What you can do against that post-holiday dip
You feel like a huge whiner when you say it out loud, but you just got home from vacation and you are completely exhausted. The reluctance to go back to work is enormous, because even though everyone around you says ‘you must be fully recharged’, you don't feel that way. Nobody wants to be stuck at work all day, right? If your answer to this is ‘no’, then you need to quickly do something about your mindset. It sounds silly, but the point is that your problem is easier to solve than you think. There are few people who can quit their job to do whatever they want all day. But if you change your view on your work, it can become a lot more bearable to get back to work after your vacation.
Half of your reluctance can be solved by looking at your work differently. It’s not a chore; you chose to do this job yourself. So take another look from the perspective you had when you applied: what were the elements that made you think ‘I want to get started with that’? If you focus on that again, you make it a lot more enjoyable for yourself than if you keep seeing work as an obligation. That costs more energy, and it doesn’t make sense either. You need the money, so try to have fun with it. Another tricky point: vacation does provide the relaxation you need, but because you work so hard the rest of the year, a week off is actually not enough. You only let go of the tension of daily life once you are on vacation, which releases all the fatigue. This means you might return just as tired from your trip. Maybe it helps to extend your vacation by just two more days. This way, you don’t start on Monday, in the full post-holiday stress, and you also have a shorter week. You’re nicely close to the weekend if you start on Wednesday.
Also think about why you enjoyed your vacation so much: what things did you do differently on vacation than at home? Try to implement those things at home if you found a lot of joy in them. For example, it’s a nice idea to have breakfast together every morning if you enjoyed that on vacation. What is often different on vacation: you spend less time on your phone and watch little TV. There is much more room for real conversations. It’s really easy to plan one evening a week at home where the TV and phone are off. Just enjoy quality time together, without the extra stimuli from outside. The easiest solution is, of course, to plan the next vacation right after you get home. Then you can look forward to the moment when you can leave the daily stimuli behind.
Image: Devil Wears Prada
