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What Happens to Us When We Get Away?

  • 3 days ago
  • 12 min read

Updated: 3 hours ago

By:  63° Editorial

August, 2026


For years, the science on holidays was surprisingly underwhelming. They seemed to make us feel better, but perhaps only briefly. A major new analysis has challenged that view, finding that time away may do more for our wellbeing than researchers previously thought. The interesting part is what seems to make the difference, because it may have much less to do with where you go than we have been sold.


Most of us know the feeling before we have the science for it.


Life has been particularly relentless. Work has expanded into evenings. School has become one deadline after another. The children are on holiday while you somehow are not. You have been waking tired, rushing through meals and telling people you really must see them soon. Eventually, sometimes half jokingly, you say that you need a holiday.


What exactly are we asking the holiday to do?


Perhaps we want sleep. Perhaps we want distance from work, a change of scenery, more time with people we love or simply a few mornings when nobody needs us to be anywhere. Sometimes we want novelty. We want to eat somewhere we have never eaten, swim in a different ocean, walk streets we do not know or wake up and briefly become a person whose day has not already been decided.


For some people, that means an international flight and an extraordinary hotel. For others, it is driving home to see family, taking the children somewhere for the weekend, staying with a friend or using annual leave without leaving home at all.


The travel industry has become exceptionally good at selling us destinations for this feeling. Science has been considerably slower at explaining whether any of it actually works. Until recently, the answer was not particularly exciting.


In 2009, psychologist Jessica de Bloom and colleagues pooled the available research on vacations, health and wellbeing. They found that holidays did appear to help, but the effect was relatively small and seemed to fade quickly once people went back to work. The scientific version of the story was almost painfully familiar. You go away, feel better, come home, open your inbox and normal life returns.


Then, researchers kept studying holidays.



That is new and worth knowing. But the most useful part of the research is not simply that holidays appear to be good for us. It is what the evidence begins to reveal about why some time away seems to work better than others. Because it turns out that changing your location and actually recovering are not necessarily the same thing.


  1. You can take your entire working life on holiday with you

A founder can be in Monaco and still be at work. An employee can be officially on annual leave while replying to WhatsApp messages from their manager. A teenager can be on school break while thinking continuously about results. A parent can take leave from paid employment and discover that caring responsibilities have simply expanded to fill the space.


Modern work has made this particularly interesting because physical distance no longer guarantees psychological distance. The office used to be somewhere you left. Now much of it fits inside your phone. This is where one of the strongest findings from the newer vacation research becomes useful.


Grant and colleagues examined not only whether holidays improved wellbeing, but what people actually did and experienced while away. Psychological detachment from work emerged as one of the factors most strongly associated with better wellbeing. Physical activity also stood out.


Psychological detachment sounds clinical, but the idea is not. You are not merely absent from work. For a while, you are no longer mentally doing it. That difference may explain why two people can spend the same week in the same beautiful place and come home feeling completely different. One swims, sleeps, walks, talks, reads and genuinely forgets what is happening at work. The other approves documents over breakfast, takes multiple calls, checks email beside the pool and spends Sunday evening mentally preparing for Monday. Only one of them may have really left.


This is especially relevant to people with enormous responsibility because money can solve many of the inconveniences associated with travel without solving this one. You can remove airport queues, uncomfortable seats, poor hotels and logistical friction and still remain psychologically tethered to the thing from which you supposedly took time away. The ultimate luxury may therefore be less glamorous than we imagine. It may be having built a life, team or organisation capable of functioning without your attention for a while.


  1. The science is also questioning whether you need to go very far

This is where the story becomes much more interesting for everybody else. The 2025 analysis looked at whether vacation location changed the wellbeing effect. Was travelling away better than staying home? Was a mixture of the two best?


The answer is that researchers still cannot say clearly. Vacation location did not produce a sufficiently consistent pattern to conclude that going away is inherently more restorative than staying home. That does not mean travel itself has no value. Of course it does.


A destination can give us novelty, beauty, culture, food, social connection, nature and experiences that simply are not available at home. A 2025 study in Tourism Management Perspectives, for example, found evidence that both natural and cultural destinations can support psychological restoration, while novelty and familiarity can shape that experience in different ways. But there is a useful distinction between saying travel can be restorative and saying you must travel somewhere expensive to recover.


The evidence does not support the latter. A week in the Maldives can be wonderful. So can Cape Town, Dakar or Zanzibar, going home to your place of origin, visiting family in another town, staying where you are and spending four days sleeping properly, seeing people you miss and not opening your laptop.


Recovery has increasingly been packaged as something we purchase. The hotel has a sleep programme. The resort has a longevity clinic. The retreat has cold plunges, infrared saunas, supplements, IVs, breathwork, biometric testing and a carefully designed schedule for helping you recover from your carefully designed schedule.


Wellness tourism itself is expanding rapidly enough that researchers are now treating health-oriented travel as an important interdisciplinary field. A 2026 special issue of Tourism Recreation Research describes a shift towards travel experiences built around preventive health, wellbeing and more meaningful forms of tourism. Other researchers in the same issue argue that the field needs to move beyond an overly individualistic, consumer-driven idea of wellness and consider social, relational and environmental wellbeing too.


But it also raises a question worth asking before booking anything. Do you need another wellness intervention, or do you need some time during which nobody is asking you to perform?


  1. A good holiday may involve doing more, not less

The idea of recovery is often visualised as complete stillness. A sun lounger, a pool and absolutely nowhere to be. Sometimes that is exactly what you need. But the newer evidence suggests that recovery does not necessarily mean becoming motionless. Physical activity during vacation showed one of the strongest positive relationships with wellbeing in the 2025 meta-analysis.


That does not mean finding the hotel gym before you find your room. Movement on holiday can happen almost accidentally. You walk around a city for hours because there is something to see. You swim because there is water in front of you. You play football with cousins, dance at a wedding, hike, cycle, play tennis or simply spend much less of the day sitting behind a desk or inside a car.


This may be one reason travel can sometimes make healthy behaviour feel unusually easy. The environment changes and movement stops being another appointment in the calendar.


The useful takeaway is not that every holiday needs exercise. It is almost the opposite.

You may not need to preserve your normal exercise routine perfectly to remain an active person while you travel. If you normally lift weights four times a week and spend a holiday swimming, walking everywhere and dancing until late, your fitness has not collapsed because your training spreadsheet did. Living better has to leave some room for living.


  1. Perhaps novelty is doing something too

There is another part of travel that is harder to reproduce at home. Newness.


At home, the brain knows the route to work, the supermarket, the view from the bedroom and what normally happens after dinner. Travel interrupts some of that prediction. There are new streets, foods, languages, faces, landscapes and decisions.


Researchers are increasingly interested in how these experiences relate to wellbeing. The 2025 study comparing natural and cultural destinations found that novelty interacted with psychological restoration in more complicated ways than simply “new is better.” In cultural destinations, both novelty and familiarity could strengthen restoration, while excessive novelty in natural settings could weaken some restorative effects.


Another 2025 study in Annals of Tourism Research examined emotional fluctuation during travel and suggested that wellbeing may be influenced not merely by feeling positive all the time but by the rhythm and variation of emotional experiences across a trip.


That is a much more interesting picture of a good holiday than uninterrupted relaxation.

Perhaps part of what makes travel memorable is precisely that it contains contrast. The difficult hike before the extraordinary view. Getting slightly lost before finding somewhere brilliant. A loud night followed by a quiet morning. Novelty followed by familiarity. The best trip may not be the one on which you achieve a perfectly flat line of calm. It may be the one on which you feel alive in ways ordinary routine has stopped asking you to feel.


  1. There is also a social side to holidays that wellness culture sometimes forgets

Think about the holidays you remember most clearly. The destination may matter enormously, but often the memory contains people. The friend you travelled with at 22. The family Christmas when everybody was finally in the same place. The first trip with someone you loved. The cousins you stayed up talking to. The stranger who became a friend. The holiday on which your children saw something for the first time.


This matters because social connection is not simply decorative to wellbeing. It is one of the most consistently important themes across decades of psychological and health research. Vacation research is beginning to recognise this more explicitly too. A recent 2026 review of health-oriented tourism argues for moving beyond an exclusively individual model of wellness towards one that includes relational and social dimensions of wellbeing.


That feels particularly relevant in African contexts, where travel is not always the highly individualised experience depicted in global wellness marketing. Holidays may involve extended family, returning home, weddings, religious celebrations, Christmas migrations, festivals and communities rather than one person disappearing alone into a silent retreat.


Those trips may not always be relaxing. Anyone who has travelled home for Christmas knows this. But recovery and meaning are not necessarily identical to silence.


Sometimes what ordinary life has been missing is not less stimulation. It is more connection.


  1. A holiday can also be terrible for you

This is where romanticising travel becomes unhelpful. You can sleep badly for seven nights, drink much more than usual, spend hours in airports, cross several time zones, eat in ways that make you uncomfortable, argue with your family, overspend, answer emails every morning and return home on Sunday night with work beginning at 7 a.m. on Monday.


Technically, you had a holiday. Your body may have experienced something closer to an endurance event. This is why asking whether “holidays are healthy” is almost the wrong question. A holiday is not one exposure. It is a container in which many things can change at once. Sleep can improve or deteriorate. Movement can increase or disappear. Alcohol can decrease or increase. Relationships can deepen or become stressful. Work can disappear or remain omnipresent. Financial stress can temporarily disappear or follow you home as a credit-card bill or empty bank account.


The science therefore should not be used to medicalise holidays or promise that booking one will cure burnout, depression, hypertension or any other condition. The 2025 meta-analysis primarily examined employee wellbeing. That is meaningful, but wellbeing is not the same thing as disease prevention, and the evidence does not justify turning annual leave into medicine.


Sometimes a holiday is simply a holiday. That is allowed too.


  1. How long do you actually need?

This is one of the questions almost everyone asks, and science does not give us a magical number.


The newer meta-analysis did find that vacation length mattered, with longer holidays associated with greater improvements in wellbeing. It also found that national culture and the number of nationally mandated vacation days influenced aspects of the relationship.


That is interesting because it reminds us that recovery does not happen outside society.

Taking a holiday feels very different when annual leave is protected and culturally normal from when taking time away makes you fear that your job will disappear, your business will collapse or your colleagues will interpret your absence as a lack of commitment.


There is also evidence that shorter breaks can still help, so the lesson is not that a holiday only “counts” if you can disappear for three weeks. The more useful conclusion is that meaningful periods away from ordinary demands appear valuable, while the ideal duration will depend on the person, their circumstances and what actually happens during the break.


Something does not have to be perfect to be useful.


  1. The richest person in the room and the person saving for their first trip may have the same problem

Their holidays may look nothing alike. One can choose the aircraft, departure time, destination, hotel, food and itinerary and arrange for almost every inconvenience to disappear. The other may have saved for a year, taken the only available flight, stayed with relatives and returned the evening before work.


Money changes the experience enormously. What is striking about some of the strongest findings in the vacation literature, however, is how ordinary they are.



For someone with very limited control over their circumstances, that does not mean pretending structural constraints do not exist. A person with precarious employment may not be able to switch off if their employer continues calling. Someone caring for children or relatives cannot simply suspend responsibility. A person without paid leave faces a fundamentally different recovery problem from someone deciding which resort to book. For someone with extraordinary resources, however, the challenge can be almost paradoxical.


You may have purchased every condition required for rest except the willingness to become temporarily unavailable. That may be the one amenity no hotel can provide.


  1. Maybe the most useful part of a holiday happens after you come home

There is something worth noticing the next time you return from a trip feeling unusually good.


Before normal life completely takes over, ask what changed. Perhaps you slept eight hours because there was no 5.30 a.m. alarm; you walked every day because the environment made walking easy; you had long meals with people instead of eating while looking at a screen; you were outside more; you stopped checking email after dinner; you laughed more than you realised you had stopped laughing; you were simply less rushed.


The obvious conclusion is that you need another holiday. Sometimes you do. But there is another possibility. A good holiday can function almost like a natural experiment. For several days, multiple variables in your life change simultaneously, and you get to observe what happens to you.


You cannot necessarily bring the beach home. You can ask why you only see your closest friends twice a year. You cannot live permanently in a hotel. You can question why work has access to you at bed-time. You cannot spend every afternoon swimming. You may be able to stop treating movement as something that only counts inside a gym. You cannot remain on annual leave forever but perhaps you can notice that the version of you who slept, moved, talked, explored and occasionally did absolutely nothing felt considerably better than the version who was permanently rushing.


That may be the most useful thing a holiday tells us. Not simply where we should go next, but what might need to change when we come back.

 63°Take

Something genuinely changed in the science of holidays recently.


The influential 2009 evidence suggested that vacations produced relatively modest improvements in health and wellbeing that faded quickly after people returned to work. The much larger 2025 meta-analysis reached a more optimistic conclusion, finding a substantial improvement in employee wellbeing and suggesting that the benefits may last longer than previously thought.


What makes the newer research particularly useful is that it moves us beyond the simplistic question of whether holidays are “good for you.” Psychological detachment from work and physical activity appear especially important, longer breaks may provide greater benefits, while the evidence does not currently establish that travelling away from home is inherently superior to taking genuine time off at home.


Meanwhile, newer tourism research is broadening the conversation further. Researchers are examining how cultural and natural environments, novelty, emotional experiences, movement and relationships may contribute to wellbeing during travel. The emerging picture is less about finding the perfect wellness destination and more about understanding the conditions under which time away becomes genuinely restorative.


A beautiful destination can give you experiences you could never reproduce at home. Money can buy extraordinary comfort and remove enormous amounts of travel friction. Neither guarantees that you will psychologically stop working, enjoy yourself or return feeling restored. At the same time, people who cannot afford expensive travel should not be excluded from the conversation about recovery. Current evidence does not tell us that wellbeing is hiding in another country. Genuine time away, movement, social connection and mental distance from work can exist much closer to home.


Perhaps the question to bring back from your next holiday, then, is not simply whether you enjoyed it. Notice what was different about you while you were there. If you slept more, moved more, saw people you loved, spent time outside, stopped rushing, became curious again or went several days without thinking about work, that information may be more valuable than the destination itself.


A good holiday may help you live better for a while. A really useful one might teach you something about how you want to live when it is over.


Sources


 63°provides health and wellness information for educational and informational purposes only. This content is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare professional with questions about your health or before making significant changes to your health, treatment, diet or lifestyle.


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