It's that time of year again - out of offices are going on and people are off on holidays. That's a good thing right? Not for everyone. I have so many conversations, throughout the year, with people who see time off as an additional source of stress. Many just take their laptop with them and work through the holiday while their friends and family are relaxing by the pool. Reasoning usually sounds something like this:
"Taking a week off just makes me more stressed because I spend the whole time wondering what is going on at work. Then I come back to so many emails and it takes me a couple of weeks just to catch up! It's not worth it!"
Why does this happen?
The Work Pile-Up Effect: High-responsibility roles mean decisions don’t stop because you’re on a beach. Emails accumulate, projects stall, and you return to a backlog that feels heavier than the suitcase you unpacked.
Constant Connectivity Culture: Even when you try to disconnect, the world doesn’t wait. If you peek at your inbox (which most of us do), the mental load is back before the vacation glow fades.
The Q4 Crunch: Coming back in late Q3 or early Q4 compounds the challenge. This is the period of high-stakes execution: annual targets, board meetings, budget cycles, and year-end reviews all collide.
Identity and Control: Senior professionals are used to being in the loop. Time off can feel like relinquishing control, and returning means regaining it, which creates a sense of urgency rather than ease.
The Neuroscience: Your brain is tricky and has evolved to focus on threat. The more stressed you are, the more it will feel like you can't take any time away. The less time away you take, the more you reinforce this belief.
So why take time off at all?
Because the alternative is worse. Professionals who never step away burn out, experience reduced performance, and model an unsustainable culture. Rest is a strategic investment in clarity, high-performance, and resilience, for you and for your organization. Taking time off will never be frictionless at the top, especially as Q4 looms. but the cost of never stepping away is far higher. Can we stop seeing time off as an indulgence and start treating it as an essential part of resilience and performance?
If you resonated with the section above, and find it difficult to give yourself permission to switch off from work, here is a 5 minute exercise which might be interesting for you to try out.
Write a list of all the roles you occupy, including those that may feel dormant right now. These could include: your job, being a parent, being a partner, being an adult child, being a sibling, being a friend, roles in which you contribute to your local community, and parts of yourself that connect you to other values such as creativity (e.g. being a dancer or a painter).
Take a couple of minutes to reflect on how important those roles are to you versus how much time and energy your giving to them.
Consider whether there are any small actions you can take towards shifting that balance, to nourish parts of yourself ourside of your professional role.
Resilience Comes From Wholeness When we narrow our identity to our professional self we make ourselves fragile because all our worth and stability hinge on one role. But when we honor the other parts of who we are (parent, partner, creator, friend, etc.), we create multiple sources of meaning and energy.
That’s resilience: not the ability to push through at all costs, but the ability to recover and adapt because you’re rooted in more than your inbox. Your best professional self doesn’t come from exhaustion, it comes from wholeness. And wholeness starts with small, deliberate choices to feed every part of who you are.
💡 A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, summarised here by The Times, found that psychological detachment during holidays boosts wellbeing for up to 43 days afterward.
💡Research from Nature Human Behavior reports that across 141 global organizations, a shortened 4‑day week led to significantly reduced burnout, higher job satisfaction, and improved mental health.
💡 In case you missed it, Gallup's most recent report is entitled 'Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want'. Leadership competencies of instilling hope, leading with compassion, creating psychological safety and building trust, are not only seen as most important for employees, but are also directly linked to enhanced employee wellbeing in the workplace.
This month we hit 100 followers on our Empresa Psychology LinkedIn page, so we thought we'd get your opinions on this main topic of this newsletter. We asked how easy people find it to mentally switch off from work when they are taking annual leave.
💡 38% of people said they find it easy to switch off - which is great!
💡 25% of people said they think about work a lot.
💡 38% of people said they check their emails every day while on holiday.
Nobody said they just take their work with them, but it is clear that for the majority of people, having a mental break from work is difficult if not impossible.
❓Where do you sit on this scale? Feel free to drop me an email and let me know! I'd be particularly curious to know, if you are someone who checks their emails daily, whether this is an expectation from your company/manager, or whether this action is driven by an internal pressure (e.g. thinking "I might miss something important if I don't check").
