The weather has been so cold and snowy in Ithaca this winter that the local visitor’s bureau jokingly began promoting the Florida Keys on their web site with a header that reads, “That’s it. We surrender. Winter, you win.”
Unfortunately, my family stayed in frigid Ithaca during last week’s winter break. But all of the hub-bub about escaping the cold weather made me think about the evidence on vacation and positive health effects.
I wrote about this topic last year, just before my family took a trip in sunny San Diego in February. The evidence is summed up in an interesting article in Scientific American that look at the link between vacations and their effects on exhaustion, health complaints, stress and overall well-being. It turns out that although the evidence on the positive effects of taking a vacation is thin, there are a few interesting findings.
The best evidence comes from a systematic review published in 2009 that looked at the benefits of taking a vacation. The review found that vacation has positive effects on health and well-being, but that improvements fade several weeks after returning to work. The data raised more questions than it answered. Most of the subjects took their vacation in the summertime, not to escape cold weather. And there is not good data on how participants spent their time off work. (Presumably, there is a difference between staying at home and traveling to a resort for your vacation.) The review concluded that additional research on the effects of vacations is needed.
The magazine article does quote a single study that found, yes, a vacation generally increases health and well-being levels. But your activities during the vacation have an impact on the positive effects.
“The engagement in physical activities as well as the absence of negative incidents during vacation accounted for differences in the vacation effect in both studies,” the authors wrote. “These findings indicate that simply being temporarily released from job demands alone is not enough to experience higher levels of health and well-being: it is also important to be able to engage in pleasant vacation activities of one’s own choice.”
One last study provided a bit of insight into my vacation plans. This one, conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, measured the effects of vacations on happiness. The study found the same effects noted above – that vacations do improve happiness, but those improvements fade within a few weeks of returning to work. But it came to another surprising conclusion: the act of planning a vacation yields a much larger boost in happiness – up to eight additional weeks of improved moods in anticipating the vacation.
Many of my friends and colleagues spent the past week in warmer locales, and certainly enjoyed the mental boost of a week away from the cold. They certainly received an immediate boost in mood, rest and happiness. But according to the evidence, the benefits of their trip will fade in the coming weeks. As for me, I think I’ll plan a vacation to escape the cold next year. Short-term benefits or not, a break from winter sounds delightful.
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