How Do You Get Over Post-Vacation Blues?

A survey from MyBioSource found that instead of feeling recharged and refreshed, 42% of Americans dread coming back to work after time off.

The survey of over 1,000 employed Americans also found:

• 34% reported that burnout usually sets in right after returning from their time off, while 50% said it occurs within one week of returning.
• Employed Americans experiencing post-time-off burnout reported low energy levels (65%) and a lack of motivation (63%).
• Only 13% felt excited to come back to work.

A survey of 1,000 full-time employees from Visier found that 20% of respondents admitted they’d quit after returning from vacation while nearly half (44%) have thought about it.

A Harvard Business Review article noted that returning workers may feel drained despite taking a break because vacation travel may have been “exhausting” or because work calls or parenting prevented adequate relaxation. However, vacations also often lead to a reevaluation of a job’s worth.

Tessa West, professor of psychology at NYU and the author of “Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You,” told HBR, “With time away, you recognize that you’ve been dealing with all these low-level stressors at work — a long commute or a boss who’s always putting another meeting on your schedule, so you feel anticipatory anxiety about being back.”

Dani Blum, a health reporter for the New York Times, said a break is often only temporarily restorative for workers already burned out. She wrote in a recent article, “When people are intensely stressed, vacation is more like a Band-Aid. They might feel better when they’re away, but as soon as it’s time to return, they become anxious again.”

To smooth the return to work after a break, the HBR article advised setting “reasonable expectations” for getting back up to speed at work, prioritizing tasks you like to do during the re-entry period, remembering why you found fulfilling about the job, and recognizing the complementary role work plays in funding your “richer and more fulfilled life,” including vacations.

Workers were advised to start exploring new career paths and roles if work anxiety wasn’t resolved in a few weeks.

The Times article suggested taking a day off day before going back to work to reset. Another suggestion was taking the opportunity to pay greater attention to what’s causing daily work stresses and make a plan to address them.

Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley who studies burnout, told the Times that workers should connect with colleagues to explore how they cope with job stress and brainstorm together to resolve “the pebbles in the shoe,” or regular job irritations.

In an opinion piece for HR Grapevine, Benjamin Broomfield noted that while employers should be encouraging vacations to combat burnout and improve mental well-being, organizations shouldn’t expect workers to return refreshed. He wrote, “Let’s stop expecting it to be a given that after coming back from vacation, productivity and engagement will spike, and that all the issues affecting an employee’s motivation will magically disappear.”