We could all use a vacation. In fact, some of us probably need one.
That's not me talking. It turns out an active, participatory get-away — hypothetically, a dive trip to a sunny island somewhere — does the body good.
The mind, too.
Indeed, there's a growing body of research in both the medical and psychological worlds that's exploring the health aspects of recreation, as well as the mental stimulation we get when we're having fun. Both suggest we're not doing either enough — to our detriment.
"The way that it is right now, people have the sense that it's illegitimate to take your vacation," says Joe Robinson, author of "Don't Miss Your Life." "People just don't get the fact that banging your head against the wall is counterproductive."
Here's the thing: Vacations aren't just good medicine. The benefits of play include lowering our stress as well as fulfilling our brain's ingrained desire for, among other things, finding passion in our experiences. But each requires that we completely rethink how we do leisure, and while it may not be easy, it could be a lot of fun to try.
Good Medicine
First, the bad news, and it comes by way of some background, not only on how much, or rather, little, we value vacations, but also how much skipping time off affects our health and well-being. In one vacation survey, respondents said doctors should be able to write prescriptions for time off — and while that's unlikely, it may be what it takes to make us all healthier, happier people.
So here we go. Americans, on average, aren't so good at taking time off. On the one hand, that means we're pretty good at work. On the other, it means we're really bad at play. Those aren't fighting words; we simply don't use what we've earned, in spite of getting the fewest days off in the industrialized world, according to the Expedia.com "Vacation Deprivation Survey." That is, we only average 13 days off per year, while the English average 26 days, the Germans 27, and the French 38. Yet we typically leave three days on the table, while citizens of those other countries only leave two. At the same time, more than a third of U.S. workers report working more than 40 hours a week, and one in five has canceled vacation plans because of a work-related conflict. All told, American workers give back $20 billion to $25 billion in unused vacation a year.
That's all well and good; it's a free country, and we get to make our own choices. Except for one thing: If skipping vacations doesn't kill you, it'll drive you crazy.
That may sound tone-deaf if you read the news regularly, but it makes a lot of sense if you read some other things. For example, there's a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. It followed more than 700 women ages 45-64 for more than 20 years, and in compiling it, researchers found that, even when they factored in all sorts of demographic information, including income, anxiety and education, one of the most significant predictors of heart health was whether the women took vacations; among those who hadn't had a vacation in more than six years, women who identified as "homemakers" were 16 times more likely to have heart disease than regular vacationers, while women working outside the home were eight times more likely.
And then there's another study, this one conducted by the State University of New York at Oswego and the Mind-Body Center at the University of Pittsburgh, which followed 12,000 men ages 35-57 at high risk for heart disease. They found those men who took vacations were 21 percent less likely to have disease than those who didn't, and 32 percent less likely to suffer heart attacks.
That's just two examples of gold-medal, peer-reviewed scientific research. Anecdotal reports are just as interesting. "I started actually seeing that patients, after they got back from holiday, after being away, actually improved," says Dr. Mel Borins, a family physician in Toronto, an associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, and author of "Go Away: Just For the Health of It." "I saw people who had headaches, and they went away on a two-week vacation and suddenly their headache disappeared. Or they had a rash and the rash went away after they took time off. Or their mood improved considerably after being away. And I started to see this pattern."
Every bit of this points to one thing, Borins says. Vacations reduce stress (how's that fodder for a study in the Journal of Obvious Conclusions) — and that stress takes a very real physiological toll on your body when its fight-or-flight hormones crash your system.
But it takes a psychological toll, too — in particular, edging you closer to burnout, when you're tired, disinterested in getting up in the morning, wracked with aches and pains, and suffering, even, from disrupted sleep. "We're no different than cellphones or iPods: We need to get recharged, just like they do," Robinson says. "When you don't get recharged, then you just run all your resources down. That's when you get depleted, get into burnout mode, and that's taking down your body, because it's suppressing the immune system 24 hours a day so you can be vulnerable to any number of things going haywire."
He's backed up by the survey, "The Vacation Gap," conducted by NASA, Air New Zealand and research firm Alertness Solutions. The researchers found travelers self-reported cognitive performance increases of 82 percent while on vacation, and their post-vacation performance improved 25 percent; for people over the age of 45 — and those traveling with a companion — performance improved 50 percent. During their vacation, travelers also reported 68 percent less stress and better overall health, and even at home they reported better sleep, three times more intervals of deep, rejuvenating sleep and improved sexual performance.
The reason is simple enough: "Vacations regather crashed emotional resources," Robinson says. "When you're burned out, all your resources are depleted — you've got nothing left, so vacation is a healing process. It lets you build back up your resources again."
Happiness Studies
So vacationing makes you healthier. But it can also make you happier. Beyond freeing itself from burnout, your mind wants balance, and in order to give it that you should know a bit about how play is different from work, how motivation affects enjoyment, and how your brain perceives adventures.
Indeed, compared with work, play requires a different skill set — or mindset, if you prefer. In fact, mastering leisure can be hard in a world of passive entertainment, and it's doubly so if you've spent most of your adult life thinking about how to be a good worker, Robinson says. "We are absolutely uncomfortable, many of us, having time where we're not producing. We're raised to be productive, so all the emphasis in the culture is on output — that's where people get their value — so we define ourselves through our labor."
There's actually a clinical diagnosis for this: time urgency, in which people feel they have to be racing all day long, filling every minute with something. That doesn't jibe with trying to recuperate and relax, because play, being, you know, "play," doesn't have objectives, deadlines and monthly quotas. It's about, for example, diving just for the sake of diving, to get wet, and look at fish. Yet when we have leisure phobia — yes, that's a real term, too — what we shove aside is actually where we get our real self-worth, Robinson says. "Where we get our real needs met is when we're doing things we like to do."
This fits into self-determination theory, a concept created by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester that sits at the core of — don't laugh — "happiness" studies. Goofy name aside, what Deci and Ryan identified are three core needs we have to meet to make it worth getting up in the morning: autonomy, competence and relatedness. "We meet those much better when we do things at play," Robinson says.
For example, it's hard to be autonomous when you've working for someone else, compared with when you're drifting along a reef. Likewise, few of us get to stretch our comfort zones and master new skills on the job, either — yet people who seek out personal goals by, say, learning to dive then learning underwater photography, report being less bored, more fulfilled and healthier than those who recreate by escaping into the latest episode of Dancing With the Top Chefs. Likewise, passive recreators often miss the opportunity to interact with others and make fast friends on a dive boat, in a dive club or in a certification class.
When we find something that meets all three of our core needs, that activity becomes a passion, which turns Bob the Accountant into Bob the Diver. The next thing you know, he's got a new passport and a drawer full of dive flag T-shirts.
But then, self-determination theory suggests something extra occurs; because he's excited about being a diver — Deci and Ryan would say he's "intrinsically motivated" by the pleasure, experience and challenge — he not only wants to dive more, he wants to dive better. Skill building is "passion foreplay," Robinson says. During each dive, he engages in "deliberate practice" of such tasks as buoyancy control, slow-and-steady breathing and streamlined posture so he can enjoy the experience even more. Eventually, he "masters" it, and he dives without concentrating on the details.
When that happens, he achieves what psychologists call "flow" — a mental state in which he is fully immersed (no pun intended); he's focused, in the moment, free of self-consciousness, challenged but in control, full of joy and oblivious to the passing of time or the effort he's expending. He's in the zone, and loving every minute of it. It's the ultimate mental pay-off for all his training, so the cycle repeats itself.
But it's likely that flow isn't his only reward, and this gets back to the benefits of vacation again. "Studies show experiences can make us happier than material things," Robinson says.
At least that's what three-quarters of respondents said in a study by Leaf Van Boven, associate professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He took that one step further to find out why, and to do that he built on the learning principle that we remember 90 percent of what we do. He found our brains release nerve-growth-stimulating hormones that wire memories together for future recall. They're imprinted in our brains, so they not only make us happy when we remember them, as you might expect, they actually become self-defining. In other words, we think of ourselves as the sum total of our past adventures — especially when we've shared them with our friends and loved ones. Each new adventure gives us social currency, which allows us to compare ourselves with others, according to Jeroen Nawijn of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam, especially when we have something to look forward to and our office mates don't.
New Experiences
So if we're shooting for healthy and happy, we might as well try to optimize our vacation experiences. Even there, knowing how our brains process "vacationing" can offer some suggestions on how to do it better — from how to plan a get-away, why to include new experiences, and how to immerse yourself in the experience even after you return.
Surprisingly, you get nearly as big a mental boost from dreaming about an upcoming vacation as you do by taking it. According to Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia, planning — really, anticipating — is "free" happiness. She uses a cookie analogy. You have two of your favorites, and you either eat them both now, or eat one now and the other tomorrow. You'll get the same amount of happiness by eating both, except, if you wait to eat the second, you'll also get bonus joy from looking forward to eating it. The same would go for a trip you're taking next month, and according to Nawijn that may correlate with the concept of "need theory"; we need to wander, because it wasn't too long ago that we were hunter-gatherers instead of cube dwellers.
As a result, your brain gets keyed up over the idea of something novel, unpredictable and surprising, and according to brain-scanning experiments done with functional magnetic resonance imaging, it treats unknown events like it does pleasant things, lighting up the part called the right ventral striatum.
But wait, there's more. With new experiences, your brain's hypothalamus releases dopamine, the feel-good, pleasure neurotransmitter. "The anticipation of something new is called the 'exploration bonus,'" Robinson says. "This is exactly what our brains want. They want novelty and challenge more than anything else for long-term fulfillment. That's what the vacation provides in spades, if you do it in the right way: If you're out there trying new things and getting into new experiences."
In that light, it's worth considering what comprises an "ideal" vacation. Sure, there's a time and place for dozing in a beach chair — certainly, the vitamin D won't hurt if you're escaping from winter gloom, Dr. Borins says — but there's evidence to suggest that you should mix it up with more participatory experiences.
According to Dunn, we're maximally happy when we're interested enough in what we're doing that we're thinking about it; that is, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. One of the benefits of activity is that it provides an "optimal experience" — one where you're completely engaged in the moment, which is the foundation of flow. And that goes beyond diving, since you've got to fill those surface intervals with something.
Fortunately, a dive vacation offers plenty of options — cycling so you can see a destination like locals see it, learning a dance at a local festival, playing impromptu beach volleyball, or anything else that gets you moving and grooving. In fact, the further you move from your comfort zone toward feeling a little silly the better, psychologically speaking. "It's actually when you do things that make you feel foolish that you're actually learning and growing," Robinson says. "You've got to get away from all of the stuff that's familiar to have a real experience."
The caveat is to avoid living your vacation like you live your job (and we're not just talking about avoiding email). Don't overbook so you're racing to see a hundred places and do a thousand things, which is a sure way to end up disappointed when you don't accomplish everything. "It's not about how many things you do; it's about the quality of each experience that you have," Robinson says.
Yet even after the best vacation ever, eventually you've got to return to the real world, and that transition may be difficult; we may actually mourn the vacation experience, especially when it's done well (when it's not, we're just annoyed we wasted our time and money for nothing). It doesn't help that, according to Dunn, remembering experiences triggers weaker emotions than anticipating them, yet Borins suggests that may be because we jump back into daily life too quickly.
He recommends downloading and organizing your pictures, strategically placing your souvenirs and trinkets that remind you of the trip, spending time with friends you can laugh with, and taking it easy on the first day or two back so you don't go immediately onto the overbooked treadmill. He also suggests you start planning your next vacation immediately.
In the meantime, bring some of the vacation mindset home, Robinson says. Sure, the diving in Lake Kindafunky isn't the same as the Caribbean, but it you're doing it for that "deliberate practice" and you've got good friends along, there is some real value. The same goes for picking up on the salsa lessons you started while away. Passions have been shown to add eight hours of extra joy to a person's week, he says.
There's a good reason why. According to Dunn, happiness is more strongly associated with the frequency than the intensity of experiences, which probably keeps your brain's rewiring process overwhelmed as it sorts all of this out. You don't have time for the buzz to wear off, so your core needs are constantly atwitter. And that, really, is what researchers say we're looking for to stay healthy, happy, contributing members of society. In that sense, we all really do need a vacation.
Fortunately an activity like diving gives us plenty of reasons to get away.
Resources
"Go Away: Just For The Health of It"
by Mel Borins
"Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"Why Do We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation"
by Edward Deci
"Don't Miss Your Life"
by Joe Robinson
For More Information
The Great Escape: How to Leave Work Behind and Enjoy Your Vacation
www.dtmag.com/Stories/Dive%20Traveler/06-01-dive_traveler.htm
Armchair Adventures: Memory Books Keep Vacation Memories Alive
www.dtmag.com/Stories/Dive%20Traveler/01-05-dive_traveler.htm
Dive Into Your Destination: How Pretrip Planning Can Mean a Better Vacation
www.dtmag.com/Stories/Dive%20Traveler/11-02-dive_traveler.htm
|
