Previous
vakantie rust
Truly resting is harder than it seems
Karolien Koolhof •
You finally have some time off. Your out-of-office is on, and a week without obligations lies ahead. But then, after a few days, you notice you are still tense. You remember an email you should have sent, or you catch yourself already thinking ahead about what awaits you after your vacation. Being off work turns out to be not the same as resting.
That difference is exactly what occupational psychologists have been researching over the past decades. German researcher Sabine Sonnentag and her colleagues showed that recovery from work does not depend so much on how much free time you have, but on something they call psychological detachment: the ability to mentally disconnect from your work, to truly not be there in your head for a while. It had already been shown that it is not the rest itself that recharges you, but precisely that mental distance. You can lie on a beach for a week and still barely recover if your mind stays at the office the entire time.
Detaching is not easy. Especially if you have a busy or engaged mind, your work doesn't just switch off the moment you close the door behind you. You keep solving problems that no one has asked you to solve anymore. You continue thinking about a project because it genuinely occupies you, not because you have to. That makes it difficult, because it doesn't feel like work. It feels like being yourself.
Sonnentag and her colleague Charlotte Fritz described four ways in which people recover, and detachment turned out to be the most important and most researched among them. Those who struggle to mentally disconnect maintain a high need for recovery and become exhausted sooner. Therefore, it is important to direct your attention elsewhere.
A Skill
The good news is that detachment is something you can practice. It helps to consciously direct your attention to something. Do something that demands enough of you to lose yourself in it. For some, that is a long walk; for others, it's cooking or gardening. What exactly it is matters less than whether it truly captures your attention.
It also helps to draw the boundary more sharply than you might be inclined to. A single glance at your work email during vacation seems innocent, but it immediately pulls your mind back to the place you wanted to get away from. Detachment works best if you give yourself the chance to step out completely, even if just for a few days.
More Than Doing Nothing
You can have an empty calendar and still not be relaxed for a single moment, and you can have a busy day and still feel recovered by the end of it because your mind was elsewhere. The question is not how much you sit still, but whether you manage to truly leave your work behind for a while.
That doesn't happen automatically, and certainly not if you naturally spend a lot of time in your head. But it can be learned. Resting is not the same as clearing your schedule. Only when your mind is truly somewhere else does free time do what it is supposed to do.
About the author
- Karolien Koolhof is a coach voor introverts and gifted individuals
- Author of the book Introvert Leadership
- Contact