What Your Vacation Says About Your Job (and Your Finances)
By Acey Holmes, Founder of BoredLess & Expert in Playful Work Design
You just got back from vacation. Inbox overflowing, slack notifications out of control, laundry pile looming, and maybe a sunburn you didn’t plan on. But underneath the surface of “back to reality,” there’s a more useful question: How do you feel about going back to work?
If you’re genuinely recharged and maybe even looking forward to diving in, congratulations. You’re likely aligned! Your earning life (how you make money) and your spending life (how you enjoy it) are playing well together. That kind of alignment can come from fair pay, great coworkers, psychological safety, or work that actually lights you up.
But if the dread has hit harder than the jet lag, your vacation may have been more revealing than refreshing.
What Science Says About Breaks
In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis explored how breaks affect our experience of pleasure and pain. They found that interrupting a positive experience can make it more enjoyable because it prevents adaptation and preserves intensity. In other words, stepping away from something good can make the return even better.
But the reverse is also true.
When you're in the middle of something unpleasant, a break might not help like we think it would. In fact, it can actually make things worse. In one experiment, participants listened to an annoying sound. Those who experienced a brief pause reported the noise as more aversive than those who heard it continuously. That break reset their expectations, making the discomfort feel sharper when it returned.
Work is no different. If your job feels like a grind, a vacation won’t fix it. It might even sharpen your awareness of how misaligned or draining it really is. Breaks don’t always refresh. Sometimes, they reveal.
What Your Vacation Mood Is Telling You
Let’s bring this down to real life. If you feel:
Refreshed and motivated: You’re probably earning and working in alignment with your values. You’re doing work that feels meaningful or at least well-supported. Your vacation added to your life rather than exposed a deficit.
Guilty or stressed about spending: You may have stepped out of sync with your financial goals or spent in ways that didn’t align with what you truly value. That tension is worth noticing.
More miserable than before: Your job might be a bigger part of the problem than you thought. Your work may be underpaying you, misusing your talents, or draining you emotionally. The vacation just helped you notice.
For Leaders: Don’t Use PTO as a Band-Aid
If your team is struggling, more vacation isn’t a fix. It might delay burnout, but it won’t prevent it if the work design itself is broken. Before you throw PTO at the problem, ask:
Is the work meaningful?
Are people supported and safe to speak up?
Can they flex their roles to match their strengths?
Do they feel like part of something worth showing up for?
Apply principles of playful work design—structure that allows for autonomy, flow, recovery, and creativity—before adding more days off.
A Final Thought
Take the vacation. Always take the vacation. But also take what it tells you seriously. If it recharged you, that’s data. If it drained you or revealed something deeper, that’s data too.
Vacations won’t save you from burnout. But they can help you see what needs saving.
This guest post was written by Acey Holmes. She is the founder and CEO of BoredLess, where she helps organizations create culture transformation through playful work design. You can learn more about her work at www.playfulworkdesign.com and follow along on instagram @beboredless.
