Why you should take every vacation day you earn

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, as I started my career, there existed a tenet that working as much as possible meant you had ambition; someone who would go far in your career. This included being proud if you could “cash out” your vacation time instead of using it. I have always found this a fallacy, especially as I had only 2 weeks of vacation and 9 holidays for much of my early career, which seemed absurd over a 365-day year.

Vacation from work, including from mobile email and text, gives our minds a chance to reset. Much like your computer gets bogged down if you haven’t completed an update in weeks or months, or have too many tabs open at any one time, our brains become less efficient due to poor habits. There is simply too much going on in our brains for us to make purposeful decisions. And this is when mistakes happen.

Problem solving and creativity take a huge hit when we don’t give ourselves rest, and depression rises. In a peer-reviewed study, Daniel Kim concludes, “This study provides the first evidence on the linkage between paid vacation leave and depression, and supports a protective effect in White women with ≥2 children. Should this association be truly causal, and assuming a uniform effect across all ages in working adult women, the results from this study would suggest that a hypothetical increase in the average number of days of paid vacation leave of 10 days could avoid an estimated 568,442 cases of depression in women each year and lead to a cost savings of US$2.94 billion annually. Policies that mandate paid vacation leave may have marked positive impacts on the population health and economic burden of depression among working women in the USA.”

I just returned from a week in the Pacific Northwest. I spent several days in Seattle, exploring new shops and restaurants, and at Mt. Rainier, hiking one of the U.S.’s most beautiful national parks. I did not check my work email. My team knows how to reach me via text or phone call if there is an emergency. And my brain thanked me for the break by providing better sleep, deep conversations with family and friends, and more energy.

Although the study above looked at white women with children, it isn’t hard to extrapolate that time off from work is beneficial to ALL people. In another study by Dr. H. Kristl Davison and Adam Scott Blackburn, they conclude that despite the costs to business of providing vacation time, “the average benefit of increased productivity and reduced turnover that companies obtain in return is about $12.32 per worker per week (Chen, 2016). Thus, paid leave is expected to cost employers little to nothing. A company’s bottom line may be further enhanced through paid leave’s association with increased productivity and morale, greater job satisfaction, and lower job turnover.”

However, people might not be taking vacation time because they are unable to tune out work when they are away. And what’s the point of sitting on the beach if you’re taking Teams meetings in your sunhat? As someone once told me, no one gets an award at the end of life for having worked the hardest. If policies and support aren’t in place to allow workers to truly have time away, then companies must re-evaluate workloads and backup systems. Not one person is so critical that they cannot have a couple of weeks of work-free vacation.

Vacation is a BENEFIT. It is not a nice-to-have. It is essential to your health and the health of the company.