Give us a break – from holidays. There’s increasing evidence that holidays can cause harmful stress.

Originally published in the Sunday Times,
Sunday August 31, 1986

 WARNING: Holidays can damage your health. Psychologists believe that many of the millions of Britons returning to work this week would
have been better off staying at the office instead of taking their
annual break.
 
Increasing evidence that holidays can cause harmful stress rather
than provide welcome rest and reinvigoration is to be scientifically
tested later this year.
 
Researchers from the University of Manchester’s institute of science
and technology plan to attach telemeters, small instruments that
measure stress intake, to a selected sample of holiday-makers before,
during and after their yearly break.
 
Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the institute,
is even more determined to go ahead with the project after taking his
two children to Disneyland in the US last week.
 
‘I’m shattered. I’m exhausted,’ he told The Sunday Times from Los
Angeles. ‘It’s been very stressful indeed; so much so that I’m
looking forward to a business breakfast tomorrow. ‘
 
Cooper maintains that the most smooth-running holiday produces stress simply by being a change in routine. Whether the stress builds up to health-harming levels depends, he says, on your personality, on the relationships within the family, and the type of holiday.
 
Type A people, the more dynamic, goal-oriented, hard-driving, take
far longer to unwind than the more relaxed, less ambitious type B.
 
A two-week holiday would often not relax a type A person who would
spend the time worrying about work he could have been doing at the
office, the cost of the holiday, or whether their home is being
broken into.

One reason why the hazards of holidays had until recently escaped the
attentions of stress researchers is the bland response most people
give when asked how they enjoyed it.
 
‘People have invested so much time and energy into a holiday that if
they had a bad time they won’t admit it, even to themselves,’ said
Vanja Orlans, of the stress research centre at London University’s
Birkbeck College.
 
The Sunday Times put the theory to the test. Not scientifically. We
just stopped people and asked them if they had a nice holiday. ‘Very
nice, thank you,’ said Stephanie Tuey, a London teacher, at first.
But soon she was explaining how during the family holiday in France
she had to leap into the back seat to separate her squabbling
children, aged three and five, and on another occasion spend half an
hour holding plastic cups as a makeshift solution to the boys’ toilet
problem while they were speeding down a motorway.
 
‘At that point I was feeling guilty at bringing them this far when
they were not enjoying it,’ she sighed. As she put her children on
model trains amid scenic countryside she ‘wondered why we had come
800 miles for this’.
 
Tuey, a teacher, had found preparing for the holiday perhaps the
greatest strain, especially since she had done all the shopping while
still working part-time. ‘You had this irrational notion that the
house had to be left tidier than usual,’ she said

 
Professor Cooper pointed out that family tensions, kept at bay during
the rest of the year, often erupt when the family is thrust together
incessantly.
 
The vacation itself may cause conflicts through each holidaymaker
preferring a different sort of activity, or inactivity, the ‘museums
versus sandcastles’ syndrome, added Vanja Orlans.
 
Even those who said they had a successful holiday came back worried.
‘I was depressed at the thought of going back to work,’ said Lynn
Hatley, a part-time secretary in a garage. ‘When I walked in my front
door I felt a pain right round my head as all the pressures piled
back on me. ‘
 
The stress specialists debunk the notion that a good holiday
necessarily helps people start work with renewed enthusiasm.
 
‘People who come back from a terrific holiday are often disorientated
and can’t work well,’ Orlans said.
 
She added that the fixed yearly holiday period has big drawbacks:
people may postpone dealing with things that are getting them down at
work or at home, believing the holiday will be the cure.

People have invested so much time and energy into a holiday that if
they had a bad time they won’t admit it, even to themselves,’ said
Vanja Orlans, of the stress research centre at London University’s
Birkbeck College.
 
The Sunday Times put the theory to the test. Not scientifically. We
just stopped people and asked them if they had a nice holiday. ‘Very
nice, thank you,’ said Stephanie Tuey, a London teacher, at first.
But soon she was explaining how during the family holiday in France
she had to leap into the back seat to separate her squabbling
children, aged three and five, and on another occasion spend half an
hour holding plastic cups as a makeshift solution to the boys’ toilet
problem while they were speeding down a motorway.
 
‘At that point I was feeling guilty at bringing them this far when
they were not enjoying it,’ she sighed. As she put her children on
model trains amid scenic countryside she ‘wondered why we had come
800 miles for this’.
 
Tuey, a teacher, had found preparing for the holiday perhaps the
greatest strain, especially since she had done all the shopping while
still working part-time. ‘You had this irrational notion that the
house had to be left tidier than usual,’ she said.
 
Other recently returned holidaymakers we spoke to included Karen
Brown of Maidenhead, who reported a lizard-plagued, loo-flooded
Maltese ‘paradise’ hotel bedroom; and Cheryl Younson of London, who
arrived in Tunisia to find everyone denying she was part of the
package trip.
 
Jane Vaughan of Sittingbourne, Kent, said: ‘It takes most of your
holiday to recover from the run-up to it. Her family had found it
difficult to get a booking, and their Green Card arrived from the AA
only on departure day. Her son, aged six, developed chicken-pox the
night before but they went to the Netherlands anyway. Their daughter
then caught it.
 
Cooper believes new research could help provide guidelines for people
to design the right sort of holiday for their personality, family
structure and work position. Some may need passive ones, others
active, some short, some long.