Holiday over? Seven expert tips for how to avoid back-to-work stress

By Cary Cooper

Manchester: The philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill once wrote about why he didn’t take holidays. “No holidays allowed,” he explained, “lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired.” It is certainly true that when people take holidays and then return to work, they tend to feel “instant stress”.

All the R&R they got from the laid-back lifestyle of lounging by the pool can disappear within hours of returning to the office.

Whether we’re mainly office-based or work from home, our working environment can be frenetic, full-on, fast-moving, unrelenting and exhausting for many – especially after some time off. Two top US cardiologists in the 1970s, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, defined the consequences of most work environments as “hurry sickness”.

The UK’s most recent Health & Safety Executive report on sickness absence showed that “stress, depression or anxiety” accounted for 51 per cent of all work-related ill-health cases, and 55 per cent of all working days lost due to work-related ill health.

In a nutshell, most work is stressful, requiring bouts of respite and serious rest, relaxation and recuperation.

Reconnect with your colleagues

On your first morning back at work, use your first hour(s) to reconnect socially with your colleagues, sharing your holiday and other experiences. Work can provide positive and meaningful relationships, and to sustain our health and wellbeing, social connection is essential.

Control your workload

Avoid doing your email responses straight away. The large inbox will induce an immediate stress response, and your desire to read all your emails on day one will not only overload and exhaust you, it may also lead to problematic responses that create relationship issues down the line.

You might, for example, be more curt than you usually would be, and the recipient might take offence. Look over all your emails casually, highlight and respond only to the urgent ones, and leave the rest for another day.

Take short breaks

Ensure you take a coffee or tea break and lunch each day during your first week back. If you’re office-based, take these breaks with different colleagues and, over lunch, try to leave the office to have your lunch in a park or other outside venue.

Go home on time and avoid long hours

When you get home, be active. Don’t flop in front of the TV but go to a gym or out for a run, or treat yourself to a meal out with your family or friends. Let the holiday mode spill over to your home environment.

Don’t arrange lots of meetings

The pace of most workplaces is fast for many people. Cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman suggested in their 1974 book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart, that people become “obsessionally time-directed” by the office environment. Don’t arrange numerous meetings to show others that you’re back and up and running. Basically, don’t try to do everything in your in-tray in 48 hours!

Be tolerant of colleagues

Colleagues who constantly complain and suggest there is no solution to a problem can create stress, particularly when you have just returned from a wonderful and stress-free holiday. Try to be patient, tolerant, and listen to their diatribe without taking it seriously.

Set realistic work objectives

So how can we learn to manage the stress of returning to our desk, to ensure we retain some of the benefits that breaks from work provide and avoid the post-holiday stress trap? As a professor of organisational psychology and health, here are seven suggestions.

Finally, avoid setting unachievable deadlines for your work or making unnecessary appointments, and politely say no to things you won’t be able to achieve in your first week back.

Studs Terkel, the social reformer, wrote in his acclaimed book Working: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor – in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying.” Holidays provide an opportunity for recuperation from the stresses of modern work environments, so let’s allow some of this to spill over into the workplace on your return to the office.

(Cary Cooper is a Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health, University of Manchester)