on itself, right, you're worrying over work, stress,
You're it's bashing us in the face with embarrassing or
(09:09):
or downright traumatic memories. From the past. So it's a
place of introspection, place of depressive thoughts and uh, it's
a place of endless ego at tinkering with the story
narrative that we build around our lives. And one of
the reasons why it's so important to recharge and to
try to to get into that default mode network in
a positive way is because that's when you do that
(09:32):
sort of mind wandering again. And you would pointed out
your mind is going to take up twenty percent of
resources no matter what it's doing, right, so if you're
meditating or if you're taking a test, maybe test, but
so you when you get into the default mode network
and you allow the mind chatter too dim and just
(09:52):
kind of meander, well, that's when you get some really
good stuff going on. And this is from Fairesh Chabra
from Scientific American and his article why your brain needs
more downtime. He says, while mind wandering, we replay conversations
that we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blenders
as a way of learning to avoid them in the future.
So it's kind of a safe space, um to revisit
(10:17):
some of those and not in a negative way. We
shuffle through all those neglected mental post it notes listing
half finished projects, and we moll over the aspects of
our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions.
We sink into scenes from childhood and catapult ourselves into
different hypothetical futures, and we subject ourselves to a kind
of moral performance review, questioning how we have treated others lately.
(10:41):
These moments of introspection are also one way we form
a sense of self, which is essentially a story we
continually tell ourselves. So that's one of the reasons why
we have to have that time away from our work,
so that our brains can actually dwell on solutions, dwell
on how who improve ourselves, and also create a better
(11:02):
sense of self. And to illustrate this point that our
brains need to take advantage of every bit of downtime
that they can get, consider this two thousand and twelve
study about blinking. I feel like I've been talking about
blinking a lot lately. It's from to Mommy Nicano of
Osaka University, who recorded electrical impulses in people's brains as
(11:23):
they watched clips of British comedian Missed Being and you
found that the brain can engage in the default mode
network and the blink of an eye literally when you
blink your eyes, the default mode network comes alive. And uh,
the idea is that the brain is trying to catch
its breath, even if it's just for that the fraction
(11:45):
of a second and blinking. And so when you think
about vacation, it turns out that it's just the right
kind of distraction for the default mode network, and it's
really kind of like an extended blink for the mind.
I can also see though, with if someone as a
particularly busy brain, they might they it might almost be
a little apprehensive about going on the vacation because it
(12:07):
brings to mind just setting on the beach, like next
to your brain in a beach chair, and your brain
is just like, hey, what's up, let's talk about about stuff.
You know, it's like a fight right now. I'm trying
to relax here. I don't want to talk about stuff
all right. So what are some of the general benefits
of vacation. Some of these are no brainers, no pun intended,
(12:27):
but but just to roll through them. Uh, vacations revitalize
our mind and body by distancing us from our job
related stress. Um. I with a few times that I've
traveled essentially to the other side of the planet. I
like to think of it in terms of I'm actually
placing the center of the Earth between me and anything
that could conceivably stress me out, you know, So it's
(12:50):
like a nice earth barrier there. Um. Also, vacations allow
us to drop into a new place, a new culture,
surrounded by new people, new set of experiences, and a
new environment for our mind to chew over. So suddenly
you have all of this brand new stuff, be it
you know, pleasant brand new stuff like the wonderful tourist
attraction you're at, or the more negative stuff like the
(13:13):
tourists that are with you at the tourist attraction that
you've been looking forward to. Uh. And of course all
the newness can generate new ideas and thoughts. And we
also tend to kick forced concentration to the curb side,
so by and larger going on vacation, there's not gonna
be any crunch time. We're like, all right, I really
got to figure this out, unless it's you know, getting
around town in a far in metropolis. And finally, when
(13:37):
you go on vacation, hopefully, hopefully you can get a
decent night's sleep and maybe grab a nap or two.
That's what I was thinking, the allusive sleep that we
all are pursuing. You finally get a taste of that,
and that makes such a big difference. Let's take a
quick break and when we get back, we'll talk about
something called time poverty. All right, we're back. Yes, we're
(14:09):
talking about vacation and now time poverty, which actually doesn't
have anything to do with doctor who Nope. Ever since
the clock was first used to synchronize labor in the
eighteenth century, time has been understood in relation to money.
So we started to put time into three different buckets.
Here we have the wasting, the saving, and the using.
And as the industrial revolution gave way to the technological revolution,
(14:33):
we've seen a decrease in the amount of time it
takes to do things. So just even the most wrote
things like doing your laundry or getting from you know,
place A to B, none of this stuff is quite
as involved as it used to be. And so as
a result, paradoxically, we have more time on our hands,
and yet we feel as though we don't have enough time.
(14:54):
And part of that is because we keep cramming it
with stuff to do, because there's this idea of at, uh,
the more time you have, the more you should jam
in some work because time is money. Yeah, I mean
is interesting to think about, how you know often you'll
find yourself in a situation where you did an hour's
worth of work and you washed all the clothes in
the house. And these two things were for the longest
(15:17):
stretch of human history, um could not be done at
the same time. Right. You ate food that you didn't
have to grow right and harvest um. So this idea
this time is money, we don't have enough of it
is a concept known as time poverty. And in the
article by Jenny Dearborn Why is Everyone so Busy? In
The Economist, she says, quote, this makes time, that frustratingly finite,
(15:39):
unrenewable resource, feel more precious. And as a result of time,
or rather a lack of it, it becomes this kind
of status symbol. And she says that Daniel Hemmermash, who
we mentioned earlier, calls this a yuppie cavetch. This ethos
that busier is better. And if you look at an
(16:00):
analysis of international time stress data, Hammermish found that complaints
about insufficient time come disproportionately from well off families, even
after he controlled for holding constant hours spent working at
jobs at at the home. So the bigger the paycheck,
the more anxiety there was about time in this kind
(16:22):
of time poverty communication about it moreover. A two thousand
and eleven pull from Gallop concluded quote, the more cash
rich working Americans are, the more time poor they feel.
And it's this kind of it almost kind of builds
into this work macho is m And the Harvard Business
(16:43):
Review had an interesting article about this, and it's called
extreme Jobs Societea that really high performing people in very
lucrative jobs are these warriors and they're putting, you know,
seventy plus hours of work per week in and in
the article they say it's like they're trying to prove
(17:05):
their worth. It's akin to going up against the elements. Yeah,
I mean it sounds in more extreme cases, less like
work macho is um and more like work masochism. You know,
as if you're trying to tell your employer, look at me,
I hate myself. This is the kind of employer you
want on your team, because I would just bleed all
over the place for you. Yeah, I will cancel my vacations.
(17:27):
I'll only take half of my vacation days. And we
mentioned all this because we want to try to set
up the conditions that are here, the corporate culture that's
at play, that doesn't say, hey, please take a boatload
of vacation days. And then this kind of warrior perception
of people who are um over compensating, maybe overworking their hours.
(17:51):
So then the question becomes, well, what happens when we
finally get to take a vacation, well leading up to it,
and that's that's a big thing too, is there's the
lead up to the vacation, the launch towards the vacation
and uh, and it affects the way that we perceive time.
The easy analogy here is do you think back to
you when you were a kid, right, and you're in
the lead up to Christmas and it just seems to
(18:13):
take forever and ever because it's the thing you want
most in the world, right, Um, But when you of course,
when you're grown up, it's just another two months between uh,
you know, between Halloween and in Christmas. But vacation is
kind of the adult version of this. Uh you know,
you have this this destination in time that you're looking
(18:33):
forward to. But it's not just the temporal distance here,
but also the geographic distance that plays into all of this. Uh.
There's a two thousand and twelve study that was publishing
the Journal of Consumer Research, and they actually found that
consumer decision making is affected by the relationship between time
and spatial distance. So in the study, the authors asked
(18:53):
test savors to imagine visiting a post office today and
a bookstore three months from now. Okay now. Sometimes, depending
on on the test study, sometimes the distance between these
two places is short, Okay, the bookstorce is right around
the corner. Other times it's a longer distance. Maybe the
bookstore is across town or in another city, another state.
(19:15):
So the greater the distance between you and your vacation destination, uh,
then the longer it seems to take, the slower time
seems to pass between now and then. And in the
same study, they also found that test subjects who imagined
retiring far away, uh, you know, retiring down in Florida
when you're living up in Minnesota. Uh, they felt like
the retirement was also further away in time. So the
(19:38):
key here for the purposes of the study. Of course
we're business related and that spatial distances can change your
perception of future time and make you impatient. Uh. But
the breakdown for vacation is pretty clear. The more of
a destination vacation you have planned, the more it's going
to cause the time leading up to it to track.
So that that's a bit of a bummer, right, because
(19:59):
you're really side of let's say that you're going to
China and we we're here in Atlanta, so you're that's
that's quite a distance. So you're sitting there kind of
nailbodding for you know, a couple of months waiting for
that moment. But then again, um, you get to experience
life longer, like maybe you actually live a little longer
by stretching it out. I don't know, that's nice. No. Um,
(20:20):
the same sort of mind time happens while you're taking
vacation and then when you reflect on that vacation afterward.
So again, when we talk about time, we usually think
about it in more linear terms and and highly strettured, right,
But in on side of our minds, it becomes a
bit of a jumble. Um. And this is something that's
(20:43):
psychologist and BBC broadcaster Claudia Hammond examined. She calls this
the holiday paradox. In her book Time Work, she writes,
quote that the paradox is the contradictory feeling that a
good holiday or vacation for US Americans whizzes by. Yeah,
it feels long when you look back. And she says
the reason for this is that, say, in any given
(21:05):
time period, maybe two weeks um, the average person would
accumulate something like six to nine new memories because so
much of what we do is routine. Is routine, right,
is the wrote stuff that we do day after day. Um,
there's not much out of the ordinary. But she said
that on vacation we can build up that number of
(21:26):
memories in a single day because everything we experience is new,
meaning that when we look back it will seem to
have lasted much longer than it really did. And so
that's where you get this fast, slow paradox. While you're
experiencing the vacation in a new place, it all feels
like it's whizzing by. But then afterwards you get to
(21:48):
linger on all those new memories that are made. And
if you think of yourself and your brain is this uh,
is it just a collection of memories. Not taking vacation
or not being able to take vacation. Uh, you're really
short changing yourself. You're short changing this flood of memories
(22:08):
that makes up who you are. Well, that is exactly
what Farish Chabre was touching on in that Scientific American
article when he said that that mind wandering, those moments
of introspection are one way that we form a sense
of self. So you're right, you're you're shortcutting yourself out
of these moments that really add to, uh, this sort
(22:30):
of dictionary of self, this reference book of self. Now
to return to that that lead up to vacation, right,
the months and months that that occur before you actually
get to take the trip. Uh, there's some interesting a
science surrounding the idea that fantasizing about vacation can lead
to poor decisions. And of course we all fantasize about vacations. Uh.
(22:53):
And then they're kind of two levels. Right, there's like
the early stage where you think, hey, maybe I should
go to Hawaii. What would that be would be? What
would that be like? Without thinking about how much it's
gonna cost or how I'm gonna get there, or when
it's gonna work best for my work schedule, that sort
of thing. And then there's when you actually boil down
to it and start start weighing the pros and the
cons right and saying, all right, you know, how much
(23:14):
is it gonna cost? How long can I stay? What
am I going to do when I get there? Well?
A two thousand twelve study by New York University's Heather Cappies,
published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, looked into this, uh,
looking at how positive fantasies such as a vacation influence
the decision making process. Because these fantasies are powerful, right,
(23:35):
they keep us going in those months leading up to
the vacation, but they also can influence our behavior in
the present. So in the study, she asked people to
imagine a particular future about one of three topics, wearing glamorous,
high heeled shoes, making making money in the stock market,
and taking a vacation, okay and so, and then she
(23:55):
prompted people to think about how great they would be,
just to make sure they're putting a positive spin about
it in their minds. Okay, you know, just imagine how
wonderful those shoes are. Gonna look, or how much money
you're gonna win the stock market, or how great this
vacation is going to be. But then there's a control
group as well that she said, but would it really
be that great? Would the vacation only be that great
with the shoes be a little uncomfortable, etcetera. So they're
(24:18):
inserting some doubt there, yea, to make sure that there's
a control group that's thinking about these things in a
in a less than positive way. Then after all this,
everyone was presented with material on the pros and cons
of these future events. So, you know, like a pamphlet
about the wonders of high heeled shoes, and a pamphlet
about the the the pain of high hilled shoes, that
sort of thing. Pamplet about how great this vacation destination
(24:40):
is and one about how it sucks. So for each topic,
imagining the idealized positive version made people prefer to learn
about the pros rather than the cons of the future event,
especially if they were not seriously considering doing it. So
the idea here is that when we actually boil down
and decide yes, I'm going, that's when we tend to
(25:01):
actually weigh the pros and cons more evenly. But in
that fantasy zone, Uh, that's leading up to the serious zone. Uh,
We're we're going to be more inclined to just focus
on the positives. But the risk here is that in
that fantasy period, you end up a skewing your results
towards towards the positives, and then that's going to affect
(25:22):
your supposedly unbiased exploration of the pros and cons when
you're planning the vacation. So this is the reason why
I made the decision early on when my husband and
I went to Belize to engage in this, uh, this
escapade of climbing a Mayan ruin. But I don't know
(25:45):
how many hundreds of feet tall it was, but it
was incredibly steep. And while I was doing it in
the degree heat and looking down because I have a
fear of heights. Uh, I was wondering why I have
made this choice? Yeah, right, pssibly, because I hadn't really
pondered it long enough and it seems like a really romantic,
wonderful thing to do while I was planning the trip. Yeah,
(26:07):
you end up just focusing on the pros and then
when you actually start start weighing the pros and cons,
you're still waiting towards those pros, so that kind of
gets us towards this category of travel called adventure vacations.
Adventure can be anything from I don't know, like writing
atop a dolphin, which I don't recommend, um, you know,
(26:29):
to some of the more risky stuff like helicopter skiing.
Do you know if us where you're on a helicopter
and it takes you to the top of the mountain
and then you jump off the helicopter and ski down
the mountain. It sounds like a great idea before and
this may be because some of those people are neophiliacs.
We've talked about these people before. They possess a migration
(26:52):
gene a d N, a mutation that occurred about fifty
thousand years ago as humans were dispersing from Africa around
the world. And just according to row Robert Moyses, who
was a biochemist at the University of California at Irvine,
and he says that these genetic variations affect the brain's
regulation of dopamine. So this is that neurotransmitter that helps
to process rewards and new stimuli, and variations have been
(27:17):
linked to faster reaction times a d h D and
a higher pension for novelty seeking and risk taking, which
is why some people may instead of seeking out a beach,
seek out, say tornado chasing um actually taking vacation time
and chasing a tornado down. And that's because you do
(27:37):
have these these different reactions to dopamine into new stimuli.
But it's also because fear provoking situations can put us
in a state of mental clarity. And that's also really
interesting for our memories because that sort of mental clarity
means that we can commit those memories in a way
that feel really fresh and interesting. So you take that
(27:59):
risky vacation and you chase after that tornado, and later
on you revisit that material as if it's fresh and new.
And that's because a type of protein within the cell
walls of neurons called alpha two receptors respond to the
release of nora adrenaline and they act to increase neural efficiency,
and so then you have a boost of activity in
your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex, as we know, is
(28:20):
kind of like the referee of your emotions and your memories,
and so the net net effect is that is that
you're you're kept on target, You're kind of have this
zen mental clarity, and you've got the reward system amped up. Yeah.
I feel like we probably all have acquaintances like that
who tend to go for the adventure vacations. Um, there's
(28:41):
one guy I know, and I'll see him posting on
Facebook and he'll post stuff like I partied in the
most dangerous city in South America last night, and which
is great for him, but inside I'm also thinking, why
would you do that? Why would why would that be
your vacation? But he's got the gene. What can you say?
Can't help it. So we've mentioned already people tend to
(29:01):
return from vacations relax and renewed, right, And according to
Terry Hearted, an environmental psychologist at Solo University in Sweden,
we tend to spread those viral vibes to everyone we
come into contact with when we get back. Um, this
is his take on it, called a collective restoration. So
you kind of Greg comes back from his vacation. Normally
(29:24):
Greg's a bit uh get bit anxious at work, you know,
but he comes back, he's refreshed, he's renewed. And then
all the people Greg interacts with, he kind of spreads
a little bit of vacation vibe to them, and so
it spirals out into a more pleasant workplace environment for everybody. Right,
So that's his theory. He decided to put it to
a test. A Heartig did so. He studied monthly antidepressant
(29:47):
prescriptions in Sweden between and two thousand five, and he
found that the more people that were taking vacations at
a given time, the more prescriptions dropped exponentially. So overall
some was the happiest time. Uh So, low prescript prescription
rate and in high vacation rate, and do in part
(30:07):
perhaps because Swedish law has mandated that every worker have
five weeks of paid vacation every year since nineteen seventy seven.
And on top of that, workers can take four consecutive
weeks off during the summer, so that tends to be
when people take advantage of the of the policy. Now
you think about that, the fact that depression costs the U.
(30:28):
S economy and estimated twenty three billion dollars a year
in lost productivity alone, and you can see where a
little more mandatory vacation might be helpful for the populace. Yeah,
and we should also say to that, you know, don't
go away your prescriptions here quite yet, because um, there
are fleeting effects of vacation. In the paper how do
(30:52):
vacations effect workers health and well being? Jessica to Bloom
looks at a meta analysis of the benefits of vacation
and concludes that the restorative effects generally fade within two
to four weeks. And then one of her studies of
nineties six Dutch workers, they all reported feeling more energetic, happy,
less tense, and more satisfied with their lives uh than
(31:15):
usual during one of their vacations. In this vacation was
between seven and nine days long, but within just one
week of returning to work, uh, this began to dissipate.
In a second experiment on four and five days of
respect came to essentially the same conclusion. Now, there are
a raftive studies on this, and they all kind of
(31:37):
point to this, you know, one to three week um
attenuation of effects here, and a lot of it depends
on how long someone was on vacation. So maybe that
juicy or meteor you know, four or five week vacation,
maybe you had two weeks of these effects. Uh, but
they all point to the fleetingness and that that seems
(32:01):
a little depressing. But for me, it just makes the
case that we need to take more vacations more often. Yeah.
And plus I mean everything's fleeting, so life. Yeah, that's
just life. So as we've discussed, we we Americans, we're
a little hesitant to take those vacations. And you might
(32:22):
wonder if some of that has to do with fear
of missing out, because I know that when I take
a vacation, it takes a good two days for me
to settle into it and shed my work skin. Yeah,
I find it find the same situation in my life,
and I even think about it in terms of launching
something into orbit. Right, you have to you have to
(32:43):
deal with, you know, getting everything squared away at the house,
you have to get somebody to feed the cats. You've
got to make sure your work life is in order.
Then you've got to actually travel there, so you having
to fuel the rocket, launch the rocket. And then once
you get up there, once you get into space, once
you get on your vacation, you still got to decompress
a little that you've got to deal with your with
where the expectations of say, a vacation, beach house, meet
(33:05):
the reality of it. Um, you have to deal with
all that and then letting slowly come down from it.
So yeah, I tend to find it's like the second
day before, I suddenly find myself just like thinking idly
about things that are not work and actually enjoying the experience. Yeah,
because for me, those first two days really boiled down
to routine. And I was thinking about Charles du High,
(33:27):
who has a book called The Power of Habit, and
he says that something of our decisions are just habit.
And I thought, well, it's it's about right, because you know,
you have the habit of checking your email at a
certain time or doing these certain things day after day,
and so it would make sense that you have your
mind kind of circling and saying, but wait, you can't relax.
(33:50):
We usually do this at this time, all right. So
there you have it, vacation and the brain. What happens before, during,
and after you finally take that trip to the beach
or the mountains or what have you. Hey, if you
want to check out more of what we do here,
you can check out more episodes of the podcast. You
can check out blog post videos you name it, it's
(34:12):
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you
have thoughts about vacations and re entry after a vacation,
you can send those thoughts our way by emailing us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie, you're
looking forward to vacation. I am. I love a good vacation.
To good vacation, you know, just really really recharges you. Yeah,
(00:25):
and I've been thinking about I mean, it's only May
right in my My vacation is not until July, and
I like every couple of days, I just sit there
and think, yes, one day I will be going on
you vacation. Now, A lot of people don't know this,
but compulsory vacation in the United States was almost a thing.
(00:47):
Uh William Howard taft In he proposed giving American workers
two to three months of vacation every year. Can you imagine?
I really cannot imagine how that would work, but it
would get speaking from the vantage point of today's modern
vacation adverse culture, Yeah, particularly in the United States. You
(01:08):
hear that, you know, two to three months in nineteen ten,
and you sort of wonder what Americans would be like
if they had that today, how that would change the culture. Um,
of course this brings up this idea of a rather
question when did humans start vacationing in earnest And we
can't say, uh, this exact date, we can't point to it.
(01:29):
But we have a couple of clues because, according to
psychologist Jessica to Bloom, ancient hieroglyphic graffiti found engraved into
the walls of the Pyramid of Jos their state quote
Hand and his brother have been here to make an
excursion and enjoy Memphis. These hieroglyphics date back to two
(01:50):
thousand years ago. I'm picturing Uma with their Rick Steve's
travel backpacks standing in ancient Egypt. I love that they
just put a little graffiti to pyramid, like, you know,
a sort of Julie was here, Robert was here. I
was like, hey, we were here, we were visiting from Memphis.
That was a vacation blogging of the day, indeed, very
short and to the point. Uh. The etymological origin of
(02:13):
the word vacation also dates back to the time of
the Roman Empire and stems from the Latin word of
the kato, which means being free from being at leisure,
having time for and Yet it wasn't until the twentieth
century that some nations began to recognize and institutionalize vacations.
(02:33):
All right, So where are we now in terms of
vacation appreciation and the vacation deprivation. Well, there's a two
thousand thirteen survey that came out that was handled by
Expedient and they looked at different countries, different cultures to see,
all right, who's who's really maxing out on their available vacation,
(02:53):
who's pulling back, who has the most available, etcetera. And
they found that the average Japanese worker gets thirteen days
off each year but only takes five UM on the end. Uh.
In a similar vein South Koreans UH get an average
of nineteen days off but only takes seven. So that's
kind of like the low end of of taking advantage
(03:15):
of your vacation in the modern world. Uh. Here in America,
Americans tend to get twelve days off a year on average.
Uh they'll take tenidate again on average, while Mexicans get
fourteen days of vacation and only take keen. So we
haven't really hit in upon any of the real vacation
levers yet. For that, by and large, you have to
go to Europe because Europeans in general tend to score
(03:38):
twenty five to thirty vacation days a year um, and
among the European nations, the French and Spanish tend to
take the full thirty available to them. Germans tend to
take only twenty eight. And for another high vacation country,
you have to travel across the ocean to Brazil, where
they follow suit and generally take the full three. Wow,
(04:01):
that's very leisurely beautiful. Top of the spectrum Brazil, Spain,
France and Germany, bottom South Korea and Japan. Now I
know we alluded to this, but the US is the
only advanced economy with no national vacation policy, and one
in four workers have no paid vacation at all, which
makes you wonder, are we just really addicted and obsessed
(04:21):
with work or is the structure just not there to
support vacationing well. Americans tend to put more hours in
during so called leisure hours at night and on weekends,
pointing to this idea that we might be sort of
addicted to our work. And economists Don hammer Mesh and
Elena san Connelli published their findings on American work habits
(04:43):
in two thousand and fourteen, and they found that in
a typical weeknight, a quarter of US employees did some
kind of work between ten at night and six in
the morning. Wow. Yeah, it seems very hardcore. And on
the weekends, one in three workers in the u US
we're on the job. Now, you can compare that to
one in five in France, Germany in the Netherlands. So
(05:07):
what happens when you take these hard working Americans and
you strong arm them into something called deliberate periodic rest, Well,
they don't like it. And we know this because there's
a four year study by Leslie Purlow of the Harvard
Business School and her colleagues who tracked the work habits
of employees at the Boston Consulting Group. And in one experiment,
(05:29):
each of five consultants on a team took a break
from work one day a week. That's kind of a
big deal, right, Um, that's that's a significant chunk of
your work week. And then in a second experiment, every
member of a team scheduled one weekly night of uninterrupted
personal time, even though they were accustomed to working from
home in the evening, so not even checking your email, right,
(05:52):
So understandably, people in this experiment they felt a little
bit annoyed by this, right, because their routines had been
disrupted and they felt like they might get behind or
they would be out of the loop. And this is
the thing though, After five months, employees experimenting with deliberate
periodic rest were more satisfied with their jobs, more likely
to envision a long term future of the company, and
(06:15):
more content with their work, left balance and prouder of
their accomplishments. They just had to have it forced upon them,
like essentially tazed in the hallway and their their work
email removed from their phone exactly, and it's like her,
now now you must rest, mandatory rest. But this mandatory
rust really helped them to reset their minds. And in
(06:36):
order to do that, you have to get to something
called the default mode network. Yeah, the default mode network.
And we've talked about this before in previous podcasts. I
think it came up especially during the scientists in the
Shaman episodes. We did uh dealing with the psychedelics, But
essentially it boils down to this the stream of human consciouness. Right,
(06:56):
that's the analogy we tend to to to use. But
if we were to use the more fluid dynamic e term,
it's not a single stream, but it's more like an
elaborate convergence of currents and bodies. Then, even when we're resting,
there's a lot of activity going on. Uh. In fact,
we've known since the early twentieth century that there's actually
a considerable amount of activity in the resting brain. Now, granted,
(07:20):
a lot of that is simply your brain maintaining unconscious
control of the of the body spaceship, but a lot
of stuff is going on under the hood. Um, go
back to that's when a team of neuroscientists led by
Marcus Roushell of Washington University in St. Louis discovered that
the brain constantly demands of all the energy the body produces.
(07:42):
And if you really need to put your thinking cap
on for something, you know, to do your taxes or
you know, try and figure out what the tip is
that at a restaurant, Um anything math for me? I
guess um, you're only gonna add five on top of that.
It's kind of like looking into the process the section
of the window task manager, right, you suddenly see all
(08:03):
these different things going on, and you're wondering, well, what's
using all of the resources of the computer. Well, um.
In this research, they also noted that a certain set
of scattered brain regions quieted down during serious contemplation. So
you're put on the thinking cap and these sections go quiet,
but then they crank back up when the patient's mind
is just idly wandering and daydreaming. Uh. And they were
(08:24):
engaged in coordinated communication with one another, So scientists can
to label this day dreaming chatter as the default mode network,
though we now know that it's just one of at
least five different resting state networks that are involved in vision, hearing, movement, attention,
and memory. So it's in this state that you know,
on a good day, you're you know, you're setting there,
(08:47):
you're just thinking idly. Your thoughts are kind of doing
their own thing, and you're you know, thinking about something
you're excited about in the future. You're thinking about, you know,
some pleasant memory in the past or something you saw
on TV. Right general, you know, mundane or ales and stuff.
But then also on a bad day, this is where
the brain is gnawing on itself, right, you're worrying over work, stress,
You're it's bashing us in the face with embarrassing or
(09:09):
or downright traumatic memories. From the past. So it's a
place of introspection, place of depressive thoughts and uh, it's
a place of endless ego at tinkering with the story
narrative that we build around our lives. And one of
the reasons why it's so important to recharge and to
try to to get into that default mode network in
a positive way is because that's when you do that
(09:32):
sort of mind wandering again. And you would pointed out
your mind is going to take up twenty percent of
resources no matter what it's doing, right, so if you're
meditating or if you're taking a test, maybe test, but
so you when you get into the default mode network
and you allow the mind chatter too dim and just
(09:52):
kind of meander, well, that's when you get some really
good stuff going on. And this is from Fairesh Chabra
from Scientific American and his article why your brain needs
more downtime. He says, while mind wandering, we replay conversations
that we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blenders
as a way of learning to avoid them in the future.
So it's kind of a safe space, um to revisit
(10:17):
some of those and not in a negative way. We
shuffle through all those neglected mental post it notes listing
half finished projects, and we moll over the aspects of
our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions.
We sink into scenes from childhood and catapult ourselves into
different hypothetical futures, and we subject ourselves to a kind
of moral performance review, questioning how we have treated others lately.
(10:41):
These moments of introspection are also one way we form
a sense of self, which is essentially a story we
continually tell ourselves. So that's one of the reasons why
we have to have that time away from our work,
so that our brains can actually dwell on solutions, dwell
on how who improve ourselves, and also create a better
(11:02):
sense of self. And to illustrate this point that our
brains need to take advantage of every bit of downtime
that they can get, consider this two thousand and twelve
study about blinking. I feel like I've been talking about
blinking a lot lately. It's from to Mommy Nicano of
Osaka University, who recorded electrical impulses in people's brains as
(11:23):
they watched clips of British comedian Missed Being and you
found that the brain can engage in the default mode
network and the blink of an eye literally when you
blink your eyes, the default mode network comes alive. And uh,
the idea is that the brain is trying to catch
its breath, even if it's just for that the fraction
(11:45):
of a second and blinking. And so when you think
about vacation, it turns out that it's just the right
kind of distraction for the default mode network, and it's
really kind of like an extended blink for the mind.
I can also see though, with if someone as a
particularly busy brain, they might they it might almost be
a little apprehensive about going on the vacation because it
(12:07):
brings to mind just setting on the beach, like next
to your brain in a beach chair, and your brain
is just like, hey, what's up, let's talk about about stuff.
You know, it's like a fight right now. I'm trying
to relax here. I don't want to talk about stuff
all right. So what are some of the general benefits
of vacation. Some of these are no brainers, no pun intended,
(12:27):
but but just to roll through them. Uh, vacations revitalize
our mind and body by distancing us from our job
related stress. Um. I with a few times that I've
traveled essentially to the other side of the planet. I
like to think of it in terms of I'm actually
placing the center of the Earth between me and anything
that could conceivably stress me out, you know, So it's
(12:50):
like a nice earth barrier there. Um. Also, vacations allow
us to drop into a new place, a new culture,
surrounded by new people, new set of experiences, and a
new environment for our mind to chew over. So suddenly
you have all of this brand new stuff, be it
you know, pleasant brand new stuff like the wonderful tourist
attraction you're at, or the more negative stuff like the
(13:13):
tourists that are with you at the tourist attraction that
you've been looking forward to. Uh. And of course all
the newness can generate new ideas and thoughts. And we
also tend to kick forced concentration to the curb side,
so by and larger going on vacation, there's not gonna
be any crunch time. We're like, all right, I really
got to figure this out, unless it's you know, getting
around town in a far in metropolis. And finally, when
(13:37):
you go on vacation, hopefully, hopefully you can get a
decent night's sleep and maybe grab a nap or two.
That's what I was thinking, the allusive sleep that we
all are pursuing. You finally get a taste of that,
and that makes such a big difference. Let's take a
quick break and when we get back, we'll talk about
something called time poverty. All right, we're back. Yes, we're
(14:09):
talking about vacation and now time poverty, which actually doesn't
have anything to do with doctor who Nope. Ever since
the clock was first used to synchronize labor in the
eighteenth century, time has been understood in relation to money.
So we started to put time into three different buckets.
Here we have the wasting, the saving, and the using.
And as the industrial revolution gave way to the technological revolution,
(14:33):
we've seen a decrease in the amount of time it
takes to do things. So just even the most wrote
things like doing your laundry or getting from you know,
place A to B, none of this stuff is quite
as involved as it used to be. And so as
a result, paradoxically, we have more time on our hands,
and yet we feel as though we don't have enough time.
(14:54):
And part of that is because we keep cramming it
with stuff to do, because there's this idea of at, uh,
the more time you have, the more you should jam
in some work because time is money. Yeah, I mean
is interesting to think about, how you know often you'll
find yourself in a situation where you did an hour's
worth of work and you washed all the clothes in
the house. And these two things were for the longest
(15:17):
stretch of human history, um could not be done at
the same time. Right. You ate food that you didn't
have to grow right and harvest um. So this idea
this time is money, we don't have enough of it
is a concept known as time poverty. And in the
article by Jenny Dearborn Why is Everyone so Busy? In
The Economist, she says, quote, this makes time, that frustratingly finite,
(15:39):
unrenewable resource, feel more precious. And as a result of time,
or rather a lack of it, it becomes this kind
of status symbol. And she says that Daniel Hemmermash, who
we mentioned earlier, calls this a yuppie cavetch. This ethos
that busier is better. And if you look at an
(16:00):
analysis of international time stress data, Hammermish found that complaints
about insufficient time come disproportionately from well off families, even
after he controlled for holding constant hours spent working at
jobs at at the home. So the bigger the paycheck,
the more anxiety there was about time in this kind
(16:22):
of time poverty communication about it moreover. A two thousand
and eleven pull from Gallop concluded quote, the more cash
rich working Americans are, the more time poor they feel.
And it's this kind of it almost kind of builds
into this work macho is m And the Harvard Business
(16:43):
Review had an interesting article about this, and it's called
extreme Jobs Societea that really high performing people in very
lucrative jobs are these warriors and they're putting, you know,
seventy plus hours of work per week in and in
the article they say it's like they're trying to prove
(17:05):
their worth. It's akin to going up against the elements. Yeah,
I mean it sounds in more extreme cases, less like
work macho is um and more like work masochism. You know,
as if you're trying to tell your employer, look at me,
I hate myself. This is the kind of employer you
want on your team, because I would just bleed all
over the place for you. Yeah, I will cancel my vacations.
(17:27):
I'll only take half of my vacation days. And we
mentioned all this because we want to try to set
up the conditions that are here, the corporate culture that's
at play, that doesn't say, hey, please take a boatload
of vacation days. And then this kind of warrior perception
of people who are um over compensating, maybe overworking their hours.
(17:51):
So then the question becomes, well, what happens when we
finally get to take a vacation, well leading up to it,
and that's that's a big thing too, is there's the
lead up to the vacation, the launch towards the vacation
and uh, and it affects the way that we perceive time.
The easy analogy here is do you think back to
you when you were a kid, right, and you're in
the lead up to Christmas and it just seems to
(18:13):
take forever and ever because it's the thing you want
most in the world, right, Um, But when you of course,
when you're grown up, it's just another two months between uh,
you know, between Halloween and in Christmas. But vacation is
kind of the adult version of this. Uh you know,
you have this this destination in time that you're looking
(18:33):
forward to. But it's not just the temporal distance here,
but also the geographic distance that plays into all of this. Uh.
There's a two thousand and twelve study that was publishing
the Journal of Consumer Research, and they actually found that
consumer decision making is affected by the relationship between time
and spatial distance. So in the study, the authors asked
(18:53):
test savors to imagine visiting a post office today and
a bookstore three months from now. Okay now. Sometimes, depending
on on the test study, sometimes the distance between these
two places is short, Okay, the bookstorce is right around
the corner. Other times it's a longer distance. Maybe the
bookstore is across town or in another city, another state.
(19:15):
So the greater the distance between you and your vacation destination, uh,
then the longer it seems to take, the slower time
seems to pass between now and then. And in the
same study, they also found that test subjects who imagined
retiring far away, uh, you know, retiring down in Florida
when you're living up in Minnesota. Uh, they felt like
the retirement was also further away in time. So the
(19:38):
key here for the purposes of the study. Of course
we're business related and that spatial distances can change your
perception of future time and make you impatient. Uh. But
the breakdown for vacation is pretty clear. The more of
a destination vacation you have planned, the more it's going
to cause the time leading up to it to track.
So that that's a bit of a bummer, right, because
(19:59):
you're really side of let's say that you're going to
China and we we're here in Atlanta, so you're that's
that's quite a distance. So you're sitting there kind of
nailbodding for you know, a couple of months waiting for
that moment. But then again, um, you get to experience
life longer, like maybe you actually live a little longer
by stretching it out. I don't know, that's nice. No. Um,
(20:20):
the same sort of mind time happens while you're taking
vacation and then when you reflect on that vacation afterward.
So again, when we talk about time, we usually think
about it in more linear terms and and highly strettured, right,
But in on side of our minds, it becomes a
bit of a jumble. Um. And this is something that's
(20:43):
psychologist and BBC broadcaster Claudia Hammond examined. She calls this
the holiday paradox. In her book Time Work, she writes,
quote that the paradox is the contradictory feeling that a
good holiday or vacation for US Americans whizzes by. Yeah,
it feels long when you look back. And she says
the reason for this is that, say, in any given
(21:05):
time period, maybe two weeks um, the average person would
accumulate something like six to nine new memories because so
much of what we do is routine. Is routine, right,
is the wrote stuff that we do day after day. Um,
there's not much out of the ordinary. But she said
that on vacation we can build up that number of
(21:26):
memories in a single day because everything we experience is new,
meaning that when we look back it will seem to
have lasted much longer than it really did. And so
that's where you get this fast, slow paradox. While you're
experiencing the vacation in a new place, it all feels
like it's whizzing by. But then afterwards you get to
(21:48):
linger on all those new memories that are made. And
if you think of yourself and your brain is this uh,
is it just a collection of memories. Not taking vacation
or not being able to take vacation. Uh, you're really
short changing yourself. You're short changing this flood of memories
(22:08):
that makes up who you are. Well, that is exactly
what Farish Chabre was touching on in that Scientific American
article when he said that that mind wandering, those moments
of introspection are one way that we form a sense
of self. So you're right, you're you're shortcutting yourself out
of these moments that really add to, uh, this sort
(22:30):
of dictionary of self, this reference book of self. Now
to return to that that lead up to vacation, right,
the months and months that that occur before you actually
get to take the trip. Uh, there's some interesting a
science surrounding the idea that fantasizing about vacation can lead
to poor decisions. And of course we all fantasize about vacations. Uh.
(22:53):
And then they're kind of two levels. Right, there's like
the early stage where you think, hey, maybe I should
go to Hawaii. What would that be would be? What
would that be like? Without thinking about how much it's
gonna cost or how I'm gonna get there, or when
it's gonna work best for my work schedule, that sort
of thing. And then there's when you actually boil down
to it and start start weighing the pros and the
cons right and saying, all right, you know, how much
(23:14):
is it gonna cost? How long can I stay? What
am I going to do when I get there? Well?
A two thousand twelve study by New York University's Heather Cappies,
published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, looked into this, uh,
looking at how positive fantasies such as a vacation influence
the decision making process. Because these fantasies are powerful, right,
(23:35):
they keep us going in those months leading up to
the vacation, but they also can influence our behavior in
the present. So in the study, she asked people to
imagine a particular future about one of three topics, wearing glamorous,
high heeled shoes, making making money in the stock market,
and taking a vacation, okay and so, and then she
(23:55):
prompted people to think about how great they would be,
just to make sure they're putting a positive spin about
it in their minds. Okay, you know, just imagine how
wonderful those shoes are. Gonna look, or how much money
you're gonna win the stock market, or how great this
vacation is going to be. But then there's a control
group as well that she said, but would it really
be that great? Would the vacation only be that great
with the shoes be a little uncomfortable, etcetera. So they're
(24:18):
inserting some doubt there, yea, to make sure that there's
a control group that's thinking about these things in a
in a less than positive way. Then after all this,
everyone was presented with material on the pros and cons
of these future events. So, you know, like a pamphlet
about the wonders of high heeled shoes, and a pamphlet
about the the the pain of high hilled shoes, that
sort of thing. Pamplet about how great this vacation destination
(24:40):
is and one about how it sucks. So for each topic,
imagining the idealized positive version made people prefer to learn
about the pros rather than the cons of the future event,
especially if they were not seriously considering doing it. So
the idea here is that when we actually boil down
and decide yes, I'm going, that's when we tend to
(25:01):
actually weigh the pros and cons more evenly. But in
that fantasy zone, Uh, that's leading up to the serious zone. Uh,
We're we're going to be more inclined to just focus
on the positives. But the risk here is that in
that fantasy period, you end up a skewing your results
towards towards the positives, and then that's going to affect
(25:22):
your supposedly unbiased exploration of the pros and cons when
you're planning the vacation. So this is the reason why
I made the decision early on when my husband and
I went to Belize to engage in this, uh, this
escapade of climbing a Mayan ruin. But I don't know
(25:45):
how many hundreds of feet tall it was, but it
was incredibly steep. And while I was doing it in
the degree heat and looking down because I have a
fear of heights. Uh, I was wondering why I have
made this choice? Yeah, right, pssibly, because I hadn't really
pondered it long enough and it seems like a really romantic,
wonderful thing to do while I was planning the trip. Yeah,
(26:07):
you end up just focusing on the pros and then
when you actually start start weighing the pros and cons,
you're still waiting towards those pros, so that kind of
gets us towards this category of travel called adventure vacations.
Adventure can be anything from I don't know, like writing
atop a dolphin, which I don't recommend, um, you know,
(26:29):
to some of the more risky stuff like helicopter skiing.
Do you know if us where you're on a helicopter
and it takes you to the top of the mountain
and then you jump off the helicopter and ski down
the mountain. It sounds like a great idea before and
this may be because some of those people are neophiliacs.
We've talked about these people before. They possess a migration
(26:52):
gene a d N, a mutation that occurred about fifty
thousand years ago as humans were dispersing from Africa around
the world. And just according to row Robert Moyses, who
was a biochemist at the University of California at Irvine,
and he says that these genetic variations affect the brain's
regulation of dopamine. So this is that neurotransmitter that helps
to process rewards and new stimuli, and variations have been
(27:17):
linked to faster reaction times a d h D and
a higher pension for novelty seeking and risk taking, which
is why some people may instead of seeking out a beach,
seek out, say tornado chasing um actually taking vacation time
and chasing a tornado down. And that's because you do
(27:37):
have these these different reactions to dopamine into new stimuli.
But it's also because fear provoking situations can put us
in a state of mental clarity. And that's also really
interesting for our memories because that sort of mental clarity
means that we can commit those memories in a way
that feel really fresh and interesting. So you take that
(27:59):
risky vacation and you chase after that tornado, and later
on you revisit that material as if it's fresh and new.
And that's because a type of protein within the cell
walls of neurons called alpha two receptors respond to the
release of nora adrenaline and they act to increase neural efficiency,
and so then you have a boost of activity in
your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex, as we know, is
(28:20):
kind of like the referee of your emotions and your memories,
and so the net net effect is that is that
you're you're kept on target, You're kind of have this
zen mental clarity, and you've got the reward system amped up. Yeah.
I feel like we probably all have acquaintances like that
who tend to go for the adventure vacations. Um, there's
(28:41):
one guy I know, and I'll see him posting on
Facebook and he'll post stuff like I partied in the
most dangerous city in South America last night, and which
is great for him, but inside I'm also thinking, why
would you do that? Why would why would that be
your vacation? But he's got the gene. What can you say?
Can't help it. So we've mentioned already people tend to
(29:01):
return from vacations relax and renewed, right, And according to
Terry Hearted, an environmental psychologist at Solo University in Sweden,
we tend to spread those viral vibes to everyone we
come into contact with when we get back. Um, this
is his take on it, called a collective restoration. So
you kind of Greg comes back from his vacation. Normally
(29:24):
Greg's a bit uh get bit anxious at work, you know,
but he comes back, he's refreshed, he's renewed. And then
all the people Greg interacts with, he kind of spreads
a little bit of vacation vibe to them, and so
it spirals out into a more pleasant workplace environment for everybody. Right,
So that's his theory. He decided to put it to
a test. A Heartig did so. He studied monthly antidepressant
(29:47):
prescriptions in Sweden between and two thousand five, and he
found that the more people that were taking vacations at
a given time, the more prescriptions dropped exponentially. So overall
some was the happiest time. Uh So, low prescript prescription
rate and in high vacation rate, and do in part
(30:07):
perhaps because Swedish law has mandated that every worker have
five weeks of paid vacation every year since nineteen seventy seven.
And on top of that, workers can take four consecutive
weeks off during the summer, so that tends to be
when people take advantage of the of the policy. Now
you think about that, the fact that depression costs the U.
(30:28):
S economy and estimated twenty three billion dollars a year
in lost productivity alone, and you can see where a
little more mandatory vacation might be helpful for the populace. Yeah,
and we should also say to that, you know, don't
go away your prescriptions here quite yet, because um, there
are fleeting effects of vacation. In the paper how do
(30:52):
vacations effect workers health and well being? Jessica to Bloom
looks at a meta analysis of the benefits of vacation
and concludes that the restorative effects generally fade within two
to four weeks. And then one of her studies of
nineties six Dutch workers, they all reported feeling more energetic, happy,
less tense, and more satisfied with their lives uh than
(31:15):
usual during one of their vacations. In this vacation was
between seven and nine days long, but within just one
week of returning to work, uh, this began to dissipate.
In a second experiment on four and five days of
respect came to essentially the same conclusion. Now, there are
a raftive studies on this, and they all kind of
(31:37):
point to this, you know, one to three week um
attenuation of effects here, and a lot of it depends
on how long someone was on vacation. So maybe that
juicy or meteor you know, four or five week vacation,
maybe you had two weeks of these effects. Uh, but
they all point to the fleetingness and that that seems
(32:01):
a little depressing. But for me, it just makes the
case that we need to take more vacations more often. Yeah.
And plus I mean everything's fleeting, so life. Yeah, that's
just life. So as we've discussed, we we Americans, we're
a little hesitant to take those vacations. And you might
(32:22):
wonder if some of that has to do with fear
of missing out, because I know that when I take
a vacation, it takes a good two days for me
to settle into it and shed my work skin. Yeah,
I find it find the same situation in my life,
and I even think about it in terms of launching
something into orbit. Right, you have to you have to
(32:43):
deal with, you know, getting everything squared away at the house,
you have to get somebody to feed the cats. You've
got to make sure your work life is in order.
Then you've got to actually travel there, so you having
to fuel the rocket, launch the rocket. And then once
you get up there, once you get into space, once
you get on your vacation, you still got to decompress
a little that you've got to deal with your with
where the expectations of say, a vacation, beach house, meet
(33:05):
the reality of it. Um, you have to deal with
all that and then letting slowly come down from it.
So yeah, I tend to find it's like the second
day before, I suddenly find myself just like thinking idly
about things that are not work and actually enjoying the experience. Yeah,
because for me, those first two days really boiled down
to routine. And I was thinking about Charles du High,
(33:27):
who has a book called The Power of Habit, and
he says that something of our decisions are just habit.
And I thought, well, it's it's about right, because you know,
you have the habit of checking your email at a
certain time or doing these certain things day after day,
and so it would make sense that you have your
mind kind of circling and saying, but wait, you can't relax.
(33:50):
We usually do this at this time, all right. So
there you have it, vacation and the brain. What happens before, during,
and after you finally take that trip to the beach
or the mountains or what have you. Hey, if you
want to check out more of what we do here,
you can check out more episodes of the podcast. You
can check out blog post videos you name it, it's
(34:12):
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you
have thoughts about vacations and re entry after a vacation,
you can send those thoughts our way by emailing us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com
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