When you go on holiday, you reduce your stress levels and improve your health. That’s nothing groundbreakingly new, but vital to remember it. Forbes explains that in the short term, the levels of certain hormones like cortisol and adrenaline get raised by stress, and this can be helpful because it triggers your ‘fight or flight’ response. However, chronic stress can lead to serious health issues like heart disease.
One study that was released by the American Psychological Association came to the conclusion that taking time off from work helps reduce stress. This is because people remove themselves from all the activities and environments that they learned to associate with anxiety. While you’re away from an anxiety-inducing environment, odds are that you’ll be spending more time outdoors, in nature which, of course, is good for your health.
Professor Eddy Ng previously explained to Bored Panda that it is vital that employees know their rights. “Labor laws or employment standards will require employers to provide regular employees with paid time off for statutory holidays. In the event that an employer requires an employee to work over the holiday period, the employee will be eligible for statutory holiday pay—the amount varies across different jurisdictions,” he explained.
“Employees can and should remind employers of their statutory rights pertaining to holiday or holiday pay should they work. Employers may face fines if they violate labor laws or employment standards,” Professor Ng said.
“Employees are entitled to know and should know their rights when working over a holiday period. This information should be provided in employee handbooks and it is good management practice to let employees know of their entitlements. Employees may also contact the Department of Labor that enforces labor laws or employment standards to file a complaint,” the professor said.
“Sometimes, it is necessary to ask employees to work during a holiday period. However, employers have a duty to accommodate employees who are unable to work over a holiday period for religious observances (religious accommodation). Employees should inform their employers in advance to allow their employers to find replacement workers. US laws also require employers to accommodate employees only to the point of undue hardship, i.e., more than a de minimis cost or burden to the employer.”
Lordsprout’s thread on Twitter received a lot of attention online. It got over 13.1k likes and was retweeted nearly 2.5k times.
In a perfect world, what Lordsprout says should be how things happen: when we’d need to take a day or a week off, we’d simply notify our employers that, hey, I’m off to enjoy life outside the job for a bit. However, this isn’t a perfect world that we live in.
Unless you’re very high up in your company’s hierarchy or the business fully trusts its workers, you can’t take time off at the drop of a hat (unless it’s a family emergency, of course). If you want a vacation, that means communicating with quite a few people.
