Back From Vacation – Are You Well-Rested or Totally Exhausted?

It’s your last day of vacation. Aside from sad that it’s coming to an end, how do you feel?

That simple question will elicit a lot of different responses, but they all seem to fall into several main categories:

• I feel wonderful! I did and saw so many new things. I’m energized and ready to get back to it!
• Ugh! I can’t believe I’m more tired than I was before this vacation. I was so busy the whole time, I never sat down to just relax.
• I feel renewed and rejuvenated. Having the time away from normal life responsibilities and allowing myself some downtime was just what I needed.
• I am wiped out, but I had so much fun! Feeling like this is totally worth all the adventures I had.
• I got a lot done around the house, but just being away from the stresses of the job helped me mentally unwind.

What Are You Doing on Your Vacation?
That list could keep going for quite awhile. And we’re all so different in what we want and need from a vacation. Even so, that unfortunately doesn’t mean we will GET what we actually need from a vacation.

Maybe you feel obligated to take the family on an extensive (and expensive) trip around the country, or even the world. The time is wasted if you don’t see everything and do everything. That can be both exhilarating and exhausting.

You might want or need to travel “back home” to see parents, grandparents, or attend a family reunion. Being in familiar surroundings and around your loved ones and old friends can be comforting and help you get back to yourself. But it can also mean running all over town or further, trying to see everyone you want to see before heading back home.

You may choose a “staycation” which can be many different things. A chance to get house projects done and get ahead on things you never find the time for. A respite to catch up on sleep, rest, and leisure activities. Or it might be a financial necessity that leaves you bored and depressed.

No matter what we choose to do with our vacation time, one thing is for sure. It should leave us feeling better, more positive, and more rested than we felt before.

What Is Vacation For Anyway?
The word vacation stems from the Latin vacare which means to be unoccupied, idle.

While that certainly could be the vacation goal for many of us, it isn’t always possible or realistic. And for the rest of us, being unoccupied sounds…kind of unbearable. But the basic idea is true for all of us. Vacation means we are not occupied by our normal, work-a-day life. We may not be idle, but we have vacated our normal routine. See what I did there?

But wait, not everyone calls it a vacation like American English speakers. British English speakers say holiday for this time away from work, school, and just everyday life.

And, because I love word origins so (I really do!), I’ll share that the word holiday comes from the Old English haligdæg, which translates to holy day. Originally a religious day or festival, it meant that people were to refrain from labor and recreation, as on the Sabbath.

Okay, that’s what it means. But what is it for?

Most of us need periodic time away from our normal life. We need this time to avoid the burnout that comes from the GO GO GO of working, going to school, cooking, yard work, homework, laundry…just keeping up.

Speaking of keeping up, most of us also need some extra time to catch up on sleep.

A Sleep Vacation, You Say?
No. No-no, we don’t mean a vacation from sleep!

A sleep vacation is a somewhat new term to describe a not-so-old idea of taking time off work to catch up on sleep. While there are a lot of us who have sneaked a day (or more) off just to sleep, sleeping your vacation away is now a thing. There are even hotels and resorts that cater to the sleep vacation market. Wow…if you build it, they will come.

For most of us though, what we probably should strive for (sorry, the word strive seems out of place in a conversation about vacations and holidays) is to do the fun things we want to do during our time off, while also getting plenty of relaxation and sleep to refresh our bodies and minds.

Here’s just a few ideas for a variation on a sleep holiday. Spend some of your time off or staycation time focusing on your sleep. That could mean:

• Allowing yourself a few days of sleeping late and then getting your sleep schedule back on track before you have to return to the real world.
• Snoozing under a beach umbrella or on your deck at home in the afternoons.
• Make some adjustments to your bed and your bedroom to make them more sleep-conducive.
• Take a look at your sleep hygiene and get it more in line with great sleep.

And now, my last little piece of advice that we all know, and we never manage to do…

Get home a day or two before you have to hit your real life again. You won’t be sorry.