You need a vacation

Summer is here: Give yourself and everyone else a break

Your stomach is in knots. You haven’t slept in three nights. Your nutrition has been reduced to candy bars and a constant drip of coffee. Black. You missed your son’s soccer game, asked your neighbor to drive the Girl Scout carpool, and had nothing left to offer at story time. If one more person tells you it’s just a job, you might have to get ugly. But it is … just a job.

You need a vacation. A break. In fact, everyone around you needs your vacation.

“When you have a 9-to-5 job or routine,” says Nancy Bartell, retired Community Hospital marriage and family therapist, “you can sometimes get out of perspective, get singly focused. You can get so involved in your job, it becomes your whole life. Consider the idea of ‘whole life.’ If you can step back and away from your job or routine, you can usually see the bigger picture of where this job fits into your life, or should. It is only one part. This company, this town, this country; it is not your whole world. But you need to break away, get out of your routine, to understand this.”

Scheduling and actually taking a vacation are often easier said than done. A vacation means change, which can be stressful because people often cling to routine and structure. Anything different might take us out of our comfort zone, creating a paradox of sorts since the thing we need most is also what we tend to resist: change.

“You may not like change,” says Bartell, “but everyone needs it. Hopefully, if it’s done its job, you will return from vacation refreshed, rebalanced, with your creativity stirred by something along the way. Particularly if you had a change of venue.”

Learn to delegate. Close the office. Do what it takes to be OK with taking a break. And then figure out what and where will give you the respite you need.

It’s important to examine how you — and your family — define “vacation,” what it means to you and what you need from it. Some people want to lie on a sandy beach, sipping something cool and tropical. Others want to engage in extreme sports such as helicopter skiing, climbing Kilimanjaro, or powertouring museums. Still others want to stay home, draw the drapes, and whittle down that “to do” list of household projects.

“You need to think about what it is you really want and what that means for your vacation,” says Suzi Brauner-Tatum, a Community Hospital clinical social worker. “Do you want to visit Disneyland from the moment it opens until the fireworks at midnight, jamming in every ride at least once, or do you want to sit by the pool without moving all day? Perhaps you want to spend time with family. Be specific with that image. You may want to visit family, but you’d prefer to stay in a hotel or to schedule certain days with the family and others for yourself. If you have an idea in mind and you end up doing something different, you may be asking for more stress.”

It all comes down to understanding your needs, outlining a plan to meet those needs, and then honoring yourself by following through.

How much time do you need to restore your energy, your perspective, your enthusiasm, and your appreciation for daily life?

Likely, you’ll need more than a day; try to schedule at least a week off, two or more if you can.

“I really think, if you can afford it, a longer break is important,” says Bartell. “I don’t start relaxing until about the third day. Until then, I’m impatient for the waiter to come take the order; and then, finally, I get it. I don’t actually slow down until then. I think it’s because we get used to, at most, no more than two days off on the weekend.”

For some, just the idea of departing on a vacation, whether you ever leave town or not, produces anxiety. It sounds OK during the planning stages, you may even be looking forward to it, but once the time comes to wrap things up at the office, or you still need to pack, water the plants, stall the mail, and arrange for pet care, you’re reluctant.

“When I go on vacation — at least up until the last vacation I went on — I experience this anxiety,” Bartell says. “I plan all year for a trip, get all excited, and then, days before, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. It’s that fear of jumping off into the unknown, leaving my comfortable home and routine and letting go of that security. The more you can do ahead of time to know what to expect, the more you can diminish the spookiness of leaving.”

And, by all means, implement the adage popularized by the “New Games” movement of the late 1970s: Play hard, play fair, and quit while you’re still having fun. Know when to come home.

“Some can leave town Saturday morning, travel all week, return Sunday night, and then race into work Monday morning,” says Brauner-Tatum. “Others need a day to integrate back into their home life, to accomplish tasks like laundry and grocery shopping, and perhaps to relax a moment before getting back into the routine. Know what works best for you and your family members and pay attention to that.”