How (I am Learning) to Go On Vacation
Turns out that my learning to take a vacation meant these two actually got their first real energetic vacation…
This is a different kind of article. More of a “here’s what I’m learning”, less “Here’s the protocol. Join me as I learn how to actually take a real break.
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I am 41 years old and I am only now learning how to take a vacation.
I want to be clear about how embarrassing that sentence is to type. I am a burnout resilience coach. I have spent the last several years researching rest, studying stress cycle completion, building nervous system regulation into my coaching practice, and helping other people recover from the exact patterns I was still quietly, privately, running myself.
February 2026 broke me, a little. My kids had the flu for a week. Then February break — because New England schools apparently believe children should have two full weeks off before the snow melts. Then, because Rhode Island decided to pile on, forty inches of snow closed the entire state for another week. Three consecutive weeks of children at home, me working the whole time, nobody winning. What got me wasn't any single week; it was the frog-in-boiling-water quality of it. Each week had a perfectly reasonable explanation. Each week I told myself we'd make it work. Each week I was half-parenting, half-working, and fully fooling no one — least of all my kids, who absorbed every ounce of my scatteredness and reflected it back at me in the form of chaos, fights, and an atmosphere that could generously be described as "tense."
By the time the blizzard lifted, I had decided: April break was going to be different. I was going to actually figure this out. I did research. I talked to my therapist. I crowdsourced tips from friends. I read about the neuroscience. And then I tried it.
It turns out I loved it. And I learned enough that I'm sharing it here, in the hopes that you don't have to wait until a three-week snow day catastrophe to get here.
A Slice of Vacation on Chaos Bread
Here's the pattern I hear constantly in my coaching work, and one I've lived personally.
You finally take the time off. The week before is a sprint — getting everything in order, handing off projects, sending emails that don't technically need sending yet, having seventeen "just in case" conversations that leave you depleted before you've even left. You arrive at vacation already tired.
During the week, you're technically off. But you check email "only once." You respond to "one thing." You mentally rehearse that deliverable the entire time. You feel vaguely guilty every time you're not being productive, and vaguely guilty when you are. If you have kids, you're cruise-directing the whole break — who's hungry, who needs sunscreen, who needs to apologize to whom — and arrive home no more rested than when you left.
Then Monday comes, and you're back at your desk staring at an inbox that has absolutely not waited for you, wondering why the week off didn't actually help.
I've started calling this "a slice of vacation on chaos bread." The restorative part is in there somewhere, sandwiched between a chaotic lead-in, a guilt-laden middle, and an on-your-heels return. As a recovery strategy, it's not doing what you're counting on it to do.
Maybe you recognize yourself in one of these:
You love what you do, and "taking a break" from it feels uncomfortably close to abandonment. Every book you bring on vacation is tangentially about your field.
You can't quite explain why you're checking email "just to see" when you promised yourself you wouldn't. The anxiety of not checking feels worse than checking.
You're never actually alone on vacation — you're with your kids, your family, someone who needs something — and trying to relax while remaining responsible for other humans is a category error your brain can't resolve.
You're the kind of person for whom things always seem to come up. The urgent question. The project nobody else can handle. And part of you, if you're honest, isn't sure you want that to stop.
Or maybe the problem is simpler than any of that. Maybe your work pays the bills and that's legitimately what it does for you. You don't define yourself by it. You just also can't fully leave it behind — because the culture won't let you, or because the inbox reproduces while you're gone, or because you've learned that being accessible is the price of staying employable. More on that shortly.
None of this is moral failure. It's a pattern that makes complete sense given who you are and how you got here. And it's worth getting curious about, because burnout doesn't care whether you love your job. It cares about chronic unrecovered stress, and unrecovered is exactly what a chaos-bread vacation leaves you.
Planning Ahead Isn't Just About Logistics
Here's something the research makes clear that most PTO advice skips: the wellbeing benefits of a vacation begin long before you take it.
A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life examined vacation and happiness in over 1,500 Dutch adults. People reported higher happiness in the weeks before their trip than after it — suggesting that anticipation itself is a significant source of the benefit. Pre-trip happiness was notably higher for vacationers than non-vacationers. The boost after returning? Lasted about two weeks at most, and only if the vacation was genuinely relaxing. A stressful vacation left people no happier than if they'd stayed home.
This matters for how you plan.
A last-minute vacation — booked in a panic when you're already depleted, with minimal prep time and a team that isn't ready for your absence — starts from a deficit. You've sacrificed the anticipation benefit entirely, rushed the preparation, and handed yourself a chaotic return. The vacation itself has to do all the lifting, and there isn't enough time for it to do so. Meanwhile, the stress of the lead-up can actually crowd out whatever recovery the week might have offered.
In contrast, booking time off months in advance gives you something researchers describe as "anticipatory happiness" — a period of elevated mood, reduced stress, and improved sleep simply from having something good on the horizon. Neuroscience points to dopamine as part of the mechanism: anticipating a pleasurable future event activates the brain's reward system in ways that improve mood and motivation in the present. You're essentially borrowing joy from the future, and it spends in the now.
I did this for the first time this year. By mid-February, I had April blocked and told. Knowing it was coming let me work the weeks before it differently. I stopped agreeing to things that would land in the middle of that week. I stopped over-committing in March because I knew I had a clear break coming. The anticipation was real — I felt it — and it made the weeks before the vacation better, not just the vacation itself.
My friend Matthew, who finds all of this baffling, put it plainly: "I plan bike races eight months out. El Capitan. Everything. I've been talking about it all year. Now it's happening." He didn't mean it as advice, exactly. He meant it as evidence of how to live with something genuinely worth looking forward to on the calendar. He starts clean: "My vacations? Start with a clean calendar. I do so much of my work 'on the road' that blocking 'nothing allowed at all' is the big one."
The lesson isn't that you have to climb a mountain to justify taking time off. It's that having something on the calendar — booked, told to the people who need to know, genuinely planned — is itself a form of rest.
Why Rest Is Hard — and Why Stress Lies to You About It
Stress is, among other things, a very persuasive liar.
When you're running at a high chronic load — even a manageable one, the kind that doesn't feel like crisis — your perception narrows. Researchers call this cognitive tunneling: the brain prioritizes immediate threats and immediate demands, and the planning horizon collapses. Thinking about next July becomes functionally impossible when today is barely survivable. So you don't plan the vacation. You tell yourself it's a bad time. Then it's still a bad time. Then the PTO is expiring and you squeeze in something last-minute and wonder why you didn't feel better.
Here's the part that always gets me (even as a burnout coach): burnout specifically impairs your ability to recognize that you need a break.The brain under chronic stress functions with reduced prefrontal cortex capacity — the part responsible for executive function, perspective-taking, and long-range planning. The very faculties that would allow you to see that you need rest are the ones most impaired by exhaustion. It's a closed loop: burned out → can't see I'm burned out → can't plan the recovery → more burned out.
This is why I've never, in my coaching practice, had someone recognize their burnout before they began to recover. Almost universally, people look back and say: "Oh. I was so much further gone than I thought." Not because they were unintelligent or unaware. Because the brain that's doing the assessing is the same brain under siege.
So "it's not a good time" is almost always stress talking. It will always be a slightly bad time. There will always be a reason. The question is whether you build the structure — the booked dates, the told team, the reboarding plan — before the stress narrows your vision enough to make even that feel impossible.
And it's not only people who love their work who struggle with this.
I want to say something for the people who don't have a vocation story, whose work is valid and honest and paying the mortgage ad making the school pickup possible. You don't need to love your job to struggle to leave it. Culture fills that gap nicely.
Many workplaces — not maliciously, just effectively — reward constant availability. The person who answers emails at 10pm gets the promotion. The person who takes a real vacation comes back to an inbox that punishes them. The person who is never fully offline is perceived as more committed, more dependable, more valuable. This isn't a law; it's a set of norms that have accumulated over time, and they're particularly strong in certain industries, in government, in healthcare, in any environment where the work is never technically done.
Pancho, my co-host, had a word for it that stuck: a sick culture. As in, not a mean culture, not a cruel culture, but an unwell one. One that has normalized patterns that, if you described them to someone from outside, would seem obviously problematic. When nobody takes real vacations, nobody takes real vacations. The whole system reinforces itself, and the person who tries to actually unplug becomes the outlier — the one who makes other people uncomfortable by demonstrating that it's possible.
If that's you — the one who actually wants to disengage, the one who is trying to model something healthier — it helps to know that being the person who takes a real vacation is a leadership act, not a luxury. Pancho described watching his team shift when he did it well: they understood they had permission. They started doing it too. The culture, which is just a set of habits people collectively practice, began to change at the team level.
But you do have to over-communicate, especially at first. Because in a culture that hasn't normalized real rest, your absence will be read as absence — not as a deliberate, prepared handoff. So you tell people early. You give them real lead time. You delegate with specificity. You set up systems so the work can continue without you, and you trust those systems, and you leave.
Why Your Brain Actually Needs the Blank Space
Here’s the thing about boredom that I know, but hate to live out.
When your brain has nothing externally demanding to process — no email to answer, no problem to solve, no input to consume — it doesn't go idle. It activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network: a set of interconnected regions that become most active when you're not focused on the outside world. The DMN is involved in daydreaming, self-reflection, imagining the future, and making sense of complex experiences. It's also closely linked to creativity.
Research on the default mode network consistently shows that some of our most generative thinking — the kind that produces insight, makes unexpected connections, and resolves problems we've been stuck on — happens not when we're concentrating, but when we're allowing. The shower revelation. The walk-around-the-block idea. The thing you figured out while staring at the ceiling at 6am, before you reached for your phone.
The problem is that boredom feels uncomfortable before it feels generative. The initial restlessness is real. For people with ADHD or attention differences — and a meaningful proportion of the high-achieving, over-responsible people I work with have late-identified or suspected ADHD — that restlessness can feel intolerable. So we reach for our phones, or our books about our field, or our to-do lists, or a podcast that makes us feel productive, and the DMN never gets its turn.
The Art of Accomplishment framework has a term for the state the DMN creates: 404 space. The experience of being genuinely without a task, genuinely in confusion, genuinely not building a new story. It's uncomfortable in the way that fasting is uncomfortable — not because it's bad for you, but because your body has learned to expect constant input and is staging a small protest. Give it a couple of days. The creativity and clarity that emerge from the other side are not something you can manufacture by working harder or thinking more.
This is also why "rest" isn't synonymous with "lying down." For some people, genuine rest looks like a six-hour hike or a complete home renovation — something that demands full physical presence and leaves no cognitive bandwidth for work. My friend Stacey gave me the most practical articulation of this I've heard: "Make stuff like you did when you were a kid on winter break. Get a coloring book. Make things, make a mess, make a necklace you've been thinking about for seven years." Not goal-oriented. Not optimized. Just absorbed.
The vacation worth taking is the one where, somewhere around Day 3, you realize there is genuinely nothing you have to do — and instead of filling that space immediately, you stay in it for a moment. That's the space your brain has been waiting for.
Four Things That Made April Actually Work
I want to share what I did differently, because the tactics are less obvious than "put your phone away."
1. I committed like a pig, not a chicken.
There's an analogy about bacon and eggs: the chicken is invested, the pig is committed. I've been chicken about my vacations for years. I'd block my calendar but leave coaching sessions running. I'd take off from one job and not the other. I'd vow to be present and still answer "one quick thing," which was never one and was never quick.
This time I treated work sobriety the way I treat anything I take seriously. No coaching. No health equity reading. No podcasts that might send my brain careening into a content plan. No "just this one" Slack message. No joining the Wednesday meeting I genuinely wanted to attend.
What I discovered was that the completeness of the commitment was itself relaxing. I didn't have to be vigilant. I didn't have to check whether I'd missed something. I'd said no to everything, so every moment of the week was genuinely mine. My nervous system believed it in a way it hadn't before. Everything downstream of that — my mood, my energy, my patience — was different.
2. I said no to the small intrusions — especially the small ones.
This was harder than it sounds. I can make anything about burnout resilience or health equity. A stranger's conversation can become a networking opportunity. A novel about eighteenth-century military history can become a meditation on leadership and organizational decay. The smallest door is enough for my brain to walk back into work mode.
So the work wasn't blocking the big things. It was noticing the small intrusions and declining them without explanation. Martha's concept of "Minimum Days" captures something real here: days of genuine rest with no productivity agenda, where you don't explain yourself, you don't apologize, you just stop. The instructions are: rest, sleep, self-care. Not optimize your rest or track your recovery metrics. Just stop moving for a minute.
On Thursday of that week, someone called with a job offer at a place I'd loved. "There's no one else who can do this but you" — which I'll tell you honestly is very effective bait for me. Pre-vacation Kim would have said yes before the sentence finished. This Kim said no. Not because I'm morally superior in some new way, but because I had actual brain space to make a clear decision. I could see what the yes would cost me. I chose differently.
3. I filled the space with intention — and gave myself permission for the scaffolding.
Creating the space is only half of it. If you don't know what to fill it with, you'll default to scrolling, low-grade background anxiety, or — if you're me — finding a way to make your leisure time productive anyway.
I knew I needed a consuming project for the first few days. The Great House Cleanout of 2026 had been waiting for approximately three years. My kids had been sharing a room for nine and a half years (plus nine months of pre-birth roommate experience, which they did not ask for), and getting them into their own spaces required clearing out every closet, drawer, and surface in the house. It was eighteen thousand steps in my house in a day. I donated a garage's worth of stuff to shelters and school programs. I loved every minute of it.
Is that what seasoned-vacationer Kim will need in five years? Probably not. But I'm a beginner. I needed something that pulled me fully away from work before I could settle into anything quieter. Stacey's advice — make stuff like you did as a kid, make a mess, let yourself be absorbed — points at the same thing. The goal isn't accomplishment. It's absorption.
By midweek, I'd read two big books. Not short, not adjacent to my work, not anything I could metabolize into a content idea. Long sustained fiction that required full attention. This is one of the best ways to train the kind of non-instrumental attention that genuine rest requires. I'd had workouts that felt like play. I'd had unhurried conversations with friends. I walked around the neighborhood just to walk around.
And on Sunday — the last day before returning — I looked at a conference I'd planned to attend the following month, realized it would take more than I wanted to give, and canceled. That decision wouldn't have happened without the week. The week gave me the clarity to see what I wanted to protect.
4. I built a reboarding protocol so I didn't dread Monday.
A significant part of what keeps people from fully disconnecting is dread about return. The inbox. The things that dropped. The frantic back-on-your-heels first week. If "it's too much work to actually unplug" is part of your resistance, this is for you.
Before I left, I set up an AI tool to attend my meetings and take notes while I was gone. The day before I returned, I gave it a prompt: summarize the week, give me a project status with context on blockers and progress, then sort everything by urgency into a to-do list. I blocked my entire first morning back for no meetings. I read the summary on Monday afternoon, had a clear map of what needed attention, and caught up without the sprint.
A bare-minimum pre-vacation prep list
Tell the humans in your work life — not just the calendar invite — and give them real lead time
Delegate with specificity: who handles what, what can wait, what's the pressure release valve if something needs to drop
Set your out-of-office with your return date and a clear alternate contact; be explicit that you won't be checking
Identify what you'll do in the first hour of vacation that has nothing to do with work
Set up AI meeting notes or a designated colleague to track what happens while you're gone
Block your first morning back — use it to orient before you re-engage
Being the Person Who Actually Unplugs
If you're in a workplace where real vacations aren't the norm, being the person who takes one is a mild act of rebellion. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that makes people around you mildly uncomfortable and then, slowly, gives them permission.
The thing Pancho observed in his own leadership experience was this: when he prepped well, delegated clearly, and actually left — his team didn't fall apart. They stepped up. They figured things out. They had evidence that they could handle it, and they grew into that evidence. "If you believe your team can't do this without you," he said, "that belief will show up in all your behavior, and they will live down to it."
But if your culture really has normalized constant availability, you do have to be deliberate about how you go. Over-communicate before you leave. Give people the prep they need. Don't just disappear and hope it works out — that's not modeling healthy rest, that's just being absent. Prepare thoroughly enough that your absence is covered, then actually be absent.
And here's the harder part: notice what pulls you back. The check-in that "only takes a minute." The Slack message you respond to "because it was quick." The meeting you pop into "just to listen." Every one of those has a carrying cost. Every one of them requires a context switch that chips away at whatever recovery you've built. There's no benefit to partial presence — for you or for your team. It's just enabling a pattern that exhausts everyone and serves no one well.
Listening to your body — actually learning to tell what full presence feels like versus split attention — is one of the most important skills in preventing the chaos-bread vacation from recurring. And uncovering the patterns underneath the constant pulls back matters too. The impulse to check email isn't random. It's telling you something about where your nervous system has been trained to look for safety.
Naming Something Harder
I want to go a level deeper before I close, because the tactics are real but they're not the whole story.
I had a moment during the week, sitting in the morning with a book, when my ten-year-old, Oren — who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns — looked at me and said: "You know, you can just choose to read every morning."
They said it like it was obvious.
I sat with that — with how many years I'd told myself I missed reading, how many mornings I'd gotten up and gone straight to work content instead of the novel I kept meaning to get to, how long I'd framed that as circumstance when it was actually choice. Nobody was making me do that. It was a choice I kept making and then narrating to myself as inevitability.
The logistics of my vacation problem were real. But underneath them was something less comfortable: I didn't quite believe I'd earned it. Or that things would hold without me. Or that my genuine, unhurried, non-strategic presence was what my kids actually needed — not my productivity, not my ideas, not my hovering anxious usefulness. Just me, without an agenda.
In the FLOURISH framework I use in coaching, I talk about the Wind factors in your burnout — not what started the fire, but what keeps it going. Productivity as worth. The belief that your value is conditional on output. Hyper-independence dressed as responsibility. These beliefs look like virtues from the inside. Seeing them clearly is a different order of work from learning to plan your PTO better — and it's the only thing that makes the logistics actually stick.
You can optimize your reboarding protocol and still spend the whole vacation mentally drafting an email you're not going to send. The logistics are downstream of the belief.
Pancho made an observation that I keep coming back to. He said he's always pointing toward something he wants, not away from something he's avoiding. He doesn't plan a vacation as an escape from work. He plans it as a commitment to something that matters as much as work — a goal, a person, an experience. In rafting, when you can't shout over the noise of the water, you point positive: you indicate where you want people to go, not what to avoid. Most burnout-prone achievers are running from. Finding something to run toward — even something modest, even just a week of reading and moving furniture around — changes the quality of the time in ways that are hard to predict until you experience it.
And the evidence from my house is persuasive. My kids were the best they'd been in any stretch of time I can remember. Not because I parented more skillfully. Because I was actually there. Not half-there. Not strategically there. Just there, unhurried, without an agenda. Oren made a little video documentary of the week — a cartoon character narrating the highlights. The Chinese food. The tulip farm. The scooter loops around the block. Tiny things I hadn't realized they were noticing.
"They got permission to go on vacation," Pancho said, "because you gave yourself permission."
That permission is not a logistics problem. And for some of us, it requires more than a planning checklist to actually believe it.
Taking Rest Seriously Before You Have To
PTO is not a reward for completing your work. It is not something you get to take once you've done enough. It's part of the prevention cycle — one of the Water factors in the Forest Fire Burnout Model. You build Water before the drought gets deep enough that no amount of rain fixes it fast.
And if you're in direct service, mission-aligned work, healthcare, advocacy, education, or any field where the need is constant and the stakes are human — you are the asset. Not the system, not the output, not the deliverable. You. Protecting the asset is part of the job. Nobody else can do it, and nobody is going to hand you permission.
The practical version of all of this:
Book your next vacation now. Today. Before you think of a reason it's a bad time.
Put it in the calendar and tell people who need lead time.
Notice what your resistance to doing that is made of.
Let the anticipation be part of the benefit. It is.
I'm releasing an episode of Now That You See It on May 7th that goes deeper on all of this — including the conversation with Pancho about vocation versus job, why mission-driven people have a particular flavor of vacation resistance, the psychology of "it's never a good time," and what I actually did in April that was different. Come listen.
If you want to understand your own Wind factors — the patterns and beliefs that keep you running even when you want to stop — Regenerate + Relaunch is three months of exactly that kind of work, in depth, with support. Or if you'd rather start with one session and a clear map of where you actually are, The Next Right Step is built for exactly that.
If you work with an organization — a team, a clinic, a nonprofit, a school — where you're watching people run on empty while trying to serve others, the work I do in speaking and training is designed for that context specifically. Building cultures where rest is genuinely practiced, not just preached, is some of the work I find most meaningful.
And if you know someone who would benefit — someone who hasn't taken a real vacation in years, who always says they're fine and whose face tells a different story — the referral program exists for exactly that. You don't have to do anything except say the name.
Go book a week. Before you come up with a reason it's a bad time. It's always a bad time. Book it anyway
Kim Paull is a burnout resilience coach, host of the Now That You See It podcast, and — as of approximately three weeks ago — someone who is finally starting to figure out what a real vacation actually is. She works with individuals, leaders, and organizations through coaching, training, and keynote speaking. Learn more at kimpaull.com
