Summer is here, the annual leave is booked, and you've been looking forward to this for months. You want to make the most of your time off work, but it’s important to remember that a holiday is just as much about rest as it is about experience.
If you jam-pack your holiday with things to do from morning to night, you might end up coming back feeling like you need another holiday to recover from the holiday. Because when we're used to working full speed, adjusting to slowing down (even when we're resting) can feel tough. So here's what the science actually says about resting properly when you go away.
Holiday-optimising (and why we've made rest into another performance)
We’re big fans of breaks that involves arriving somewhere, having very little planned, and letting the days unfold at whatever pace they want. But this can feel uncomfortable for some people.
We have imported the same optimising instinct into rest that we apply to everything else. The pre-trip research, the best-restaurant lists, the itinerary engineered so no day is wasted. Holidays have become something to execute as much as inhabit, and the phone has made this much easier to do. Even people who intend to switch off often find themselves checking in, staying vaguely on top of things, scrolling in the evening because the habit runs so deep that it happens before a conscious decision is made.
There's also the performance layer on top of all of this. Holidays are increasingly something that happen in public, even when the point of them is meant to be private. The impulse to document them shifts the experience from something you're experiencing, to something you're also producing. These are not the same thing, and one of them is considerably less restful than the other.
Leisure sickness: why you might feel ill the moment you stop
Leisure sickness is the name given to a surprisingly common experience: becoming exhausted or unwell as soon as you slow down and your body finally gets a chance to stop.
It sounds counterintuitive, but the mechanism makes sense once you understand what stress does to the body. Sustained stress keeps cortisol elevated, and cortisol suppresses the immune system. It's useful in the short term because your body is prioritising the immediate threat over everything else, but when the stress finally lifts, the immune system gets its turn to catch up on everything it's been deferring. Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets, who named the phenomenon in 2002, found it this affects a significantly higher rate of people in high-responsibility roles who find it difficult to mentally let go of work.
Why scrolling or ‘checking in’ on holiday doesn't count as rest
When you're not doing anything in particular (daydreaming, mind-wandering, staring out of a window) your brain activates what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network. It might feel like you’re doing nothing, but your brain is actually consolidating memories, processing emotions, making connections between ideas, and doing the maintenance work that makes you feel like yourself again after a sustained period of stress. To activate it, it needs genuine, uninterrupted space to run (which is why we tend to have our best ideas in the shower or on a walk).
Scrolling, watching content, staying loosely plugged in keeps the brain just stimulated enough that the Default Mode Network can't fully engage. You're not working…but you're not recovering either. Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan found that natural environments are particularly good for cognitive recovery because they produce "soft fascination" - attention that's gently held without being effortfully directed. A landscape, a view, something to look at without needing to process. A phone screen, however good the content, does the opposite.
Why you should plan boredom into your holiday
Boredom is uncomfortable. So uncomfortable in fact that in one study, participants left with nothing to do for fifteen minutes chose to give themselves mild electric shocks rather than sit with their thoughts. With instant access to social media and entertainment, it has become something we're collectively very bad at tolerating. The phone is very effective at filling any gap in stimulation before it has a chance to develop into genuine idleness. On holiday, this plays out as a state of persistent low-level stimulation that feels like rest because nothing urgent is happening, but which doesn't deliver what real rest is for.
Boredom, when properly experienced, is actually the gateway to recovery and creativity. It's the moment the brain, deprived of incoming stimulation, turns inward begins processing everything that stress and busyness have been deferring.
How to actually rest on holiday
The research on genuine cognitive recovery points in a fairly consistent direction. None of it is complicated, but some of it requires resisting instincts that are quite strong.
- Start winding down before you leave. Going on holiday that starts with a 10pm finish the night before isn’t going to give you the best start for a break. Factoring in a couple of lower-intensity days before you travel gives your nervous system a head start on the decompression, which means you actually start recovering when you arrive rather than spending the first two days just coming down from the week before.
- Go somewhere with nature in it. Time in natural environments outperforms urban environments for cognitive restoration by a significant margin. A study by cognitive psychologist David Strayer found that three days in nature with no digital access produced around 50% improvements in creative problem-solving. Cities, however enjoyable, demand constant low-level attentional alertness which doesn't give the directed attention system the rest it needs.
- Don't over plan and fill every day. The instinct to plan thoroughly is understandable - you've spent money, you want to make the most of it, you don't want to waste a day. But unscheduled time is not wasted time. It's often where the actual recovery happens, once the boredom threshold has been cleared.
- Give it more than a long weekend. The first day or two of any holiday is largely decompression - the cortisol coming down, the mental adjustment to the absence of usual demands. The deeper recovery tends not to begin until day three or beyond. Long weekends and short city breaks can be genuinely enjoyable without being particularly restorative, because you leave before the actual rest has started.
- Put the phone somewhere inconvenient. Leave it behind or put it somewhere that creates real friction before you can reach for it. The habitual scroll happens before a conscious decision most of the time, which means good intentions aren't enough. Physical distance helps.
- Prioritise connection. Genuine social connection the kind involving uninterrupted conversation, shared meals, time with nowhere else to be is consistently identified in the research as a component of recovery, not an optional extra. The same dinner with phones on the table is a qualitatively different experience from one without them.
- Give yourself at least one day with no plan at all. Not a loose plan, not a "we'll see how we feel" plan…genuinely nothing decided in advance. Let the day go wherever it goes. If you want to find somewhere good to eat, ask someone who lives there rather than opening TikTok or Google. The best meal of most trips tends to be the one nobody planned, at the place somebody's neighbour mentioned, at a time that only worked because nothing else was booked.
If you need a place to genuinely rest without the lure of visiting the best coffee shop on TikTok, we might know a place or two off the beaten path…