Relaxation can be as productive as work

Are you a holiday sprinter? Do you go on holiday with a productive vengeance, jamming it with back-to-back sights or activities…

Are you a holiday sprinter? Do you go on holiday with a productive vengeance, jamming it with back-to-back sights or activities or interrupting your fully scheduled day with calls to the office to make sure you aren't missing anything while you are gone?

As we've stumbled out of our work places to hit the holiday trail this summer, lots of us have taken along an extra bag - dead weight we can call non-performance anxiety.

This tiresome companion has a habit of dooming trips to fits of guilt or frantic attempts to holiday in job mode. In a culture where we define ourselves by what we do - putting in 60-hour weeks and working out daily - free time can be a source not of fun but of torment. Busyness has become our real business, a goal in and of itself.

It's hard to learn the juice of the journey isn't in the sights notched, but in the unscheduled moments. We have to realise that, like a jazz concert, a holiday isn't about knocking off songs, it's all in the playing.

READ MORE

But work habits keep many people from seeing that. Case in point: a holiday that Faye Rogaski, a New York public relations entrepreneur, took in February with her parents and brother to the Caribbean island of St Martin, where holiday-makers can linger over such gruelling decisions as whether to float in the bathtub sea or grab a cold one at the pool-side bar.

But for Ms Rogaski, the choices had nothing to do with the island's decelerated offerings. They were dictated by that exasperating stowaway in her luggage.

Her first dilemma was whether to stay out of touch with her office or scour around for an Internet outlet. It was no contest. Ms Rogaski described how she prowled the island for her electronic fix.

She tracked down a connection and was soon embroiled in a "business crisis" some 2,000 miles away. It led her to cut the trip short, ruining the family holiday. "I brought my office life into my vacation," she said. "I realise I am completely uncomfortable relaxing, which is quite frightening."

Just how frightening, this chronic over-scheduler found out earlier this year, when her workaholic ways came to an unscheduled stop - from a stroke.

Ms Rogaski is 29 years old. Her doctors, she said, attributed the stroke, at least in part, to her tendency to overwork.

The need for constant activity comes from "the belief system that I have to perform to be okay," says Steven Sultanoff, a psychologist. "I'm supposed to perform, I'm supposed to do. And if I'm not doing, performing, accomplishing some visible task, then I lose my value."

The conflict between the time off we want and the guilt we feel when we actually surrender to leisure, is a long-running battle. But it has gone to absurd new lengths in a volatile economy driven by 24-7 technology tools and an over-scheduling mania that has made many feel as if free moments are a descent into terminal vagrancy.

Some plan every holiday moment before they even leave the house. Consider Amanda Vega, a marketing executive.

To guarantee that her time off is action-packed, Ms Vega leaves nothing to chance. Before she and her husband take off, they plot activity options, from meals at certain restaurants to museum visits, as if they were preparing a report for the next week's budget meeting.

"I spreadsheet them into a document by time/day and then optimise that spreadsheet in an order so that I can make sure we get the most done in our time allotted," she says.

"It kind of takes the fun and whimsy out of it, but I think I would be really, really nervous if I didn't have some sort of plan."

Nicole Miller, a publicist, said she wrestled with her productivity paranoia during a week-long trip to Europe. For the first six days, she says, she felt "really antsy. I remember sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam having a beer with my friends, and my lower back was just shaking. It was that uptight feeling, like shouldn't we be going somewhere?"

But on the last day of her trip she got a surprise as she ambled through a flower garden in Holland. "It was such a strange feeling that I remember thinking to myself, 'Wow! This is what relaxation feels like.'"

You probably know the old adage that work expands to fill the available time. With today's technology, that has come to mean all the time.

But we don't have to turn into hard drives with hair. It is possible to relax before the grave, if we can just move beyond the new standard default behaviour (where work always takes priority over our personal lives) and do for ourselves what we do for kids: Set boundaries.

Granted, it's hard to let up when you've been programmed not to. Perhaps that hard-wiring has religious roots.

The idea that work is an end in itself, that idle time is the Devil's time, and that all spontaneous enjoyment should be strictly avoided - has morphed from sacred to secular proscriptions that still run us in the modern world.

Except that instead of the fear of God controlling the show, now it's the fear of worthlessness, a belief that our identities are riding solely on the tally of what we produce each day.

Of course, productivity paranoia isn't all self-inflicted. It's aided and abetted these days by a workplace culture that would like you to believe that advancement depends on your being welded to a work station.

Research now shows, however, that leisure can do something job titles and money can't: deep down, everyone knows you need time off to make your life better. We don't believe it, though, until some study tells us so. Here it is: a new study by psychology professor Tim Kasser at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, reveals that, as work hours go up and leisure time down, feelings of life satisfaction and vitality plummet while health problems and negative emotions increase.

Other studies have shown that actively indulging in leisure increases initiative, self-esteem, leadership, perceived competence and adaptability and promotes positive mood and well-being, because it builds lasting self-worth that is not dependent on the ephemeral approval of others.

The productive yardstick simply doesn't work on holidays, because holidays aren't about output; they're about input-exploring, learning, reflecting. The good stuff on a holiday has nothing to do with end results or tallies. The magic is in the experience itself, which, like life satisfaction, can't be quantified, only felt.

The urge to check off items on the agenda torpedoes the key ingredients of a memorable trip - spontaneity and discovery.

It's here in this scary non-production zone that we can be swept up by a parade of random strangers and adventures.

All of which, if it makes you feel less guilty, could be considered productivity of the highest order.