You might be wondering, what exactly does national "circling back day" mean. Well, as those unfortunate enough to deal with a lot of meetings and emails might know, folks love to "circle back" to some topic. The holidays offer us a brief escape from this, for better or worse. But afterward, it ends up hitting twice as hard. As sad as it sounds, post-vacation blues, or, more accurately, post-travel depression (PTD), is a measurable psychological issue that workers face all around the world. While it’s sometimes a result of coming down from the “high” of travel, more often than not, the need to return to a steady, day-to-day job is the real culprit.
Often enough it goes unnoticed. After all, how often do you speak with your coworkers about their mental health? At the same time, a person suffering from PTD might feel ashamed talking about it to people at work. Who wants to highlight how time off made them sad when talking to people who were working the entire time?
However, since around this time of year, many people are going through the same thing, there is a sort of critical mass that reveals just how depressing going back to work after some “freedom” can be. If it’s any consolation, this feeling tends not to last too long, unless you deeply despise your job, in which case, a similar negative emotion was likely in place anyway.
Some folks recommend “simply” always having a vacation planned, so you have something to be striving towards, regardless of where one is in the year. Psychologists suggest that knowing that something will end at some point often helps a person “push” through difficult times, even if it’s in the distant future.
In general, PTD remains an understudied phenomenon, mostly because it can be hard to measure. People might not be honest about their holidays, they might have already recovered or it might be hard to prove that it’s precisely post-holiday blues that are getting them down. Nevertheless, there has been some research done on the topic, with one study reporting that up to 57% of Brits experience it.
Not to mention, the time off on the holidays can often be just enough to make you forget. The pre-holiday period is full of plans one hastily makes for “next year” without quite internalizing the fact that next year is often just a handful of days away. So when those emails begin to roll in, it can get pretty exhausting.
