Why Vacations Can Be More Stressful Than Everyday Life

Vacations are a great way to take a break! (Photo credit)

How many times do we wish, on a stressful day, that we were on a nice vacation, sipping a drink and maybe curled up with a book? Ah! The thought itself is so soothing, right? But actually start planning that vacation and most of the times, I just want to go back to work. In my experience, planning a vacation and sometimes even being on one is more stressful. I know I sound weird. I mean mostly with vacations to new places which involve lots of research and planning. And then there’s a whole lot of site seeing - which is tiring if you do and guilty inducing if you travel all the way and don’t. 

I’ve always been iffy about elaborate vacation plans since they require quite a bit of time to plan. Vacations are meant to be times away from our usual routine involving work and home. Most of us are busy in our stressful lives and get to breathe easy during weekends. Taking a break by going to some nice place is a great way of having a long break and de-stress ourselves. Most photos I see of people on travel, sometimes with kids in tow, are about exotic places, adventure sports, landmarks - and pretty much in any season. I so admire their adventurous spirit. They really know how to take a break and live it up too! And I think to myself - the only kind of break I want is to check in to a hotel and go to sleep and order only in-room dining. I don’t want to get up early and look at places because, Hell yeah! I am on vacation! 

We haven’t planned an elaborate vacation to a new place in the last few years. That requires giving up our precious weekend time to planning and booking. And I’ve been okay with a quick weekend getaway to some familiar place where we can just ‘be’ and take it easy. But then we decided to take the plunge and take a vacation in the US this year. Half a weekend was spent in deciding the places we wanted to visit. And once that got done, it was the pressure of finding the time to look up suitable flights and hotels that fit our budget. And when we were finally on our vacation, we were torn between just sleeping in and actually having a day out. (I won't shock you by revealing which city we were in and yet ended up lying around in our room chomping on room service!) We paced it well with enough lying around time but with different timezones and covering 3 cities, it was exhausting. And this set me thinking about how people look at vacations. 

I ran a twitter poll to see what kind of things people like to do. I don't claim that the results of this poll represent the real divide. But I was relieved to see that a majority like to take it easy.

What is your kind of #vacation? Laid back and lazy? Or action packed with places to see? What's ur idea of time off?

— Suman Kher (@Suman_Kher) March 22, 2016

After our vacation this time, I realised that it's best to go with the times and succumb to some new fangled concepts sometimes - the staycation. I just checked and it's already in the dictionary too! Although a twist should be good to ensure we indeed distance ourselves from our humdrum surroundings. Probably check into a hotel in the same city. This essentially eliminates the door bells, the landline phone calls and the temptation to get some work done while I am in my comfort zone at home. This also ensures that one doesn't need elaborate planning or site seeing and also sounds like a real vacation (from planning etc)

What kind of an outing describes your vacation? While I feel I still have some adventure left in me, I still like to take it layer it with easy going time. I am keen to know how others plan their time out. Do tell me in the comments and share with the readers too.