How you spend your holiday could be changing the way you feel about your job

Could you describe each episode, from when you woke up to when you dozed off to sleep? How much time did you spend on each one? Who did you spend it with?

In a 2004 study, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked one thousand working adults to go through this exercise, describing each episode in writing.

The resulting data gave the research team a sense of how people tend to spend the time on a given day. The largest chunk of our daily hours is associated with work (6.9 hours).

Other activities like eating, commuting, watching television, and spending time on our phone each take up around one to two hours per day. The researchers also examined with whom, if anyone, each episode was spent—family, friends, customers, alone, and so on.

The next part of the study is where things got interesting. They asked participants to then go back through each episode, and report how they felt during each one, in terms of positive and negative emotions. That way, the researchers could pinpoint the most and least pleasant aspects of people’s daily lives.

The most positive daily activities were intimate relations, socialising, and relaxing, and the most positive interactions were with friends, then family. The least positive activities were commuting, working, and doing housework, and the least positive interactions with others were with oneself (being alone), followed by one’s boss and then coworkers.

While perhaps not shocking, these findings explain why so many of us experience the “scaries” on Sunday evenings or “a case of the Mondays” the following morning at work. Or why when we’re on vacation, and the thought of going back to work pops into our minds, it fills us with dread. In general, we like our jobs less than the other parts of our lives.

Regarding vacations in particular, we enter one of the ultimate feel-good liminal spaces in our lives when we go away on holiday. It provides us with a temporary escape from work and from the routines of our daily lives, and that escape tends to feel quite nice.

While on vacation, we experience a spike in positive emotions and life satisfaction, and these good vibes tend to continue when we return. But they don’t last. Over the course of a few weeks, they fade. It’s this boomerang in our well-being that makes vacations potentially jolting. We get this big dose of positive emotions while we’re in a new space, on a break from our normal lives. This makes a perfect setting for epiphanies, including when we return and find that the satisfaction we gained on our vacation fades away.

Don’t get me wrong; vacations are a good thing for employee well-being. The few studies that have examined employees’ intentions to quit pre- and post-vacation have shown that going on vacation slightly reduces employees’ likelihood of leaving. But at the same time, researchers have found that reflecting on work during vacation, either positively or negatively, is common.

When the reflections are positive, we return to work in a more engaged state; when we have negative thoughts about our job while away, we return to work more disengaged than when we left on holiday.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

____________________

Dr. Anthony Klotz is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at UCL and author of Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk