In the 93 days of summer, beginning June 21, find some time to recover

You need a vacation. That’s not just me talking; that’s research.* “Taking a vacation (even a weekend getaway) can help individuals to recover from stressful work, while individuals can benefit more from longer vacations,” concludes a 2012 study, “Vacation Recovery Experiences on Life Satisfaction.”¹

TIPS FOR TIME OFF

Americans spent more than $100 billion on vacations in 2017,² so it makes sense to get the most from such an investment. Consider these tips:

Vacation stress, such as waiting in lines, rushing from place to place and concerns about safety can, “eliminate the positive benefit of time away,” write researchers/authors Michelle Gielen and Shawn Achor in the Harvard Business Review.³ Beat stress by managing your vacation time and planning, “as one of the key predictors of vacation ROI is the amount of stress caused by not planning ahead.”

Plan as early as you can because, “for most, the enjoyment starts weeks, even months before the holiday actually begins,” according to Applied Science in Quality of Life (ASQL).⁴

Researchers from the University of Vermont who studied 37 million geolocated Tweets found “expressed happiness increases logarithmically with distance from an individual’s average location.”⁵ In other words, you may experience greater happiness the farther you travel.

Don’t forget about staff vacations. After mandating employees to take time off, the firm SimpliFlying found post-vacation improvements in the staff’s creativity, happiness and productivity.⁶

TRAVEL IDEAS

If you need suggestions of just where to take your time off, check out this month’s “O.D. Scene” on summer destinations, which was written by world traveler Kirk Smick, O.D. And we won’t tell if you take Optometric Management along with you. After all, reading is like a vacation, it can reduce stress levels by as much as 68%.⁷ OM

* For those who actually need documented research to justify taking time off, references are available on optometricmanagement.com .