Vacation; all I ever wanted

I am one week into a two-week vacation. Instead of daydreams and carefree moods, I feel anxious, tired, and unsettled. I have worked diligently for the last two months to take two weeks to disengage and recharge. Vacation should be all I ever wanted it to be. But, almost daily, I am reminded of my blog “Why Relaxing Isn’t Relaxing”. It doesn’t feel like vacation, it feels like a different kind of work.

Disconnect the wires

I attribute my anxious feelings during vacation to lack of practice. During the work week, I feel engaged, productive, and successful. On paper, this appears to be an ideal situation, but it comes at the cost of operating at a high frequency of adrenaline. Remove the work and the adrenaline is gone. Limit engagement on social media and internet scrolling and the dopamine is gone. What is left is an open schedule of limitless opportunities. This is vacation, right? No plans and go with the flow. But it doesn’t feel like vacation. I know that with practice it will feel like vacation. It just takes a while to disconnect the wiring I depend on everyday.

Vacation from the internet

I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of the ways social media, news outlets, and advertisers mess with our psychology to keep us online. Taking internet vacations daily and during the week are always a good decision. I don’t need the internet as much as I let myself believe. To vacation from the iPhone search and scroll, I experimented with the idea below.

Replacing one habit with another

Based on my experience with the 2016 election, I knew I would read too much news and scroll my feed without purpose. I knew it would be important to limit my time online to preserve my emotional bandwidth for things that are more important. In October 2020 during the apex of the presidential election, I started daily habits and tracked them using a printed habit tracker. I decided that instead of cutting off my access to the news and social media, I would ask myself to have completed 5 habits that day before I got to aimlessly scroll. Usually by the time I finished all 5 habits, I had some natural endorphins running in my blood and I didn’t want to ruin it by reading sensationalized headlines or Facebook posts.

Vacation from email

I have been a long-standing believer that you should not have email on your phone. To take it a step further, you should not do email unless you are at your work space. This means no couch surfing with your laptop. The lines get too blurry when you spend time in your leisure space doing work. The vacation from email doesn’t have to happen only during vacation. I love the days where I set an intention to not check email until X ‘o clock. Even better is when I wait until after lunch to check email. And even better yet, to have a plan of attack (because email is a monster to tame) for when I start and stop email and how I will handle the time in-between.

Vacation from family

Self-care has been discussed more frequently during the pandemic because of the overlapping environments of work, school, family and home. The need to shift responsibilities throughout the day makes it easy to forget time to care for ourself. A scheduled vacation away from family is an option, however, the cost of the vacation may weigh on your mind. A simple way to vacation from family is to put yourself somewhere other than home. For me, this is a walk on a trail or aimlessly strolling through TJMaxx.

Vacation from responsibility

Take a day to ditch the list. If your priorities and measure of success are completing a series of tasks, you may find a lot of freedom in letting your instincts lead you through the day. For home, consider taking a full day off from housework or take the whole week off and pick one day to do it all.

Vacation is what you make of it

Vacation isn’t reserved for a number of days each year. Vacation from the internet, email, family and responsibility can be done in minutes each day and they add up to improved health over time. Then when you take the consecutive days away from work and home to recreate and travel, there is a smooth transition.