Why You Can't Relax on Vacation (And What Actually Helps)
By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
You've been counting down to this trip for months. The out-of-office is on. The bags are unpacked, the view is everything the photos promised, and someone has just handed you a cold drink by the water.
And you feel... wired. Restless. A little guilty, for reasons you can't quite name. Your hand drifts to your phone "just to check one thing." You catch yourself mentally drafting a reply to an email from Tuesday. By day three, you've finally started to unwind, and you wake up with a sore throat and a headache.
(This is a composite drawn from the stories travelers have shared with me over the years, and I'd bet at least a bit of it sounds familiar.)
If you've ever wondered why you can't relax on vacation, here's the reassuring part: you're not bad at vacationing, and you're far from alone. Relaxation turns out to be a psychological process with its own logic and timeline. Your body can arrive somewhere beautiful in a few hours. Your mind usually takes longer.
Let's look at what the research says about why switching off is so hard, why some people actually get sick the moment they stop, and what genuinely helps.
Relaxing Works More Like a Dimmer Than a Switch
Most of us treat vacation as an on/off proposition. Work mode ends Friday at five, vacation mode starts Saturday morning. But the psychology of recovery doesn't work that cleanly.
Organizational psychologists Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz have spent years studying how people recover from work stress. In 2007, they published the Recovery Experience Questionnaire, which identified four distinct experiences that help people unwind:
Psychological detachment: mentally switching off from work, including not thinking about it
Relaxation: low physical and mental activation; the body and mind coming down
Mastery: challenging, absorbing experiences outside of work, like learning to surf or navigating a new city
Control: the sense that you get to decide how to spend your time
Psychological detachment tends to get the most attention in this research, and for good reason. You can be on a beach thousands of miles from your desk and still be at work in your head, replaying a meeting, anticipating what's waiting in your inbox, rehearsing a hard conversation. Physically you're away. Psychologically you never left.
Here's the frustrating part: detachment is hardest exactly when you need it most. Sonnentag calls this the recovery paradox: research consistently finds that heavy job stressors, especially workload, make it harder to mentally switch off, even though those are exactly the conditions that call for real recovery. So the people who most need a real break are often the ones who struggle most to take one, even once they're on it.
That's why the first few days of a trip can feel so strange. Your nervous system is still running at work speed. It needs time, and usually some help, to downshift.
Why Some People Get Sick the Minute They Stop
If you've ever spent the first days of a long-awaited trip with a cold, a migraine, or a mysterious stomach bug, you may have assumed it was bad luck or the airplane air. Sometimes it is. But there's also a name for the pattern of getting sick precisely when you stop working: leisure sickness.
The term comes from Dutch psychologists Ad Vingerhoets, Maaike van Huijgevoort, and Guus Van Heck. In a 2002 pilot study published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, they asked a representative sample of nearly 1,900 Dutch adults whether they recognized themselves in a description of falling ill during weekends or vacations. Around 3% said yes to each, which the researchers described as relatively common. Among the people who did experience it, the pattern had often lasted for more than a decade, and it typically began during stressful periods in their lives. Interestingly, what people did on their days off didn't seem to explain it.
Why would stopping make you sick? Researchers don't fully know yet. In later writing, Van Heck and Vingerhoets called for much more systematic research into the mechanisms involved, and it's still a small research area. My own read, which goes beyond what these studies show, is that a sudden drop from high demand to rest is a big physical transition in its own right, and that constant busyness can mask symptoms we only notice once everything goes still.
What I take from it, as a psychologist, is this: if you consistently crash at the start of your vacations, your body may be telling you something about how hard you've been running before you leave. That's useful information, and it's worth listening to.
Your Phone Keeps One Foot in the Office
A generation ago, going on vacation meant being genuinely unreachable. Today, work can follow you to a hammock in Tulum, right there in your pocket.
Psychologists Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi gave this pull a name in 2015: workplace telepressure, the preoccupation with work messages and the urge to respond to them quickly. In their research, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, people higher in telepressure reported worse sleep, more burnout, and more health-related absences from work. Later work by the same team found evidence that telepressure takes its toll partly by eroding psychological detachment, the very recovery experience we just talked about.
One detail from Barber's research has stuck with me. Individual differences explained relatively little of telepressure; a lot of it comes from the norms and expectations of the workplace itself. Put plainly, if you feel compelled to check email on vacation, it may say more about the culture you work in than about your willpower.
You still have options, and starting from there is a lot gentler than blaming yourself. Each quick check reopens the work loop in your head. You read one message, and suddenly part of your mind is back at your desk solving a problem, even after you've put the phone down and gone back to the pool.
When Rest Feels Like You're Doing Something Wrong
Then there's the guilt. Not everyone feels it, but many of the travelers I talk with describe some version of it: the sense that lying by a pool for an afternoon is indulgent, lazy, or somehow undeserved.
Jessica de Bloom, one of the leading researchers on vacation and recovery, has said in interviews that she thinks many people are afraid to step away from work because they worry others will see them as lazy. I think that fear runs deeper than what colleagues might say. For a lot of us, productivity has become woven into how we see ourselves. If a big part of your identity rests on being useful and busy, then a day of doing nothing can leave you feeling strangely unmoored.
This is my interpretation as a psychologist, and I see it most often in high achievers, caregivers, and people whose sense of worth has long been tied to taking care of everyone else. The vacation itself becomes another performance to get right: the perfect itinerary, the right photos, maximum value from every hour. And performing relaxation is about as restful as it sounds.
If this is you, I'd gently point out that recovery is part of doing good work and living a good life. The research is pretty clear that people who never fully recover from stress tend to pay for it in burnout, poor sleep, and lower well-being. Rest is part of the cycle that keeps everything else going. It's also a big reason why travel's mental health benefits depend so much on the person taking the trip, which I explore in Does Travel Actually Help Your Mental Health?
Unwinding Takes Days, and the Glow Fades Fast
So how long does it actually take to relax on vacation? Some of the most useful answers come from Jessica de Bloom's work at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
In one study, she and her colleagues followed Dutch workers through long summer vacations averaging 23 days, checking in on their health and well-being along the way. Well-being rose quickly once the vacation started and peaked around the eighth day. De Bloom has been careful to say that this doesn't make eight days the magic vacation length, since the team didn't measure every single day and people can't be randomly assigned to different trip lengths. Still, it suggests something many of us feel intuitively: the first few days are a warm-up, and the deepest rest often arrives a week or so in.
Now for the less cheerful news. In her 2009 meta-analysis, de Bloom found that vacations do improve health and well-being, but that the boost tends to fade soon after people return to work. A follow-up study of workers on winter sports vacations found that within the first week back, health and well-being had generally returned to pre-vacation levels. A later meta-analysis, which updated her review with studies through 2020, reached a similar conclusion, and found that making the trip longer didn't stretch the benefits.
The practical upshot, according to the researchers themselves, is to take shorter breaks more often instead of saving everything for one big trip a year. I'd add a psychological footnote: if a short trip is all you have, you'll get more from it if you lower the bar for what "relaxed" should look like by day two.
What Actually Helps You Switch Off
The good news is that the same research that explains why relaxing is hard also points to what helps. Here's how I translate it for travelers.
1. Start winding down before you leave. If leisure sickness and the recovery paradox tell us anything, it's that the week before a trip matters. Many of us sprint toward departure, cramming in every last task. If you can, ease off a day or two early, or plan a softer first day once you arrive instead of a 6 a.m. tour.
2. Make detachment easier on yourself. Willpower alone rarely wins against a buzzing phone. Set a clear out-of-office, tell colleagues exactly when you'll be back, and consider moving work apps off your home screen. If you truly can't go fully dark, Barber's own advice on telepressure translates well: pick one short, scheduled window to check in, so work doesn't leak into every hour of the day.
3. Choose the recovery that suits you. Remember Sonnentag and Fritz's four recovery experiences. Some of us recharge best through relaxation: a book, a spa, a long lunch. Others recover more through mastery: learning to snorkel, hiking a new trail, navigating a market in another language. Neither is wrong. In their research, traits like openness and extraversion were linked with mastery experiences, and emotional stability with detachment, though personality overall explained less than you might expect. If you're curious how this plays out for you, my free Travel Personality Quiz is a good place to start.
4. Protect your sense of control. An overscheduled itinerary can turn a vacation back into a job. Leave open time where nothing is booked and you get to decide on the spot.
5. Expect a warm-up period. Knowing that the first few days can feel restless or flat takes away a lot of the pressure. You're simply partway through a process.
6. Plan the landing. Since benefits fade quickly once you're back (and post-travel blues are real), how you return matters too. A buffer day before work, or small rituals that bring the trip into ordinary life, can help. I wrote more about that in Re-Entry Rituals.
Give Yourself Time to Arrive
Go back to that first afternoon by the water: the cold drink, the beautiful view, and a mind still humming at work speed. Knowing what's going on underneath changes how that moment feels. The restlessness is your nervous system downshifting. The urge to check your phone is a habit your workplace helped build. The guilt is an old story about worth and usefulness. And the sore throat on day three might be your body finally getting the chance to say how tired it's been.
All of that is deeply human, especially coming off a demanding stretch. You're simply still on the way to relaxed.
So be patient with yourself. Let the first day be slow. Put the phone somewhere a little inconvenient. Pick the rest that actually restores you, whether that's a hammock or a hiking trail. And remember that your mind usually arrives a few days after your luggage does. Give it time to catch up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I relax on vacation?
Relaxing is a gradual psychological process that rarely happens the moment you arrive. Research on recovery from work shows that mentally detaching from work is hardest after stressful periods, a pattern psychologist Sabine Sonnentag calls the recovery paradox. Work messages, vacation guilt, and high expectations for the trip can all slow the process down.
What is leisure sickness?
Leisure sickness is a term for getting sick during weekends or vacations, often right when you stop working. It was first studied by Dutch psychologists Ad Vingerhoets and colleagues, who found in a 2002 pilot study that around 3% of people in a representative Dutch sample recognized the pattern in themselves. Its causes aren't yet well understood.
How many days does it take to relax on vacation?
There's no exact number, but in one study of long summer vacations, health and well-being peaked around the eighth day. The researchers caution that this doesn't make eight days the ideal trip length. Many people find the first two or three days feel unsettled before deeper rest arrives.
Why do the benefits of vacation wear off so quickly?
Studies consistently find that the health and well-being boost from a vacation fades soon after returning to work, often within the first week. Researchers recommend taking shorter breaks more often, and a gentle re-entry can help the benefits last a little longer.
Is it bad to check work email on vacation?
It can make relaxing harder. Research on workplace telepressure links a strong urge to respond to work messages with worse sleep and burnout, partly because it interferes with psychological detachment. If you can't fully disconnect, a short, scheduled check-in window is easier on your mind than checking throughout the day.
If this resonated, I write about the psychology of travel — where we go and how those places change us — every week on Psychologie. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox.
Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the publisher of The Journal of Travel Psychology and the founder of The Postcard Société. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.