Become a Well-Rested Success – Take 100% of Your Vacation Time
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Become a Well-Rested Success – Take 100% of Your Vacation Time
Yes. Despite your reservations (no pun intended), it’s good to use all of your vacation time. In fact, taking your full vacation is not only good for your health, but it’s good for your future earnings and for the country’s economy!
Americans generally take less vacation time than other similarly situated industrialized countries, but why?
We believe that taking vacation time might be seen by our bosses as a lack of commitment to the job or organization.
We feel guilty: Taking time off violates our internal work ethic.
We don’t feel that our work schedules or responsibilities accommodate time off.
We think we can’t afford the cost to take a vacation.
We are on the receiving end of a heavy workload and pressure from managers and peers to maintain a “nose to the grindstone” attitude.
Not taking the time off we’ve rightfully earned on the job has real costs for our economy. A 2014 study by Oxford Economics found that if Americans took all the vacation due to them, the benefit would accrue to all industries and would translate into direct economic benefits, including:
an additional $160 billion in business sales
$52 billion in additional income earned
1.2 million US jobs
But, does all this staying at work when we should be vacationing really pay off for us?
Too Much Work: Bad for Your Health
There is no question that “nose to the grindstone” and forgoing vacation does not benefit your health.
A large study of middle-aged men at high risk for heart disease found that when men follow through and take vacations, their risk for dying of heart disease goes down.
For female homemakers, another study found that infrequent vacations were associated with heart attacks and death by heart disease over a 20-year period.
Too Much Work – Bad For Our Productivity and Progress
Health is obviously something prized by just about everyone. Some of us might even be willing to risk the resulting health problems if taking that risk paid off in faster advancement or more money or job security.
So, even if it is bad for your health, is skipping vacations good for your career? It turns out that conventional wisdom might be 100% wrong here.
The benefits of taking a vacation go beyond reducing your health risks. Taking vacations also improves work performance. An Ernst and Young study done in 2006 shows that for every additional 10 hours of vacation an employee took, his or her performance ratings went up by 8 percent — nearly 1 percent per day of vacation.
CNN demonstrated how beneficial vacations can be to our productivity and progress, “Researcher Mark Rosekind of Alertness Solutions has found that the respite effect of a vacation can increase performance by 80%. Reaction times of returning vacationers increased 40% in his study.”
While many of us worry about how our vacation time will be perceived by our bosses, it can, in fact, actually benefit you to take your vacations. The choice of vacation destinations and vacation types is now more expansive than ever. Luxury villa rentals are proving to be a popular choice and there’s no guessing why. They provide you with your own personal paradise, a getaway from the stresses of work; click here to learn about Turks and Caicos villas.
Research from Project: Time Off shows that most bosses believe that vacations are good for their employee’s productivity and for the bottom line.
So, vacations are good for our health, our productivity, and career growth, what’s next?
Plan Ahead to Get the Most Benefits
Just taking any quickly thrown-together escape is probably not enough to realize all of the health-and-productivity benefits associated with taking a vacation.
Not all vacations are created equal.
If the vacation you take is poorly planned or the results of careful planning turn out poorly, a vacation might offer you no lasting benefits. So, if your vacation results in a great deal of new stress, it probably will not offer you many of the possible health or productivity benefits.
The Institute of Applied Positive Research studied how best to make your vacation result in health and welfare benefits and they concluded that you should:
Focus on planning the details
Plan more than a month in advance
Go far away – the farther the better
Meet with someone at the location who knows and can navigate the area
During the holidays, we often wish each other peace and prosperity, or we drink to our continued good health.
One of the best ways you can realize the promise of these pledges is to take and enjoy your paid vacation time. Take the steps necessary to be as healthy and happy as possible. Follow the lead of our European brethren and start using most or all of your vacation time.
Let us know how you feel about taking vacations or how you deal with the tensions between work and vacation. We would love to hear from you, leave a comment!
